Comments on: In The Guardian: surgeons’ deathrates online (but not for reuse)

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 07:13:21 +0000

New information from a very good source: NHS Choices data is going to be available via XML feeds for free-re-use; where they plan to draw the line is on cutting and pasting whole blocks of text. The worry here is that if stuff is duplicated all over the web, NHS Choices’ search ranking will fall.

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:14:19 +0000

Bernard Ribeiro, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, contributes to the debate in the Guardian’s letters page today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/18/nhs.health
Interesting points, I thought. Especially the one about mortality data being only the start.

By: Michael Cross

Michael Cross — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:39:30 +0000

Anil, that’s a cogent objection to the scheme as a whole. (And one which, I believe, has had a good airing in professional forums.) Our point here is that, if the data are to be released, they should be released in a technical format and under licensing terms that encourage re-use. As with crime statistics, some of the re-use will be moronic – but isn’t there also the possibility that opening up data will raise the tone of the debate? Is that madly optimistic?

By: Anil Kumar

Anil Kumar — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:05:37 +0000

i have been practicing general surgery for more than 15 years. if my mortality data has to go online, how does government expect me to offer surgery to high risk patients? obviously i have to look after my data and ensure that its not skewed by those who have less chances of surviving operation.

By: James Munro

James Munro — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:57:50 +0000

So the NHS Choices strategy is that “When people want to comment directly on their experiences of particular services, whether positive or negative, NHS Choices will become their first port of call”?
All very well – except that Patient Opinion (www.patientopinion.org.uk) began offering exactly this a year earlier, is independent of government, and encourages a wider range of stakeholders (patients, NHS providers, commissioners, LINks, MPs, patient groups) to get involved in improving local services.

By: Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:27:03 +0000

@Richard – yes, it’s true you can extract useful stuff from PDFs. (I use OSX which has various Unix tools such as PDF2text available.) It’s more when you have big tables that it’s hard.

Plus the fact remains that it’s about the *spirit* of what’s being said in the conditions: “don’t use this for anything but looking at it”, almost. Why not mash it with, say, the league performance of schools, density of hospitals, prevalence of smoking, any of dozens of different indicators which might tell you why a surgeon appears to have a high deathrate but actually might not?

That’s when you’ll see the spikes that tell you something odd.

Look forward to hearing about your “quasi-governmental database” soon, certainly.

By: Richard Fairhurst

Richard Fairhurst — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:01:47 +0000

One of the little-known things about PDFs, though, is that it’s actually often possible to “screen-scrape” them and extract the information back into a usable, structured format.

I’m currently working on a project to do exactly that with a large quasi-Governmental database, made available in PDF form free of charge, but for which hefty licensing fees are charged for access to the raw data: it’s progressing well and I hope to have some news of it soon.

This doesn’t solve “you’ll be banned from reusing it in any meaningful way”, of course. But they can only really stop distribution of the data – not the tool to reverse-engineer the data… and so, little by little, we chink away at them.