The WA Hospital Morbidity Data System: an evaluation of its performance and the impact of electronic data transfer

The paper evaluates the performance of the Hospital Morbidity Data System, maintained by the Health Statistics Branch (HSB) of the Health Department of Western Australia (WA). The time taken to process discharge summaries was compared in the first and second halves of 1995, using the number of weeks taken to process 90% of all discharges and the percentage of records processed within four weeks as indicators of throughput. Both the hospitals and the HSB showed improvements in timeliness during the second half of the year. The paper also examines the impact of a recently introduced electronic data transfer system for WA country public hospitals on the timeliness of morbidity data. The processing time of country hospital records by the HSB was reduced to a similar time as for metropolitan hospitals, but the processing time in the hospitals increased, resulting in little improvement in total processing time.