Health Ministry website adds accessible data on the medical system

Science and Health

“Data World,” a digital dashboard that includes extensive data on the quality of medical treatment, public complaints about health services and patients’ experiences with them has been launched by the Health Ministry in Jerusalem.

Until recently, the ministry has been stingy about providing the public with access to comparisons among medicalinstitutions and services. It is the first government ministry to publish extensive data for the public, allowing citizens to get a broad snapshot of the health system and its quality of care.

Over the past week, the ministry’s special website section at https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/portal/dashboard/health –only in Hebrew — has emerged. It follows the Corona Dashboard (https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/portal/dashboard/health) put online by the ministry some time ago.

TODAY, ‘HEALTH minister is one of the most coveted jobs’: A Health Ministry billboard in the capital stresses the importance of face masks. (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH 90)

The ministry said its new dashboard is a “breakthrough” that continues its policy of enabling access to transparent information for decision makers, researchers and the general public, with the aim of encouraging discussion and research and gain insight from the information.

Data World contains three sections that use many graphs and will soon add a fourth one:

 * Quality metrics that examine the level of clinical treatment in hospitals, geriatric institutions, psychiatric hospitals and well-baby centers (tipot halav) around the country. This makes possible comparisons among medical institutions and follow how they improve or decline over the years.* Complaints against the four public health funds, comparisons and changes over time, along with the results of complaints filed against them.* Patient experience surveys examining the levels of patient from the service and treatment they received in the hospital wards (emergency rooms and internal, medicine, surgical and other departments). Users can compare the hospitals and look for changes over time.* In the coming months, the ministry will publish additional data in the, including new content and research, with emphasis on the field of child development and analysis of inequality in the health system.

The ministry said that Data World continues the digital revolution led by its digital technologies division to display clear and accessible information for the on the quality of the health system in various fields and advanced data tools leading to a data-based discourse exchange with public and medical institutions.

For this innovation, the ministry was last year awarded the Justice Ministry’s prize for public transparency and data-based decision making. Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov noted that “in a world where social networks are distributed, much false information – some of which may harm public health – the new Data World allows the public to access reliable and transparent data to information easily and quickly.”

Rona Kaiser Jachniuk, the ministry’s director of digital technologies said that expanding the worlds of content is another breakthrough step in transparency to the public, another strategic step to share data and analyses from a wide range of content. It took us several months and included teams from various specialties, including development, analysis, user experience and more.”