MAPPING THE AUSTRIAN PERFORMANCE CATALOG OF THE INTERNATIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF HEALTHCARE INTERVENTIONS

Within the framework of performance-oriented hospital financing the Austrian procedure catalogue (OLK) is used for coding health interventions in Austria. It is a country-specific solution and compared to the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) within the course of this paper. Therefore a mapping (code to code) was performed. In 77 % of the cases an OLK code was assigned to one or more corresponding ICHI codes. An explicit 1:1-mapping was possible in 13 % of all cases. Although the OLK turned out to be the more elaborate approach, weaknesses were identified and suggestions for improvement formulated. They mainly concern the granularity and architecture of the OLK as well as the desire for formal representation.