Let there be no doubt about it. Health care and the delivery of care has become a process far greater than that of the individual practitioner.
Transparency and open government comes at a time when informatics provides new avenues for health care, patient participation and hopefully increased efficiency and decreased costs.
Initiative Launch
The Community Health Data Initiative was launched in a Forum at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 2010. Opening speakers were IOM President Harvey Fineberg, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and HHS Deputy Secretary Bill Corr. About 15 new applications were demonstrated, making health data available in new formats. Press releases were issued by HHS and the IOM. The Forum can be viewed in the video below.
The HHS Community Data set provides numerous data sets that HHS invites participants to use in creating user friendly applications to make this important information available to patients, health care providers, employers and planners.
Among those participants who demonstrated their applications were:
HEALTH COMMUNITIES INSTITUTE TRILOGYNETWORK OF CARE FOR HEALTHY COMMUNITIES
INGENIX AND INSTITUTE FOR HEALTH IMPROVEMENT
HEALTHWAYS- GAMING PLATFORM-ME YOU HEALTH- COMMUNITY CLASH
MOBILE APPLICATIONS
This short list can be expanded and clarified by watching the video above.
Aneesh Chopra, CTO for the administration announced a competition to develop new applications for extracting data in readabe formats from the current information found in multiple health data bases previously sequestered in public but inaccesible databases.
These awards will be presented in early October at the Health 2.0 Conference to be held in San Francisco.
The Health Care Challenge (Health 2.0 in San Francisco, October 2010)
What is most interesting is that these applications were developed over a very short time period (about six months). Collectively they offer a glimpse into what is coming at the frontier of the merger between information technology and healthcare.
This was one of the most exciting sessions I have been priveleged to witness. And I did not have to travel to Washington, DC to be at the meeting. It was all presented (for free, no travel, no lost time from work) over the world wide web.
This presentation and many more like it presented by Open Government will be at you disposable, PRN .