Oh dear. The APHA admits it used the wrong numbers in its attack on the insurer’s contracting practices.
The CEO of the Australian Private Hospitals Association, Brett Heffernan, has apologised for using an erroneous dataset to sledge health insurance giant Medibank over its contracting practices.
As reported by HSD earlier this week, APHA claimed the private insurer had a conflict of interest via its funding and ownership of hospitals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, saying the percentage of hospitals it contracted with had dropped in areas adjacent to hospitals it had interests in.
At the time Medibank claimed the dataset APHA had used to make the claim was incorrect. Today Mr Heffernan owned the error.
“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,” he 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.”
The consulting company which supplied APHA with the numbers also apologised.
David du Plessis, Director at Empowered Health Analytics, explained the error.
“After investigating the ingestion data layers it appears that, in late 2021, the structure of the data file for the contracted hospitals agreements changed,” said Mr du Plessis.
“This change appears to be due to fund mergers and/or closures.
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“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.”
A spokesperson for Medibank told HSD:
“We welcome APHA owning its error and the steps it is taking to correct the record.
“We’re happy to move on and focus on working with the sector to drive system change and accelerate the health transition in Australia.”