This summer the Department of Health & Human Services unveiled "a glimpse of the beginning" of population health-oriented Web-based health care.
The product of its Community Health Data Initiative, the ingenious set of apps cited by HHS chief technology officer Todd Park included Pillbox, an image database of tablets and capsules that could be used by poison control centers to identify unmarked medications, and iTriage, which provides consumers with information about the location of health care resources during medical emergencies.
Recently the Obama administration has suggested taking the same openness principle and applying it to health care information sharing - and the lack of it - between states.
In doing so, White House chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra recommended building a common database of business rules - such as income level, etc. - that states use to qualify and enroll applicants for government-funded health care benefits.
The database would enable individual states to discover where they might streamline or fill-in gaps in their enrollment processes with rules already set up by other states. De-duping state administrative processes would net savings. It would also help move states forward together in setting up similar systems - such as state health insurance exchanges - required under the health reform law.
Both efforts are a part of the Obama administration's push for more openness in civilian affairs. Information transparency - especially where it would eliminate costly duplication or stimulate commercial innovation - is a key to ensuring the public gets the most bang for the tax buck.
In our story on the CHDI in this September issue of Government Health IT issue, some of the software and service developers who sifted through HHS data troves found that the data was not entirely ready for prime time. In some cases, it was simply old and no longer relevant. That's to be expected - the CDHI might have been the first time some of these data sets had been parsed by a third party. And raw data is messy by definition.
The experience also showed that exposing government-held data to commercial software developers will create pressure to maintain high quality source data. And that means a better public return on investment, whether it results in building a health care version of the National Weather Service or streamlining state insurance systems.
The administration's health care IT policy makers should be applauded for these programs aimed at improving health care's - and the public's - bottom line.
