Surgeon creates ‘Dr Foster rival’

A surgeon has created an online tool that allows people to view the performance of hospitals, measured against five quality domains.

The Stethoscope tool is dubbed a “Dr Foster rival” and rates hospitals against mortality rates, quality of life, recovery, patient experience and safety.

Simon Swift, who has created the tool with his team at consultancy firm Methods, told EHI it is important to have a service for NHS managers that enables them to access all the data they need in one place.

He said that NHS chief executives and managers are accountable and responsible for these measures, but that “they don’t have the information at their fingertips."

“The information out there is often built for analysts by analysts and not for the decision makers,” he said.

Stethoscope is an evolved version of the NHS East Midlands Quality Observatory’s Acute Trust Quality Dashboard, developed by Methods Consultancy, where Swift now works.

It is a free online interface that also lets visitors dig into the five to eight indicators making up each domain.

The indicator data is public and gathered from disparate sources such as NHS Choices, some hospitals, the Health and Social Care Information Centre and NHS England.

It aims to give a comprehensive and easy to interpret view of approximately 50 indicators within the five domains, measured by graded colours, rather than green, amber and red.

“It’s very much designed to be used by senior decision-makers, something the chief executives can have a quick look at to see if they should be concerned or not,” said Swift.

He added that it is important to flag up when a hospital does something particularly well, not just the bad.

“If you’re really good at one particular measure, you need to know about that and see if that makes sense within the organisation and look at why you’re so good at it,” he told EHI.

The free service will be updated quarterly, while the subscription part of the service, which includes secondary uses service data, will be updated monthly.

“It’s not a single source tool; we manually pull and load up different data sources. New measures will be added over the next month or two,” said Swift.

It currently shows data for acute trusts, but Swift said they would add clinical commissioning groups over the coming weeks, mental health trusts over the winter and community trusts next summer.