Open Knowledge Ireland Calls for Hospital Waiting List “Open Data”
Denis Parfenov - April 27, 2015 in Adrian Corcoran, Denis Parfenov, healthcare, hospital, Leo, Leo Vradkar, NTPF, Open Data Ireland, Press Release, Vradkar, waiting list
*** Improve long term planning and increase effectiveness of governance.***
Monday, April 27th 2015: Open Knowledge Ireland today called on Health Minister, Leo Vradkar, to support the efforts of the Open Knowledge Community to increase the usefulness of publicly available Health Sector Data, by ensuring its publication in an open data format. The National Treatment Purchase Fund currently publishes its Out-Patient Waiting list and In-patient/Day Case Waiting list reports in PDF format which makes them impossible to access automatically thus limiting their usefulness. Over the past few months Open Knowledge Ireland has scraped the data from these NTPF lists and created a dataset of easily accessible information. The datasets are available here and clearly show that the longest waiting lists are in the areas of Otolaryngology, Orthopaedics, Opthamology and General Surgery. Open Knowledge Ireland believes that if the NTPF begins publishing datasets in an accessible way, then this can act as a catalyst to encourage other agencies to make their publicly available data open. Adrian Corcoran (Open Knowledge Ireland), commented: ‘We would like to replicate the NTPF pilot by building a network of “projects” which each tackle a specific area of publically available healthcare data and then ensure that these islands of data can be crosslinked for increased transparency.’ This requires a twined approach:- Track 1 – Publish publicly available Health data in an open data format (Health Minister, Leo Vradkar)
- Track 2 – Develop prototypes to help visualise this information, with a particular emphasis on linking across datasets (Open Knowledge, Volunteers)