Cohort selection
The cohort included 71,494 people who had a heart failure hospitalisation with an acute care type between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2019 and were alive at the point of discharge. In this report “heart failure” is used to describe both heart failure and selected cardiomyopathy diagnoses that are frequently associated with, or lead to, heart failure (see Technical notes: Classifications for relevant International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes).
Heart failure related hospitalisations were defined as hospitalisations with a diagnosis of heart failure in the principal or additional diagnosis fields.
The following exclusion criteria were applied:
- died during the index hospitalisation
- missing discharge date. This may have occurred due to a transfer to an out-of-scope private hospital or state/territory, or to linkage errors or missing data
- episodes of care that started before 2018
- out-of-scope state/territory of usual residence identified at the index hospital stay or in PBS or MBS data for the post-hospitalisations period. Hospital data from Western Australia and the Northern Territory are not included in the dataset and therefore any subsequent hospitalisations, which occurred in a patient’s home state, would not be identifiable.
Episode of care
In this report the term “hospitalisation” refers to an episode of hospital care that may involve hospital transfers or change in care type that form a continuous stay in hospital.
In our analysis, a secondary hospital separation record was defined as being part of a single episode of care if it either:
- started on the same day as (or prior to) the previous hospital record’s discharge date.
- or started the follow day and was coded as a transfer. A transfer code was recognised in the separation mode of the first hospitalisation or the admission mode of the second.