Operation Explorer
Healthcare concerns everyone. Medical care is one of the cornerstones of our society. It accompanies most German citizens from birth to old age. The community spends considerable sums of money on this. In 2021, €474 billion, or €5,699 per inhabitant, was spent on the German healthcare system. No other industry provides more jobs: in 2021, there were already six million. In short, the German healthcare system is a matter of life and death every day – and always involves a great deal of money.
Journalism as a supervisory authority
Most decisions in the healthcare sector are made under the radar of public scrutiny. This is hardly surprising, given that the system is essentially managed and controlled by stakeholders with vested interests. It is therefore an area in which journalism plays a crucial role as a watchdog.
The Operation Explorer project aimed to empower journalists to analyse as much of the quality-assured data as possible that is constantly collected in large quantities in the healthcare system.
However, much of the data is not available for research purposes, or only through complicated detours. This even applies to one of the most important data sets in the German healthcare system: hospital statistics. These contain the main diagnoses of all inpatients as well as information on all therapies and operations that clinics have billed to health insurance companies.
Unsere Recherchen
Access to Operation Explorer
When applying for accreditation, please explicitly state in the ‘Other’ text field that you would like access to the Operation Explorer.
Journalists who are already accredited should simply send an email to redaktion(at)sciencemediacenter(dot)de with a request for the access data.
