New MyHospitals website stumbles against criticism

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDDec 12 2010

The government’s brand new MyHospitals website faced criticism on its first day, with allegations that old data is being displayed that is far from the current truth. The site is comparing emergency department and elective surgery care in 769 public and 153 private hospitals across the country.

Within the first hours of it going live doctors, hospitals and Victoria’s new Health Minister David Davis pointed out inaccuracies. The site is not able to compare states and territories but it shows Victorian hospitals performed well on emergency department care for the sickest patients against the national average. This said, it was also seen that many Victorians waited much longer than the national median times for elective surgery procedures, including heart, lung and brain operations. Mr. Davis said the data was unreliable because of the alleged fraudulent reporting in Victorian hospitals. He said, “We know the data has been deficient [in Victoria] and that has formed the basis of what’s gone on to the federal website.”

Western District Health Service in Hamilton as reported by the site had failed to resuscitate all of its most urgent patients immediately last year. Service chief executive Jim Fletcher said the data was wrong. He said, “We’ve sent a note to the Department of Health today to request that they fix it… Our figures indicate we have a result of 100 per cent… so I’m annoyed about that.”

Australian Medical Association president Andrew Pesce said while the site had good intentions the data was, and sometimes questionable. He said, “While the site provides general information about individual hospitals such as the types of services provided, levels of activity, and elective surgery and emergency department waiting times, some of the key data are at least six months old, and other data are around 18 months old… It would be a much better resource if it supplied more up-to-date and more specific hospital service information.” Some smaller hospitals said listing the percentage of patients who waited longer than a year for care could be misleading as well because these hospitals were treating small numbers of patients for certain procedures.