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A new Open Government initiative unveiled by the Health and Human Services department aims to create more transparency at the giant federal health agency, improve accountability, and make large quantities of raw Medicare and public health data available to the public.
A separate transparency project at the Food and Drug Administration was announced during the same public webcast, as was a beta-test version of a new data dashboard for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (www.cms.gov/Dashboard
One of the biggest components of the HHS plan is the release of raw public health data.
The project will make various data sets public so that state and local governments, researchers, and others can use them to analyze public health trends and create novel applications, said Todd Park, HHS chief technology officer.
“We have a lot of data showing how we're doing on obesity, smoking, access to healthy foods,” Mr. Park said during a webcast launching the project.
Mr. Park said he is “100% confident” that users outside government will take the data and “come up with better ideas than we would ever have for it.”
For example, he said he could envision “social networking games to help advise a lot of folks on what's going on in community health and how to improve it.” He added that the agency is sponsoring the HHS Apps Challenge, which is a public competition for the best applications built using the data.
CMS plans to publish detailed Medicaid State Plan documents and amendments online at the CMS Web site by the end of 2010, and also will release never-before-published national, state, regional, and potentially county-level data on Medicare prevalence of disease, quality, costs, and service utilization as part of HHS's Community Health Data Initiative.
As part of the overall Open Government initiative, the FDA also launched a new dashboard, which when fully implemented, will allow the public to track some 300 performance measures and 80 key projects across more than 90 FDA program offices on an ongoing basis, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, FDA principal deputy commissioner, said during the webcast.
The public will be able to use the dashboard, located at www.fda.gov/fda
A new Open Government initiative unveiled by the Health and Human Services department aims to create more transparency at the giant federal health agency, improve accountability, and make large quantities of raw Medicare and public health data available to the public.
A separate transparency project at the Food and Drug Administration was announced during the same public webcast, as was a beta-test version of a new data dashboard for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (www.cms.gov/Dashboard
One of the biggest components of the HHS plan is the release of raw public health data.
The project will make various data sets public so that state and local governments, researchers, and others can use them to analyze public health trends and create novel applications, said Todd Park, HHS chief technology officer.
“We have a lot of data showing how we're doing on obesity, smoking, access to healthy foods,” Mr. Park said during a webcast launching the project.
Mr. Park said he is “100% confident” that users outside government will take the data and “come up with better ideas than we would ever have for it.”
For example, he said he could envision “social networking games to help advise a lot of folks on what's going on in community health and how to improve it.” He added that the agency is sponsoring the HHS Apps Challenge, which is a public competition for the best applications built using the data.
CMS plans to publish detailed Medicaid State Plan documents and amendments online at the CMS Web site by the end of 2010, and also will release never-before-published national, state, regional, and potentially county-level data on Medicare prevalence of disease, quality, costs, and service utilization as part of HHS's Community Health Data Initiative.
As part of the overall Open Government initiative, the FDA also launched a new dashboard, which when fully implemented, will allow the public to track some 300 performance measures and 80 key projects across more than 90 FDA program offices on an ongoing basis, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, FDA principal deputy commissioner, said during the webcast.
The public will be able to use the dashboard, located at www.fda.gov/fda
A new Open Government initiative unveiled by the Health and Human Services department aims to create more transparency at the giant federal health agency, improve accountability, and make large quantities of raw Medicare and public health data available to the public.
A separate transparency project at the Food and Drug Administration was announced during the same public webcast, as was a beta-test version of a new data dashboard for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (www.cms.gov/Dashboard
One of the biggest components of the HHS plan is the release of raw public health data.
The project will make various data sets public so that state and local governments, researchers, and others can use them to analyze public health trends and create novel applications, said Todd Park, HHS chief technology officer.
“We have a lot of data showing how we're doing on obesity, smoking, access to healthy foods,” Mr. Park said during a webcast launching the project.
Mr. Park said he is “100% confident” that users outside government will take the data and “come up with better ideas than we would ever have for it.”
For example, he said he could envision “social networking games to help advise a lot of folks on what's going on in community health and how to improve it.” He added that the agency is sponsoring the HHS Apps Challenge, which is a public competition for the best applications built using the data.
CMS plans to publish detailed Medicaid State Plan documents and amendments online at the CMS Web site by the end of 2010, and also will release never-before-published national, state, regional, and potentially county-level data on Medicare prevalence of disease, quality, costs, and service utilization as part of HHS's Community Health Data Initiative.
As part of the overall Open Government initiative, the FDA also launched a new dashboard, which when fully implemented, will allow the public to track some 300 performance measures and 80 key projects across more than 90 FDA program offices on an ongoing basis, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, FDA principal deputy commissioner, said during the webcast.
The public will be able to use the dashboard, located at www.fda.gov/fda