Open Government Data!
on June 11, 2010
The great thing about opening things up is that it takes extraordinary effort to close them down again.
The U.S. Government has begun opening up community health data through the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI). If you're wondering what the impact of this might be, here is an example from the UK, where information about the performance of the transportation (and health care) systems is displayed publicly. Thanks to Ted Eytan for sharing this picture:
Another example is a recent painting by Regina Holliday; it illustrates hospital patient satisfaction data and provides a context for why it is important to the individual patient.
Apples to Apples by Regina Holliday
The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, being organized by the folks over at Health 2.0, will provide an opportunity for software application developers to work together to create innovative tools to analyze and display the CHDI data.
It will take a village to sort through the data, make sense of it, and inform policy based on available facts. Kudos to the folks at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the "open government" folks for opening the floodgates. There is a lot of work ahead, but with potentially huge benefits for community health.