CIHI reports not a true reflection
VCH CEO Mary Ackenhusen shares her thoughts
The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) unveiled a new public website today to share data on the performance of hospitals and health organizations across Canada. As is the case in most of the public report cards published to date by the various “think tanks”, there is a lot to be learned from this report. When you review the VCH data, you may be surprised by how well or even how poorly we are reported to be performing in some key quality areas.
The question for many may be whether this is an accurate report card of our performance. That is what I would also like to know. For context, we need to remember that data reporting in healthcare is still a relatively immature science. Given the complexity of our systems and an unfortunate but real historical lack of focus on data collection and analytics, such data and definitions are not always robust or fully comparable, and can leave the public, clinicians, administrators and governments confused at best, or drawing inaccurate conclusions at worst.
VCH leaders have believed for some time that public reporting is a key element to improving our healthcare system. We demonstrated this by being the first BC health authority to publish a regular Health Care Report Card online. Even our own indicators are not yet perfect, but we realize that it is only through our own, and other organization’s efforts in public reporting, that we will be motivated to improve our data and hence the meaningfulness of public reporting.
So what will we do with the CIHI report and its findings? We have teams already reviewing the data trying to better understand what it says. What are the valid quality improvement opportunities that it reveals? Is a “bad” score really a quality issue, or a difference in how VCH manages patients or collects data? That is the work that our teams are undertaking now with the publication of these new performance metrics from CIHI.
We do have some preliminary thinking on the report which we will share below as well as a number of areas where we will need to dig deeper to understand the story behind the numbers. Let’s look at some of the CIHI data to explain what I mean.