I had the chance to hear the rebroadcast of a talk by Todd Park, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, given on June 18, 2012 at The Commonwealth Club of California, on Unleashing the Power of Open Data and Innovation for Health Care. He is a leading proponent for open health data in the U.S. health system. His team at Health and Human Services in collaboration with the Institute of Medicine launched the Health Data Initiative in 2009. This initiative follows in the footsteps of two other successful U.S. government open data projects. 40 year ago National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) made weather data available for free public download. In the 1980s, the U.S. government began making the Global Positioning System (GPS) available to the public.
Health Care Cost Reduction through Open Data
The goal for this Health Data Initiative was to spur health care innovation that will drive down the cost of healthcare by allowing everyone to have access to health care information while protecting privacy and maintaining confidentiality of the information. Mr. Park presented an example of how quickly such a scenario could come about. In February of 2011, Georgetown hosted a hack-a-ton. IN 8 hours, a group from Mia in Pittsburgh having no healthcare background, but with expertise in supply chain management built a working prototype of Food Oasis, an app to address the food desert problem. If you live in a food desert, you do not have access to healthy food. You can text a message to Food Oasis indicating the food you would like to purchase. The message gets sent to a web site where farmers’ markets and food coops can view the orders. These suppliers then aggregate the data and find the orders they can fulfill. They then text back to consumers when and where their orders can be picked up. Due to the low overhead, this turns out to be a cost effective way of resolving this problem.
You Have the Right to Your Medical Records
You absolutely have the rights to your medical records. In fact the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, check withing Todd for the name, has published an open letter stating that you have the rights to your own medical records.
Information at HealthData.gov
At healthdata.gov you can find information on:
| Administrative | Data on administering health care delivery, enrollment into health insurance plans and appeals. |
| Biomedical Research | Authoritative, up-to-date medical and scientific information resources for patients, families, health care providers and researchers. |
| Children’s Health | Information on children’s health and health-related services for researchers, policymakers, patients and families. |
| Epidemiology | Public health databases and registries regarding births, deaths, disease incidence, health event case reports, demographics, community health. |
| Health Care Cost | Includes National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA), the official estimates of total health care spending in the United States. |
| Health Care Providers | Freedom of Information Act disclosable health care provider data for providers. |
| Medicaid | General information on eligibility and claims data developed to support research and policy analysis initiatives for Medicaid recipients and other low-income populations. |
| Medicare | Cost report data from annual reports filed by hospitals, home health agencies, and other facilities; claim-level public use files for all major types of care. |
| Population Statistics | Metrics on community health, health care system, and determinants-of-health performance at national, state or county levels. |
| Quality Measurement | Quality and patient satisfaction data available via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for nursing homes, hospitals, home health agencies, and dialysis centers. |
| Safety | Includes all company-issued recalls for drugs, food, products from 2009 to the present; hazardous substances and environmental and public health maps. |
| Treatments | Information and databases about marketed drugs, including downloadable resources on medication content and labeling, text messaging libraries and product listing directories. |
I would encourage you to listen to the recording of Mr. Park’s talk on The Commonwealth Club of California web site. He covered many more health case related and open data topics during the hour he talked and answered audience questions.