Making hospital data accessible
From the Guardian
The NHS is increasingly publishing statistics about the surgery it undertakes, following on from a movement kickstarted by the Bristol Inquiry in the late 1990s into deaths of children after heart surgery. Ever more health data is being collected, and more transparent and open sharing of hospital summary data and outcomes has the power to transform the quality of NHS services further, even beyond the great improvements that have already been made.
The problem is that most people don’t have the expertise to analyse the hospital outcome data, and that there are some easy mistakes to make (just as with school outcome data).
A group of statisticians and psychologists developed a website that tries to help, for the data on childhood heart surgery. Comparisons between hospitals in survival rate are very tempting (and newsworthy) here, but misleading: there are many reasons children might need heart surgery, and the risk is not the same for all of them.
There are two, equally important, components to the new site. Underneath, invisible to the user, is a statistical model that predicts the surgery result for an average hospital, and the uncertainty around the prediction. On top is the display and explanation, helping the user to understand what the data are saying: is the survival rate at this hospital higher (or lower) than would be expected based on how difficult their operations are?
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »