The Macquarie Indexes of Healthcare Productivity: a set of nationally consistent and disaggregated indexes of hospital service delivery for states and territories in Australia

Presented is an introduction to a set of new indexes that describe the quantity, price and combined expenditure on hospital services delivery by the states and territories in Australia. These indexes provide a consistent account of healthcare productivity, which can be disaggregated into sub-indexes that map directly to the underlying activity and cost-structures of health sector providers and their payers. These indexes result from a body of work produced within the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Partnership Centre for Health System Sustainability, at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation (AIHI) at Macquarie University, in collaboration with the Independent Hospitals Pricing Authority (IHPA) and the Macquarie University Centre for the Health Economy (MUCHE).Contained within this introductory report are the following sections:1. Operations & Policy Context 2. The Macquarie Indexes 3. Examples of Insights from the Indexes 4. Our Approach to Indexing 5. Immediate Impact & Future Directions