Inconsistencies in Portuguese hospitals databases: Implications to hospital funding and production

Over the years, in Portugal, the volume of electronic hospital records has increased significantly. Data is daily generated and then sent to a central database in the Ministry of Health's Central Administration for the Health System (ACSS), which, after aggregation, is sent to Regional Health Administrations (ARS) and other institutions. Given the scope of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto (FMUP) as a teaching and research institution, and as a result of collaborations established with ARS North and ARS Center, the data that each intervener has access to was provided. Thus arises the motivation for writing this article, seeking to ascertain dissimilarities between different data sources and the possible implications of these differences to the hospital production numbers and consequently to its funding. To achieve our aim we used a tool to calculate indicators, namely the indicators “Inpatient data” and “Case-mix”, selected to represent the hospital production. The results obtained show significant differences between the data obtained directly from the five hospitals present in this study and the aggregated data obtained from ACSS. This kind of data is commonly used in many studies for various purposes such as epidemiologic studies or hospital performance management. It is never too much to stress the need to be aware of possible data disparities among different data sources, even if the primary source is the same.