Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Recommended Reading List #52

In a double header business intelligence expert Caroline Eveleigh picks up on the use and abuse of performance metrics inside the NHS.

She was disturbed by reports that internal NHS statistics had been manipulated for the benefit of public relations, quoting the line
"Most targets and standards appear to be defined in professional, organisational and political terms, not in patients' experience of care."
She states that
"It seems that performance measures were able to wipe away 250 years of performance improvement by not following the most basic of health procedures."
But she doesn't just leave it there. Following up, she also looks at the statistical measures in use, in particular mortality ratios between hospitals, instructively explaining how the 'mis-match between reported performance and actual performance' is a limiting factor in bringing about greater justice and value for money.


Oranjepan says:
Just imagine what a powerful social tool would be created if the political leadership was inclined to favour more open and honest reporting!

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More Recommended Reading List

2 comments:

  1. Steve Borthwick10 March 2010 at 21:48

    The work being done by Prof. Shadbolt down at Southampton University (Tim Berners Lee's dept.) is very interesting, they are attempting to open up various Government data stores to various searching and semantic querying techniques. This will allow the private sector to build applications around the data (in theory) which derive and add value to it, it's not without it's challenges though.

    http://data.gov.uk/

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