Summary: I spoke twice at the Health Datapalooza in Washington, Sunday through Wednesday, May 31-June 3, 2015. Here’s a Storify (capturing real-time records of the event) on Wednesday, one element of a days-long event put on by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services celebrating open data and its use to improve costs, quality and outcomes in health care in the U.S.
The Wednesday panel description: “This session will feature unique uses of government and private sector open data sources that are contributing to better consumer decision making and value based care. These exciting initiatives include unique, community-sourced guides to health care costs, revealing patterns of purchasing by consumers and creating deeper community engagement around cost transparency and the only free data set and API for information about individual medications, pill images, and drug identification. Moderator: Bryan Sivak, Former Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services; Panelists: Charles Gellman, MSHI, Qwalcare; David Hale, National Institutes of Health; Jeanne Pinder, clearhealthcosts.com.”
The Monday session I did not capture in this way, but was honored to speak on a panel moderated by Ben Harder of U.S. News and World Report, along with Josh Rosenthal of Rowdmap and Kevin Larsen, MD, Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT, pinch-hitting for Elizabeth Mitchell. President and CEO, Network for Regional Healthcare Improvement. The description: “Applications of Transparency: From Visibility to Action: As transparency in health care has emerged as a crucial enabler towards achieving the Triple Aim, myriad sources and types of information have become available in the last few years. Join this session to learn new ways of understanding the behaviors of patients and providers, and novel approaches to payment and delivery already underway.”
