By Ashley Wills

SHR lauds new health data website

Sep 19, 2014 | 1:15 PM

The Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) is lauding a website that launched across the country Thursday.

Your Health System is an easy-to-use site that offers an in-depth picture about the performance of the health care system in Canada.

While the data is not new, it is now presented in a way so that patients and families can easily understand how a particular hospital is doing.

“I think putting it out there and making it really accessible for the people we serve is an important next step for us as a whole health care system,” Petrina McGrath, VP of people, practice and quality with SHR, said.

According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) – the organization behind the website – it’s also for hospitals to identify where quality of care can improve.

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“You don't need to be an analyst to be able to go on now and really interpret the data and pull data out,” McGrath said, adding that she thinks managers in the health region will now be able to easily put presentations together.

McGrath said that she didn’t find anything surprising after reviewing SHR statistics on the new site. She said that they have been tackling the areas where they scored below than the national average, like high readmission rates and long emergency department waits.

“I was very excited to see our rating on sepsis, because we've been doing a lot of work on that,” she said.

In a statement, CIHI said that Saskatchewan had one of the lowest in-hospital infection rates in the country, at 3.6 per 1,000 discharges. The national average was 4.4 per 1,000 discharges.

“The data is good to tell you where you need to work, but it's also very helpful to bring back to our clinicians around where we've been doing some good work and really seeing the impact of that,” McGrath said.

CIHI will be updating the numbers on the site at least on an annual basis. The organization is both federally and provincially funded.

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