Myhospitalcare.ca is a website that allows you to look up performance measurements, or ‘indicators’, that health care industry experts use to measure and improve the performance of Ontario hospitals.

While hospitals are required to make public a great number of performance indicators, myhospitalcare.ca uses only the measurements that the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) believes are of the greatest interest to members of the general public.

Currently, the site includes measurements on acute care paediatrics, emergency, rehabilitation, mental health, chronic and complex care, as well as general satisfaction indicators such as the patients’ overall impression of their hospital experiences. Also included are indicators for hospital deaths and infection rates.

What is an indicator?

An indicator is a standardized measure that allows for the evaluation of relative hospital performance against past performance or against the performance of other hospitals.

How does the site work?

You can search and view information on myhospitalcare.ca by hospital, by location, by type of care and/or by indicator – any aspect of care that you may be interested in.

Why should I use myhospitalcare.ca?

Some hospitals have more experience or better results than others in treating certain conditions or performing certain procedures. The information on this website can help guide a discussion with your health care team about an upcoming procedure or hospital stay. You have a say in your own health care but most people don’t know where to begin learning more about who will care for them. Myhospitalcare.ca is designed to help you make an informed decision about your care. Its search tools give you easy access, in an understandable way, to publicly available information on health care that industry experts use to measure and improve the performance of Ontario hospitals.

For specific indicators, you may not see a hospital because the hospital does not provide the service for which the indicator is related to. As an example, the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health (CAMH) does not provide chronic care, and therefore does not have data for chronic care indicators.  Where the hospital has no data for an indicator, the hospital does not appear in the ratings for that indicator.

Talk to your health care team about it. Remember that hospitals are complex organizations where weaknesses in one area are often balanced by strengths in another. To judge performance by using only one measurement, or ‘indicator’, would be misleading. You should discuss your findings further with a member of your health care team.

Patients should not use the site as a guide to choosing a hospital. For that, patients may wish to visit the government’s  Your Health Care Options website at www.ontario.ca/healthcareoptions.

From doctors, nurses and pharmacists to physiotherapists, occupational therapists and dieticians, any professional responsible for an aspect of your health can be considered a member of your health care team. Other members could include, respiratory therapists, social workers, speech language pathologists, audiologists, medical radiation and laboratory technologists, psychologists, midwives, dentists, optometrists, opticians, chiropodists, massage therapists, chiropractors, denturists, dental hygienists, and dental technologists.

The website was developed by the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA), a voluntary organization representing approximately 155 public hospital corporations across 225 locations in Ontario. Founded in 1924 as an independent, non-profit organization, its members include all the public hospitals in Ontario as well as the province’s psychiatric hospitals.  As the voice of Ontario’s hospitals, the OHA is shaping the health care system by fostering leadership, supporting innovation and building linkages between hospitals and their communities. 

Ontario hospitals operate in one of the most demanding health care accountability systems in Canada. They are required to report publicly on a number of performance measures and are accountable for meeting a level of care in return for the tax dollars provided to operate them. Myhospitalcare.ca takes from this mass of information the data that is most important to patients and their families and puts it into an easy-to-understand format.

This website reflects the Ontario Hospital Association’s (OHA) commitment to transparency and openness concerning the performance of hospitals and the health care system. By making this performance data more easily accessible to the public, the OHA is also helping hospitals become more accountable. 

 

There are many factors that can cause indicator values to vary from hospital to hospital. Some of these factors, such as the diversity in patient characteristics and the populations served, are beyond a hospital’s control. The organizations collecting the data do apply some adjustment factors, as appropriate, to ensure meaningful comparisons. Still, a bad score should prompt you to ask why there are problems in that area. Talk to your health care team about what it could mean and how to find out more about whether this is a concern for you. Remember that these scores are designed primarily to trigger performance improvements and that a low score often means the hospital is currently examining ways to address this shortcoming.

No. The differences in patient characteristics that vary among hospitals are very much taken into account. In clinical research this is called risk-adjustment, where hospital data are adjusted to remove pre- existing influences. This issue is very important because patients with certain characteristics are less likely to receive some specific treatments or to have positive clinical outcomes than other groups. For example, if a hospital tends to serve a disproportionate number of such patients, it may be unfairly reported as having higher rates of undesirable events, when in fact, these rates may be comparable to another hospital with lower instances that simply serves a different population. Therefore, to improve hospital comparability, appropriate risk-adjustment techniques are used to adjust the data.  That said, it is  impossible to account for all of the differences in populations. The numbers reported on myhospitalcare.ca - and the sources that inform the site - are as accurate as possible.