Milestone Reviews

The following documents are for the completion of the Milestone Reviews:

Milestone 1 - Review Tool

Considerations for the completion of Milestone 1 Review

Milestone 2 - Review Tool Part 1 Milestone 2 - Review Tool Part 2

Milestone 3 - Methodology Compliance Review Tool

Milestone 3 & 4 - Data Compliance Review Tool

Milestone 4 - Review Tool

Milestone Review Process

All hospitals participating in the Ontario Case Costing Initiative undergo four Milestone Reviews. The objectives of these reviews are:

• Education of hospital participants;
• Monitoring of hospital progress;
• Minimizing reliability and validity error;
• Assisting in problem resolution to facilitate successful implementation, and
• Ensuring compliance with the OCCI costing methodology.

The Reviews take place throughout the planning, development and implementation of hospital case costing systems to examine the capture, interface and processing of data. Criteria have been developed to ensure adherence to the case costing standards. A variety of techniques are used, including site visits, interviews, reconciliations, and data analysis.

The main objective of this initial review is to assess the status of the hospital in terms of planning and development of the required case costing systems. The Review takes place at the onset of the planning stages.

Considerations for Implementation

The items discussed in this document do not need to be submitted as part of the Milestone 1 Review; however they would be of benefit at the facility level if completed.

Milestone 2 – Pre-Go-Live Check

The goal of this review is to examine the data capture, data interface, and data quality mechanisms to ensure reliable and valid data by each of the components of the case costing system.  The Milestone 2 Review includes two parts.  Part I is the review of the Data Capture and Data Quality components.  Part I consists of a hospital site visit.  Interviews will be conducted with representatives from various hospital areas.  These visits occurred in randomly selected functional centres.  Part II involves the review of Data Interfacing components.  This will occur during the implementation phase of the Provincial Software Solution

The purpose of this review is to conduct reconciliations between the data from various feeder systems and the costing system. The costing system is analyzed to ensure accuracy, consistency and comprehensiveness of data collection for the first three months of data.

The second phase of this review involves a statistical analysis of the first three months of test data. The hospital cost data is brought together with the corresponding discharge abstract from CIHI. The data is analyzed for any irregularities that may indicate systematic problems in the case costing system and/or deviations from the case costing standards.

Hospitals are required to resolve all issues identified from both phases prior to submitting the full year of data.

The purpose of the Milestone 4 review is to analyze one year of case cost data. The Review methodology is identical to the analysis performed on the first three months of data submitted as part of the Milestone 3 Review. Hospitals are required to resolve all issues identified in the review report. Ad hoc support is provided to hospitals requiring assistance resolving the identified issues.

Once the hospitals have successfully completed all of the Milestone Reviews, their data is added to the OCCI Database.

For information on Methodology and Audit updates please see Costing and Submission Updates page.