Interesting article: Comparison of hospital episode statistics and central cardiac audit database in public reporting of congenital heart surgery mortality. Stephen Westaby, Nicholas Archer, Nicola Manning, Satish Adwani, Catherine Grebenik, Oliver Ormerod, Ravi Pillai, Neil Wilson. BMJ 2007;335:759 (13 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.39318.644549.AE. [Medline] [Abstract] [Full text] [PDF] Description: One of the more lively debates in medicine today is the use of report cards to summarize performance of hospitals and/or individual physicians. This paper takes individual statistics compiled by hospitals (hospital episode statistics) and compares them to a centralized database. There are large discrepancies between the two, and the authors suggest that individual hospitals should spend the effort to more rigorously collect and validate their data. The description of this article was written on 2007-10-18, 2008-01-12. Category: Interesting articles, Category: Unusual data