Operation Explorer
Healthcare is a matter for everyone. Medical care is one of the fundamental pillars of our society, supporting most German citizens from birth to old age. To ensure this, the community invests significant amounts of money. In 2021, €474 billion, or €5,699 per inhabitant, was spent on the German healthcare system. No other industry is responsible for more jobs: by 2021, it already supported six million positions. In short, the German healthcare system deals with life and death every day – and always involves substantial amounts of money.
Journalism as a Watchdog
Most decisions in the healthcare sector take place under the radar of public scrutiny. This is hardly surprising, given that the system is primarily managed and controlled by stakeholders with vested interests. As a result, journalism plays a crucial role as a supervisory authority in this area.
The Operation Explorer project aimed to empower journalists to analyse as much quality-assured data as possible, which is constantly being collected in large volumes within the healthcare system.
However, much of this data is either not accessible for research purposes or can only be obtained through complicated detours. This is even true for one of the most important datasets in the German healthcare system: hospital statistics. These include the main diagnoses of all inpatients as well as details of all therapies and surgeries that clinics have billed to health insurance companies.
Our investigations
Access to Operation Explorer
When applying for accreditation, please explicitly state in the "Other" text field that you wish to access the Operation Explorer.
Journalists who are already accredited should simply send an email to redaktion(at)sciencemediacenter(dot)de requesting the access credentials.
