Peak body issues apology to Medibank "for data error"

On 28 August, the Australian Private Hospitals Association (APHA) apologised to Medibank for a 24 August media release that “sourced the wrong dataset. This mistakenly applied the hospital contracts status from another insurer to Medibank. We, along with the consultants who provided the analysis, apologise to Medibank for the error,” APHA said in its 28 August release.

“I have phoned the relevant representative at Medibank to apologise, explain and advised that we would issue this apology and remove the media release from all of our communication platforms,” APHA CEO Brett Heffernan said. “I apologise to Medibank. This was our blue and we own it. I thank Medibank for their understanding of the dataset error. They were very gracious.”

What happened

The error was explained by David du Plessis, Director at Empowered Health Analytics. “After investigating the ingestion data layers it appears that, in late 2021, the structure of the data file for the contracted hospitals agreements changed,” du Plessis said. “This change appears to be due to fund mergers and/or closures.

“Our systems would normally pick these types of structural changes up, and we have safeguards in place to detect and flag if the raw data load files change structure. Unfortunately, as this data is contained in a CSV file, this process has failed to detect the changes.

“The outcome of this is that since this change in 2021, our systems have incorrectly transposed the agreement status for Medibank with another health fund. This has resulted in our platform incorrectly representing Medibank’s contracted status.

“I deeply and sincerely apologise to Medibank and APHA for this error. We are working to build in additional safeguards for our dynamic loads to prevent this from occurring again.”

Hospital + Healthcare had run a news item based on APHA’s 24 August removed release. This news item has now been taken down.

Image credit: iStock.com/bgblue