By Courtney Markewich

New website breaks down Sask. health care

Sep 18, 2014 | 1:50 PM

People in Saskatchewan don't live as long as the average Canadian, and our province has higher rates of smoking, obesity and children vulnerable in early development.

Those are just some of the findings now available to the public. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has compiled data from Canada's hospitals and Statistics Canada to produce an interactive website. It allows people to view information about hospitals, health regions and provinces.

On Thursday, the website called ‘Your Health System’ debuted a total of 37 hospital indicators and 25 measures broken down to the hospital level.

“What we see is when you publish information publically on transparency, it tends to focus the attention of professionals on how they are doing on a comparative basis,” said Jeremy Veillard, vice president of research and analysis.

Veillard added they hope professionals can look across the country to see where the best results are and how they are achieved.

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“(To) initiate a dialogue about what can be done to improve.”

Everyone has access to all of the information compiled by CIHI. Veillard said the hope is that the public can be more engaged in the discussion about how to improve the health care system. Veillard, however, pointed out that the data available on Your Health System can't always be taken at face value.

“Indicators are only flags…we have to understand the context, we have to understand how hospitals are doing on several measures and there are a few gaps on the information available.”

That's why the website also includes contextual measures.

People can log on to the Your Health System website and search for hospitals, health regions, cities and provinces. Information is then broken down in different categories. Data in green circles are positive indicators, pink circles are areas needing improvement, and blue circles are average. Definitions of each category are provided. 

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