The Fraser Institute's Hospital Report Card: Ontario 2008 is constructed to help patients choose the best hospital for their inpatient care by providing them with information on the performance of Ontario acute-care hospitals. The information in this report is laid out in 12 sections (20 documents).

We set out to create a hospital report card that is easy to understand and accessible by the public, where individuals are able to look up a given condition or procedure and compare death rates, volumes of procedures, rates of adverse events, and utilization rates for their hospital to those of other hospitals in Ontario.

We are using the Canadian Institute for Health Information's (CIHI) Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) as our primary information source. This information is derived from patient records provided to CIHI by all Ontario hospitals. Demographic, administrative, and clinical data are extracted from the Discharge Abstract Database for inpatient hospital stays from all acute care hospitals in Ontario, except for the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.