By Paul Hemsley

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare senior executive, governance and communications group, Alison Verhoeven gave a talk about data accessibility at the Gov 2.0 Conference at the National Convention Centre in Canberra.

Ms Verhoeven used the government’s MyHospitals database website as the base example of making data more accessible, assessing audience segments, their needs and interest and how complex data sets can be presented in a ‘user-friendly’ format.

Ms Verhoeven said the website uses Web 2.0 tools and well as .NET technology as the platform from which to build the website and meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set down by the Australian Government Information Management Office, AA standard.

“This is highly complex data, so it needs to be provided with in the context, it’s not easy to compare a very small hospital that provides a limited range of services with a very large hospital in a capital city when their environments in which they operate are very different,” Ms Verhoeven said.

Ms Verhoeven said understandable contextual information needs to be provided for site visitors so people can make valid comparisons.

According to Ms Verhoeven, part of the difficulty is that working with eight state and territory governments and health systems, each of which record information about hospitals and hospital use in slightly different ways.

She said in order to deliver nationally consistent information to compare information about one state with another, there needs to be overarching metadata with agreement on methodology and analytical techniques on the data so it is not just a matter of raw numbers.

“It’s making the data useful, comparable and consistent,” she said.

Ms Verhoeven said the website has data available for every public hospital in Australia, but not every private hospital as of yet.

“When we started the site, we had a handful of private hospitals on there, which has now grown to 235,  so we’re adding to it every day, so we’re working towards having the full coverage of private hospitals,” Ms Verhoeven said.

She said the site is targeted towards the general public, researchers and policy makers such as bureaucrats and clinicians who need to understand more about how different hospitals are performing and different requirements across Australia.

In terms of analysing consumer feedback, the institute has a “very stringent” program of consumer feedback run during the building of the site during 2010, with consumer testing with the Committee of Senior Health Officials provided health evaluation reports since the site’s launch in December.

“The importance of consumer testing and ongoing consumer testing is it’s not just a one-off before you build the site but going afterwards as you make improvements to ensure that information is user accessible,” Ms Verhoeven said.

She said data governance is an issue to work around before heading into development of a site such as MyHospitals because there needs to be proper governance structures in place to get agreement around the data put on the site.