New Delhi: July 30, 2015
Open Government Data (OGD) is today considered to be an important initiative by governments across the world. A number of national and international data portals have been deployed to release datasets online. Concept was initiated by United States government, by launch of their data portal. After that UK government launched similar portal.
Healthcare is complex, intertwined, and touches every single individual on this planet. The average per capita spent on healthcare costs has been tremendously increasing over the past few years. There are numerous reforms being pushed across the world in healthcare. Whether a country has completely socialized healthcare system, a completely privatized system or anything in between, the issues are all the same: an utter lack of transparency.
In India, National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) has been notified by the Government?through a gazette notification. According to this policy, all?government departments shall soon release their datasets in open formats. To make these datasets easily accessible by citizens, policy has also mandated NIC to set up a data portal for India to provide a platform to government departments?and organisations to publish their datasets online in open formats.
Cost transparency is being viewed as a no brainer in many industries, except in healthcare. Do you know the true costs for procedures, tests and treatments whether you are in the ER, visiting your GP or heading over to see your dentist? Let’s not even talk about quality metrics that are associated with any of the above visits. What’s the discharge rate for a particular hospital and especially: what are re-admission rates and the root causes for these?
Open health data plays a big part in? Healthcare.
First and foremost: by opening healthcare data, government organizations will start bridging the divide between governments and the digital citizens. A great portion of our taxes goes towards healthcare; the argument that it is our data still holds true and is even more relevant now.
Public, private, NGO and civic society collaboration is key to inspiring and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. Again, groundbreaking innovation is what is needed across the globe. Large corporations and governments are simply not suited to provide this level of progress. However, staying in the race can also lead to policy changes that inspire innovators; lowering tax brackets (unlike the French), opening up data and engaging with the community are all fundamental points that need to be addressed.
Scientific research, grants and incentive systems for the aforementioned points need to move towards opening and sharing data across universities and other academic institutions. By the virtue of rewarding a large grant and publishing a paper, the incentives for the researchers are flawed. This leads to a negative mentality and a disincentive to opening their data.
Transparency is needed.It’s needed now and in real time; it’s needed to understand the money flows and inefficiencies of healthcare organizations; it’s needed to drive quality into these institutions and it’s needed in order for the civil society to have a valid input into the future of health and not just healthcare.
There are some challenges for the future of open health data and also provide suggestions on how to mitigate these issues:
Resistance of government entities to publish the data. Yes, resistance and concerns are still hampering the data from being used. It?s thought to be employed against politicians. It’s thought to be incomprehensive for those who ask for it. It?s thought to be mangled before public consumption. These outlooks will require government agencies to spend the scarce resources to ?defend? themselves instead of working towards the goal of open data. Digital citizens, who understand the data with the goals of the social good, will consequently help these agencies squash the nay-sayers.
Lack of access to data. Government agencies may have no data (shocking). This could be the result of a completely unwired system or a completely privatized system. We ARE the end consumers, thereby being the main ones needing to be informed about the details of the services offered.
Tracking the results of the open health data initiatives is also challenging. There is a general feeling that all the code-a-thons, hackathons, and other open data challenges are producing great results but by the nature of open -tracking the results is very difficult. Identify and structure a system to list the data sets and events. This tool will furthermore track the developers and entrepreneurs who make use of this data. A tremendous effort would be needed to implement the above-mentioned tool and it would have to be highly crowd sourced.
Finally, the word data dictionary. Yes, things are different everywhere, form ICD-10 codes that are modified to healthcare systems that don?t even use them at all. Having said that, the local entrepreneurs can focus in the local market, make sense of the data, normalize it and map it to global standards.editor@ictpost.com
