In keeping with the White House’s Open Government Initiative, we’ve got news from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on a new effort to open up more health data. Damon Davis, Director of the Health Data Initiative at HHS, announced last week the release of a Strategy and Execution Plan for improving HDI’s efforts in releasing health data to improve health and health care and spark innovation in the delivery of health care. Below is his summary of the Plan and how you can get involved, including by commenting on the blog post on healthdata.gov.
Recently the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released its strategy and execution plan for improving existing efforts to release health, health care, and human services related data for the purpose of sparking innovation. HHS’s open data work, known as the Health Data Initiative (HDI), has a mission to help improve each of those focal areas by harnessing the power of data and fostering a culture for data’s innovative uses in public and private sector institutions, communities, research groups and policy making arenas. This HDI Strategy and Execution Plan articulates our goal to make health data openly available, disseminate the data broadly across the health and human services ecosystem, and continuously educate internal and external participants in the ecosystem about the value of the data.
A focused discussion about the next steps for the HDI helped us quickly realize that a strategic plan, with tactics for executing toward specific goals and measurable outcomes, would be a tremendous asset for providing direction and focus for the HDI’s many contributors. Taking input from a diverse set of contributors like the Health Data Consortium, the National Center for Vital & Health Statistics Workgroup on Data Access and Use, and the department’s many Health Data Leads we developed this living document intended to guide the direction of the work without limiting its options or potential.
The HDI strategy and execution plan has five core components with a sixth strategic goal focused on measuring our collective work’s progress toward each goal and resultant impacts. Below is a brief recap of those strategic goals. You can read and provide your comments about the strategic execution plan on the HealthData.gov blog.
HDI Strategic Goals:
Advancing the HealthData.gov site to a more efficient, user friendly, technically advanced platform for data discovery. The goal for the platform is to be a highly useful, reliable, and well-supported platform for sharing datasets and fostering innovation. Success of the platform depends on broad-based enthusiasm for and commitment to the HDI, achieved through expanding partnerships, both internally and externally. Data is our primary asset and it is a strategic imperative to help our partners get all of the appropriate Strategically Relevant Data Assets (SRDA) published on the platform as quickly as possible as they are strategically relevant data assets for Departmental goals.
Highlighting departmental assets that support achieving HHS strategic initiatives and an increased focus on strategic data liberation. As the HDI attracts new and diverse audiences to the platform as a discovery zone of data resources it will be beneficial to focus on a subset of these data for directed communications efforts and promotion. These SRDA will need to be characterized and defined, then publicized broadly through strategic communications to entice creative uses for these and other data on the platform.
Educating new and existing, internal and external participants in the health and human services ecosystem about data availability for innovative applications, and disseminating the data for problem solving. Stakeholders from both inside and external to HHS are valuable contributors to the HDI. Internally, our HHS colleagues are the data liberators, however, it is important to engender understanding of the importance of openly available, easily accessible data for creative uses both for external innovations and internal operations. That understanding needs to penetrate beyond the Health Data Leads to program staff across the organization. Similarly external stakeholders need a broader and deeper understanding of why data assets were collected, the ways those assets are available to them, and how to interact with the data. Therefore a concerted effort to educate stakeholders about data availability, intended and possible uses, and examples of how data has been used by others are valuable educational components that will propel expanded appreciation for and uses of the data.
Enabling and incentivizing the health data ecosystem to utilize all data assets in innovative ways. The availability and analysis of data is one of the biggest drivers in the transformation of healthcare and there are tremendous opportunities for innovation in the health and humans services ecosystems that will be fed by the vast stores of data made available via the HDI. An ongoing goal is to unleash the power of private-sector innovators and entrepreneurs to utilize HHS data in the creation of applications, products, and services that positively impact health and health care in the emergence of a decentralized, self-propelled “ecosystem” of innovators across America. That ecosystem includes organizations upon which the HDI will rely on for feedback, intelligence and insights that facilitate the democratization of health data and/or advocate for the innovative and responsible use of health data. The Health Data Consortium (HDC) is one such entity working to foster the availability and use of health data to drive innovations while advocating across players in the healthcare continuum for data liberation and appropriate uses of data.
Implementing administration and departmental policies that foster openness and transparency. There are several administration policies that support and impact the activities of the HDI and the internal stakeholders who produce and provide access to departmental data assets. Coordinating the current policy implementation agenda requires the department to understand the implications of each policy separately in order to harmonize the implementation of all policies for minimal disruption and maximum impact. A key resource for implementing administration open data policies will be Project Open Data on Github.
Ultimately, many of us involved in the delivery of human services, health care, or the development of policies that affect those areas would like to understand more about the data’s impact downstream: What the impacts of broad availability of open data are on things like population health, policy development, and access to care. The question is “What are the outcomes and impacts of the HDI and related activities on health care and the delivery of human services?” Getting to those answers will require contributions from across the health ecosystem. But it’s a concerted effort worth validating.
To read more about the execution steps and planned measures, visit the blog post on healthdata.gov.