NZ Mental Health Classification And Outcomes Study (MH-CAOS)

The MH-CAOS Project was an ambitious attempt to better understand the mix of clients receiving mental health services in New Zealand. The largest DHBs took part in the study generating an unprecedented amount of detailed demographic, service, and clinical data.

While Casemix Information Manager for Mental Health Services (Waitemata DHB), Grant Paton-Simpson was responsible for developing the Resource Allocation Tool, an outcomes reporting tool, and an NHI encryption tool for national use. AURDA (an interactive reporting tool) was developed later as a PSAL consultant.

Inpatient Resource Allocation Tool (RAT)

A critical part of the CAOS project was the allocation of overall service costs to individual clients. In the case of inpatient clients, the RAT was used to achieve this. The RAT was trialled in a number of different DHB settings before being finalised and staff training being delivered (written guidelines).

Grant Paton-Simpson also developed software to collect RAT data from all participating DHBs. RatPackager was developed in MS Access (VBA) and followed the conventional Front End/Back End split.

Client Outcomes Reporter

The CAOS project was collecting a substantial amount of clinical information about Mental health clients across participating DHBs, but there was no standard way of reporting results in an individualised way. Grant Paton-Simpson was asked by the National Project Team to develop a client outcomes reporting system.

The system developed relied on both MS Access and MS Excel and displayed individual outcome trends both graphically and in tabular form. This system was deployed across the participating DHBs.

NHI Encryption

To protect client privacy, data being sent between the CAOS National Project Team and the participating DHBs needed to use encrypted NHIs. NZHIS (New Zealand Health Information Services) supplied a partially written encryption/decryption algorithm in VBA. Grant Paton-Simpson fixed the broken code, wrapped it into an easy-to-use interface, and deployed the tool to the DHBs.