The US Department of Health and Human Services has a message for programmers great and small: go forth and develop.
On Tuesday, the US government launched the Community Health Data Initiative, aimed at making the health data that the government collects — from obesity rates to Medicare payments — available to the public. The hope is that programmers will be able to take the data and create applications for citizens to see how healthy their communities are, and what resources are available to them.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius spoke in Washington, DC at a forum initiative’s launch.
“This project was launched by a pretty simple belief: that people in communities can improve the quality of their health care and of the public health system if they just have the information to do it,” Sebelius said.
Data sets are available on the HHS website in a variety of forms that can be downloaded, and developers have already started getting to work. At Tuesday’s forum, Google and Bing presented that mashups of HHS data with their respective map clients. At present, Bing’s map looks a little more fleshed out. It displays a variety of regional health indicators, compared to Google’s map, which focuses on showing hospitals that are “heart-friendly” — but collaborators will likely make short work of contributing to the map using Google’s open-source platform.
The sheer amount of data can be overwhelming, but visualization software from Palantir Technologies does its best to make some sense of it through Analyzethe.us. (Note: You have to sign up for an account). This isn’t for the casual browser; it’s for serious policy wonks only. At the forum on Tuesday, Palantir’s representative used the software to identify a cluster of communities near San Antonio which had above-average child poverty, narrowed in on those particular counties that lacked convenient access to hospitals, and was then able to identify potential on-the-ground contacts for local health departments. The software could be useful for community health planning and strategy.
No long surveys or studies required — just a few mouse clicks.
Full video of the forum, including developer demonstrations is available below: