The perioperative mortality explorer is a tool designed for clinicians, quality and risk managers, researchers and others to quickly dive into the patterns of mortality associated with publicly funded surgery in Aotearoa New Zealand public hospitals.
A login to the explorer has been provided to contacts at Te Whatu Ora and professional bodies. Additionally, health care professionals can request access on the login page (link above).
The tool is divided into three areas: equity, district and procedure. In the equity tab, users can explore by ethnicity, gender, and deprivation index to see patterns in mortality rates, admissions and trends through time. The district tab allows a Te Whatu Ora district to be explored with reference to the national view, or any other district to see the differences in demographics, mortality and variation through time. Finally, the procedure tab allows users to look at variation in mortality between surgical specialties, and by groups of surgical procedures within those specialties.
The explorer allows mortality to be examined in multiple ways. Mortality can be viewed as either death during the hospital admission for the index surgery, or within 30 or 90 days of the surgery. Crude (unadjusted) rates can be compared with age-adjusted mortality rates (standardised to the New Zealand surgical population) or with a standardised mortality ratio that takes a wide range of factors into account (allowing the leftover variation to be examined).
Finally, the explorer has an extensive filter panel that allows users to examine various subsets of the data independently (for example, waitlist admissions or acute admissions, age groups, genders, Deprivation Index, patient ASA physical status score, district and specialty).
