The Show Me State?

Here is a new twist on public reporting: how long should a state be required to keep hospital-specific data easily accessible to the public? Missouri’s Department of Public Health is taking heat for removing older data from their website (essentially, they just “write over” the old data with new data, so the older data gets purged).

The data still exists at the department...as the state’s data manager says, “it just isn’t handy”. To get it you have to formally request it, a programmer must be available, and you have to pay the cost of retrieval.

An interesting side note—the 2004 Missouri statute mandating public reporting came with no appropriation, even though the state’s health department spends over 240K each year to implement it. It’s true that you get what you pay for—if public reporting is important, it needs to be appropriately funded. And doing it correctly (including independent validation) is expensive!

Addendum: Never mind, the older data will be restored. By the time Iowa starts public reporting of HAI data, we'll have all these lessons to draw on!