Oregon makes less hospital information public

As reported in The Bulletin: Most hospitals around the country track and report complications of medical care.  While many states make this information public, Oregon does not, making information about an individual hospital’s quality and safety not available to the public. Oregon does make some limited information public through a state-administered database that includes records from every patient admitted into an Oregon hospital. This de-identified information includes where the patient was treated and the primary diagnosis on admission. But the database leaves out secondary diagnoses or complications from care. That means much of the information that could be useful in comparing hospital quality or safety is left out. Oregon state is one of 40 with a reporting mandate. And the data are sent to the federal government, where they are used in an aggregate database, and can be bought by nonprofit institutions for use in analyses that do not identify individual hospitals. But the full data set ( inpatient discharge database) is collected and owned by the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, which represents and lobbies for Oregon hospitals. OAHHS is the only entity that can grant use of the data to for-profit entities, including most types of journalism organizations. Other states make hospital-specific information through their inpatient discharge databases much more widely available. For example, on the West Coast, Oregon is the only state that does not release the data in a format that can be used for analysis of hospital complications at individual hospitals. In California and Washington, data is collected by a state agency. Texas, Utah, Nevada, New York and Pennsylvania also make much more information public than does Oregon. In all of these states, a public agency collects the hospital data, according to the National Association of Health Data Organizations.

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