Health systems and the government have more in common than a slow pace when it comes to change. Both have their vital data locked away and in silos, making it difficult to use for improving health care and the consumer experience.
But the Department of Health and Human Services is moving quickly to open up its digital information to the outside world and encourage developers to innovate, according to HHS Chief Technology Officer Bruce Greenstein, who discussed the work when he visited UPMC Enterprises in March.
At the same time, engineers at Enterprises are hard at work on thinking along the same lines. They are working on a cloud-based technology strategy, which is creating the technology needed to bridge the divide between UPMC’s many individual records systems and the applications that need access to health data.
“If we want to fix the cost and patient experience problems in health care, we need all our data in one place where it is available to providers, payers, consumers, and third-party applications,” UPMC Enterprises President Tal Heppenstall said. “Here at UPMC, we’re not waiting for someone else to solve this problem that is hampering every health system.”
Meanwhile, Greenstein said he has made it his mission to open the government’s data from a variety of health agencies, such as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health, to developers working outside of government.
“We want to put as much data into the market as we can,” Greenstein said during his visit. “We know there are researchers who can do amazing things with this data if we can make it available.”
As a starting point, HHS is aiming to create a single data governance standard across the department’s multiple agencies, said Mona Siddiqui, MD, Chief Data Officer in the CTO’s office, who joined Greenstein on the visit.
“We don’t have enough transparency in data governance even between agencies within HHS,” Dr. Siddiqui said. “We see ourselves as these individual silos within HHS and we need to break that down.”
Once that job is complete it should be easier to share more complete and useful data sets, she said.
Greenstein also is encouraging entrepreneurs across the country to explore HealthData.gov – a site dedicated to making high-value health data more accessible – and provide feedback about what’s useful and what’s missing.
“We’re trying to make that process transparent and put up a big front door made of glass,” he said.
