Making publicly available data publicly accessible: Belgium’s Hospital Minimal Data

[This article was first published on FishyOperations » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

In current times data is everywhere. The big challenge however is making it not only available, but also accessible to those who need it.

An example of this is the Hospital Minimal Data (Belgium). This dataset is openly published by the Federal Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety & Environment.

From a perspective of hospital management, a number of different interesting topics can be extracted from this. For example the market share of patients which a hospital has in a given area or the geographical distribution of patients in given diagnosis group can be retrieved from the data.

While all these data are available on the health.belgium.be website, it takes time and basic analytic skills to interpret these data and present them coherently. While bigger hospitals will have no doubt access to the analytic skills required (and probably have better tools at their disposal than the one presented here), the question remains whether or not this data is accessible enough to smaller hospitals and/or related services if no easy exploration tool is provided.

This is an attempt — and no more than that — to set-up an interactive tool to browse through Belgium’s Hospital Minimal Data.

MZG-probe
MZG-probe

While not going into detail on the backgrounds, this tool was build using open-source software. Most notably R and Shiny. The source code is available at: (WILL BE ADDED SOON)

TAKE ME TO THE MZG-PROBE

fishyoperations.com/mzg-probe

The post Making publicly available data publicly accessible: Belgium’s Hospital Minimal Data appeared first on FishyOperations.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: FishyOperations » R.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)