AIHW news

AIHW’s new national hospitals reporting platform

In December 2019, the AIHW has released a new reporting platform to provide Australians the most up to date information and data on Australia’s national hospital system in one place <www.aihw.gov.au/myhospitals>.

The new platform provides information on Australia’s hospital system based on state and territory or Local Hospital Network (LHN) and by your local hospital.

The platform has some great features:

  • hospital reporting at multiple tiers
  • multiple ways of looking at the data in a mobile friendly format
  • interactive visualisations
  • direct data access via an Application Programming Interface (API)
  • data are updated across the pages as soon as it becomes publicly available.

Users can generate pages of data for specific hospitals and LHNs using the ‘My Local Area’ icon, and data are available for download in a range of formats.

Improved accessibility

The platform has been designed to cater for a range of different users. Users can now access the information either by:

  • hospital sector - presenting data for specific parts of the hospital system including admitted patient care, elective surgery, emergency department care, or non-admitted patient care
  • theme - presenting data with a range of information across the hospital sectors including access, spending, activity, workforce and safety and quality.

The sector and theme pages provide an overview of the key high level hospital system data and allows users to progressively learn more detail if they want it.

There is also a floating navigation bar on every page to make it easy to navigate to different areas of the platform quickly.

Interactive visualisations

The new pages feature interactive Tableau visualisations that bring together data from multiple tiers and present them in an easy to understand format. Users can select the filters at the top of each visualisation to refine which data they see. Hover over the data points within the visualisation to see the data and more detail.

Users can also use the visualisations on the web pages as images, pdfs, or embed the visualisation into their own website directly. The visualisations are also specifically designed to cater for mobile phones first, responsively scaling up features and layout for users with more screen space.

Direct data access - (API)

The web API (application programming interface) allows the AIHW to share data machine to machine over the internet. This allows users to retrieve published aggregate data directly from the AIHW into their own systems, removing the need to manually download Excel data tables, and copy and paste numbers into their own records.

API users can specify just the data they want, and it will always return the most up-to-date published data. It provides read-only access to the data in JSON, XLSX and CSV formats. The platform also uses the API to automatically refresh products with the latest data across multiple locations on the platform.

The API supports interoperability and open data, by making published data more easily available for use within AIHW, between agencies, in the private sector and by the public.

Editor note: the new reporting platform on the AIHW website includes the data that was available on the former MyHospitals.gov.au website.

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