The Department of Health & Human Services tracks a torrent of health data, ranging from hospital quality indicators, pharmaceutical sales activity, breast cancer incidence, you name it. And for decades, such data has been shuttled to and from government program offices and the healthcare community as the grist of health policymaking.
Until recently, that is. With the announcement last month of its Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI), HHS has begun to pry the doors off some of its information storage sheds, inviting developers of Web services, mobile phone apps and social media to have at the data in the hopes it will yield tools and services that help the public make better decisions about their healthcare.
"Just making it known that we have this data that's available and turning it into a form that is easily accessible can spark huge amounts of innovation, and on top of that, unleash even more data," said Todd Park, HHS's chief technology officer. HHS's CHDI datasets are available from its Open Government Web site (www.hhs.gov/open), part of a broader effort by the administration to let the public access more federal information.
HHS and the Institute of Medicine initially hosted a meeting in March to explore the feasibility of the community data project. Since then, developers have already created 16 software applications that make use of the now public health data, Parks said.
The project's leaders took as their inspiration the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) use of weather data, Park said. NOAA furnishes 98 percent of all weather data, which is used by broadcasters, policymakers, travel industry firms, in myriad applications, he noted.
The applications developed so far serve a mix of consumer and community health needs. Microsoft, for example, has incorporated hospital cost and patient satisfaction ratings from HHS's HospitalCompare. gov site in its Bing search engine.
"Most of the public didn't know that HospitalCompare existed"it's just a simple app that's been in the public domain for a long time," Parks said. "Now its coming to a place that's much more convenient than having to go to the HospitalCompare site and download the table."
Some of the work so far is yielding more than cool technology. The National Association of Counties, for example, created a health dashboard that lets community healthcare planners view county-by-county rankings of selected health measures. "You can also see underlying reasons that might drive those metrics and get a continuous feed of interventions and programs to, say move smoking in the right direction," said Park.
Other communities might use the information to modify their public health programming. A county commission, for example, might use the comparative data to help make the case for budgeting for new hiking trails to encourage families to exercise.
Another application, iTriage, is a mobile application that can connect a person searching for healthcare providers by tapping the information resources of 7,500 federally qualified health centers. HHS does not have a master plan for new apps it wants to see developed but would like to work with different user groups about what is needed.
"A lot of this is very entrepreneurial," Park said. "We'll see what happens next, which will be largely driven by innovators and user groups who want to get involved."
