This month, Todd Park CTO of Health and Human Services and co-founder of athenahealth spoke about what he calls “Data Liberacion”. I attended this talk organized by Xconomy and witnessed his passion and enthusiasm for this initiative.
Pictured left to right: Chris Herot, CEO of SBR Health; Todd Park, CTO of Health and Human Services; Renee Lin, the “Health Plan Geek”
“Data Liberacion” makes tremendous amounts of health data metrics available to the Public and anyone that wants it, for the purposes of creating new and useful health applications. Todd recommended reading “The Hot Spotters” in the New Yorker, as a related example of how data can be applied in valuable ways. “The Hot Spotters” details one Physician who analyzed health data to map out the highest utilization and highest cost geographic points in his nearby city. The Physician then focused his energy on these high utilization areas with the challenge to increase patient health and lower utilization. This Physician’s story is admirable, useful and an example of how health data can be applied to add value to everyone in healthcare.
With all this data now available and more soon to be available, what should healthcare organizations do now? I would suggest a couple of actions: implementing the use of some of the data now, exploring what is available in the data sets (listed below) and then monitoring what kind of applications spawn from it. One example of something that Health Plans are doing now is to integrate data with their Provider Search tools, such as the Patient Hospital Survey (HCAHPS) and Hospital Compare data sets from Medicare which will help consumers choose a Hospital or Physician by reviews/quality. Healthcare organizations should also explore what is available in the data sets and brainstorm how the data can add value to existing services already offered. Also, it would be wise to monitor the applications that come to market as a result of this data availability and make available the helpful applications to consumers. As we take a look at the data, we may see that some of it still needs some refinement. Just as an example of the state of some of the data: when I searched for teenage births “Births to Mothers Under 18” on the Health Indicators Warehouse, I received back the metrics for non-teenage females “aged 15-54 years; Female”. The data could still use some cleaning up, however, as the industry starts to use the data, we should see refinements in the data.
Here are some of the public health data sets to start (re)exploring:
- Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems
- Healthdata.gov
- Health Indicators Warehouse
- HHS Open Data Sets
- Medicare Data Sets
- NPI Data
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