Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine announced plans to expose an enormous trove of health data as part of a public-private effort to stimulate innovation and the creation of tools that improve the health of US citizens.
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and IOM President Harvey Fineberg jointly announced the so-called Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) at a forum on June 2. Their hope is that Web and mobile phone application developers, social media enthusiasts and other entrepreneurs can “put our public health data to work.”
“Our national health data constitute a precious resource that we are paying billions to assemble, but then too often wasting,” Secretary Sebelius said in a press release. “When information sits on the shelves of government offices, it is underperforming. We need to bring these data alive. Our data can help raise awareness of health status and trigger efforts to improve it. It can help communities determine where action is most needed and what approaches might be most helpful.”
Federal and community leaders, technology experts and developers attended the forum, which featured 16 demonstrations of applications that made use of the data. The applications were developed in the 3 months since IOM and HHS first introduced the concept. Google, Microsoft, HealthWays and General Electric made presentations during the forum.
The demonstrations included Web tools that enabled users to compare health performance across counties and dashboards that let officials assess health status in their community. Also featured were an online game that teaches players about health status and a specialized Web search tool that displayed hospital performance data alongside traditional hospital search results.
The demonstration also included mobile phone-based applications that permit users to access community health information applicable to their present location. As well, there were social networking applications that allow health officials to compare the performance of their jurisdiction with that of others, share best practices, and challenge each other to improve.
“The goal is to make the gigabytes of health data our nation generates accessible and productive,’ Fineberg said. “Information is the key to awareness about health and action to improve health. The information technology sector has the creativity and skills to turn raw data into games, websites, and other applications that make information easily attainable and usable.”
To enhance the CHDI, Ms. Sebelius announced that a new HHS Health Indicators Warehouse will be made available online, free of charge and without any intellectual property constraint, by the end of the year.
The Warehouse, she said, will include up-to-date, standardized, structured data from HHS sources concerning national, state, regional, and county health performance. Included will be indices like smoking, obesity, diabetes, access to healthy food and utilization of health care services.
Data in the Warehouse will be sortable by age, gender, race, ethnicity, and income. It will be derived from the Community Health Status Indicators, County Health Rankings, State of the USA and Healthy People 2020 programs, as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Much of it had not heretofore been available to the public.
In addition to the data, the Warehouse will provide information on effective ways to improve health system performance. Anybody can access and download data from the Warehouse, and integrate it as they wish into Web sites and applications of their choosing.
The CHDI will not endorse particular applications, but it will enable their development. Communities, professionals and consumers are free to choose the applications they find most useful.
Glenn Laffel, MD, PhD
Sr. VP Clinical Affairs
Practice Fusion EMR
