ClearHealthCosts.com got a lot of love at the Health Data Initiative forum at the National Institutes of Health in Washington on Thursday, June 9.
Todd Park, chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, was one of the people who praised the the newly launched site when I showed it to him at the conference, sponsored by the Institutes of Medicine at the NIH.
Park is a rock star of the open-source movement, and has been the driving force behind the release of big swathes of data on cost, outcome and so on, released lately by the Health Data Initiative since it started a year ago. So his praise was especially meaningful.
Presenters at the event included Park; Kathleen Sebelius, the HHS secretary; Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s Chief Technology Officer; Tim O’Reilly, head of O’Reilly Media; Matt Miller, National Public Radio; and Harvey Fineberg, Institute of Medicine president.
The program included discussions of HIPAA; uses of data in commerce; uses of data in insuring good outcomes; new and not-so-new data releases; journalism using data; and a raft of presentations by companies involved in the business of health, from Aetna to Castlight Health, from Doximity to HealthLine, and everything in between.
Jeanne Pinder is the founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts. She worked at The New York Times for almost 25 years as a reporter, editor and human resources executive, then volunteered for a buyout and founded ClearHealthCosts.
With Pinder at the helm, ClearHealthCosts shared honors for the top network public service journalism project in a partnership with CBS News, as well as winning numerous other journalism prizes.
She was previously a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism. ClearHealthCosts has won grants from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; the International Women’s Media Foundation; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC in Los Angeles; the Lenfest Foundation in Philadelphia for a partnership with The Philadelphia Inquirer; and the New York State Health Foundation for a partnership with WNYC public radio/Gothamist in New York; and other honors.
She is one of Crain’s Notable Women in Tech. Niemanlab wrote of ClearHealthCosts that “The Internet hates secrets.”
Her TED talk about fixing health costs has surpassed 2 million views.