Another real-time disease surveillance program, the Children's Hospital Project in Boston, monitors its own complaint data and data from another Boston hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The department should also publish aggregated complaint data, and use that data to drive enforcement and oversight of collection agencies, it said.
Mr. Zuby pointed to the limits of the complaint data, which is compiled by the transportation agency as part of its early-warning reporting program.
In announcing its findings, the agency said "claims and complaint data indicate that a tread separation on an Explorer is no more likely to cause a crash than on other S.U.V.'s".
"We believe this is the first time that the general public has been able to see such individual-level consumer complaint data for financial products and services," Richard Cordray, the director of the agency, said Monday.
Two of the three hospitals in Staten Island have a majority of the chief complaint data missing, which would help explain the observed discrepancy in results.
Ecomplaints, which collects and analyzes consumer complaint data, says disgruntled AmWesters are more likely than other travelers to switch carriers-permanently.
However, one major issue with the chief complaint field is a high percentage of missing data for Staten Island hospitals; two of the three Staten Island hospitals currently provide chief complaint data for only 26% of ED visits.
The NYC ED SS system does not currently have complete diagnosis or discharge disposition information to provide complete details about the visit outcome, limiting us to the use of chief complaint data only for syndromic surveillance.
The Consumer Federation of America, the National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators and the North American Consumer Protection Investigators reviewed complaint data for 2007 from nearly 20% of the nations state and local consumer protection agencies.
An examination of the complaint data reveals that Navient is among the industry's worst.
