Episodes of allied health outpatient care: an investigation of service delivery in acute public hospital settings.

This paper describes 'episodes of allied health outpatient care' by linking related clinical allied health outpatient contacts. Episodes were tracked on 10095 patients in 46 public hospital outpatient services in eight hospitals over a 10-month period during 1996, as part of a Commonwealth Ambulatory Care Reform project. Fifty-one per cent of patients completed at least one 'episode of allied health outpatient care' during the period of the study. An episode theoretically comprised all those occasions of service provided to the one patient for the one condition in the one allied health outpatient service, using the one referral. There were difficulties in flagging the beginning and end of episodes, as services used specific ways of defining and recording episode characteristics. Describing allied health outpatient service usage by episode has implications for developing funding models that are appropriate to the core business of allied health services.