Yesterday, The Star reported that the Ontario government is considering a plan to consolidate more than twenty healthcare agencies into one “super agency”. The goal would be improving the integration of health services while trimming a bloated bureaucracy. One of the agencies under review is Health Quality Ontario (HQO).
Recently, I expressed concern about HQO’s lack of transparency about its own performance. Access to over 90% of HQO-related datasets in Ontario’s Open Data Catalogue has, in fact, been restricted. These datasets include:
- Tendered purchases
- Surveys of customer satisfaction, employee engagement, feedback, etc.
- Surveys of how Board meetings are conducted, including content, presentation, and areas for improvement
- Newsletter metrics
- Website analytics
- Social media metrics
- Inquiries and service requests to the IT help desk
I don’t mean to imply that HQO doesn’t contribute to improving the quality of health services in Ontario (it does) or that HQO is solely responsible for deciding whether a particular dataset is closed to the public (it’s not). But it’s ironic – and unacceptable – that there’s so little information available publicly about HQO’s own quality of service.
Any “super health agency” should commit to be open and accountable for its own performance – not just for the performance of others.