Executive Summary
What is "Open Government?"
An Open Government is one that is transparent, publishing government data that generates significant benefit for citizens and which helps the public hold the government accountable. An Open Government embraces the notion of public participation in the work of government. And it's one that is effective at encouraging collaboration across the government and with the world outside government. Above all, an Open Government is one that works better -- one that leverages the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration to deliver better results to the American people.
This Open Government Plan represents the official response of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the White House's Open Government Directive, issued on December 8, 2009.
The plan embraces the idea of working proactively and energetically to advance a culture of Open Government at HHS. We have created an Open Government Steering Group, designated senior accountable officials for Open Government, and formally charged our department-wide Data Council, Chief Information Officer Council, and Innovation Council with a range of Open Government responsibilities. Through these bodies, we will help catalyze Open Government action across HHS, supporting the work of leaders and innovators to advance Open Government at every level through education, communication, and processes that will encourage, share and celebrate best practices, including a new Secretary’s Innovation Awards program.
We believe that transparency and data sharing are of fundamental importance to our ability to achieve HHS’s strategic goals of advancing the health and well-being of the United States. HHS’s vast stores of data are a remarkable national resource which can be utilized to help citizens understand what we do and hold us accountable, help the public hold the private sector accountable, increase awareness of health and human services issues, generate insights into how to improve health and well-being, spark public and private sector innovation and action, and provide the basis for new products and services that can benefit the American people. Our plan describes exciting new developments regarding how we will leverage HHS data to accomplish these objectives:
- A multi-faceted new transparency push by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2010 -- including the following:
- A new interactive “CMS Dashboard,” which debuted in beta mode on April 6, which allows the public to visualize and analyze Medicare spending with unprecedented ease and clarity – starting with inpatient hospital spending. You can visit the Dashboard at http://www.cms.gov/Dashboard/
- Creation of 9 Medicare claim “basic files,” one for each major category of health care service, to be released from September to December 2010 for free public download on Data.gov. These files will contain a limited number of variables and be de-identified and configured through a rigorous process, in close consultation with privacy experts, re-identification experts, researchers, and key stakeholders, to ensure the protection of beneficiary privacy and confidentiality
- A significantly improved user interface and analytical tool for viewing existing CMS COMPARE data on quality performance of hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and dialysis centers. This interface and tool debuted at data.medicare.gov on April 7
- Online publication of detailed Medicaid State Plan documents and amendments on the CMS website by the end of 2010
- The release of new national, state, regional, and potentially county-level data on Medicare prevalence of disease, quality, costs, and service utilization, never previously published, as part of HHS’s Community Health Data Initiative by the end of 2010
- A Transparency Initiative being pursued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), being formulated with extensive public input, and focused on (1) providing the public with information regarding how FDA works, (2) proactive disclosure of useful, non-proprietary information in the possession of the agency, and (3) ways in which FDA can become more transparent to regulated industry. FDA is also launching FDA-TRACK, a new agency-wide performance management system, which debuted in beta mode on April 7. FDA-TRACK, when fully implemented, will allow the public to monitor over 300 performance measures and 80 key projects across 90+ FDA program offices on an ongoing basis
- Other new data sets and tools to be published from across HHS
- Implementation of a new process for the proactive identification, prioritization, publication, and monitoring of data releases – to be coordinated overall by HHS’s Data Council. This process will include “HHS Apps Challenges” – public competitions for the best applications built utilizing our data. In the spirit of energetic execution of our Open Government Plan, we have already executed two such challenges and launched a third since the debut of our initial Plan on April 7:
- A competition for best visualization of community health data as part of the Sunlight Foundation’s Design for America competition -- see http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2010/design-america-winners/ for results, announced at the end of May
- A challenge to innovators to develop applications using HHS’s community health data for debut at a Community Health Data Forum jointly hosted by HHS and the Institute of Medicine on June 2 – see http://www.hhs.gov/open/datasets/initiative_launch.html to view a webcast of the amazing results, and read more about the Community Health Data Initiative below.
- As part of this Community Health Data Initiative, HHS has collaborated with Health 2.0, Sunlight Foundation, and others to launch a third challenge, the Health 2.0 2010 Developer Challenge (www.health2challenge.org), with resulting applications to be showcased at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco in October
- A major push to assess current HHS operations in support of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), identify and prioritize improvement opportunities, and define a roadmap to implement the improvements
This plan also seeks to take Open Government to the next level by expanding opportunities for public participation in HHS activities and for collaboration across HHS and with the world outside HHS – especially via the use of new information and communications technologies. Through a new HHS “Community of Practice” for Participation and Collaboration, Open Government innovators at HHS will be able to network with each other, share learnings and best practices, compile these best practices into an HHS “workplace menu” of participation and collaboration tools, compare the efficacy of different approaches, and work together on common issues. The Community of Practice will focus in particular on the advancement of innovative mechanisms for participation and collaboration at HHS – mechanisms that apply blogging, “crowdsourcing,” group collaboration, idea generation, mobile, and on-line challenge capabilities to key HHS activities:
- Delivery of consumer information on patient safety and health -- e.g., via FDA’s product safety text-message pilot, the Text4baby program, and use of social media to reduce harm from tobacco products
- User-friendly information services for health care delivery -- e.g., via work by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to assess the effectiveness of cell phone applications as a health care program dissemination tool
- Medical research collaborations -- e.g., via the application of “crowdsourcing” and innovative patient engagement approaches to research on diabetes and women’s health issues
- Collaboration among HHS employees -- e.g., via work by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation to research and pilot advanced collaboration tools
- Better health care through better information -- e.g., via the community-driven, highly collaborative “Nationwide Health Information Network – Direct” initiative being pursued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
- Innovation in the workplace -- e.g., via the piloting of an online employee idea-generation tool and challenge program by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Finally, we have designated five initiatives in particular as “Flagship Initiatives” that we believe embody the direction in which we are taking Open Government at HHS: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) Dashboard, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Transparency Initiative, FDA-TRACK, our push for FOIA Excellence, and the Community Health Data Initiative. The first four have been mentioned above. The fifth, the Community Health Data Initiative, formally launched on June 2 at a Community Health Data Forum jointly hosted by HHS and the Institute of Medicine, is a major new public-private effort whose goal is help Americans understand health and health care performance in their communities relative to others – and to help spark and facilitate action to improve performance. As a core enabler of this initiative, HHS is providing to the public, free of charge and any intellectual property constraint, a large-scale and expanding Community Health Data Set harvested from across HHS – a wealth of easily accessible, downloadable data on public health and health care performance across communities, including a major contribution of Medicare-related data from CMS (i.e., prevalence of disease, quality, cost, and service utilization data at the national, state, regional, and potentially county levels), which has never previously been released to the public. The initiative is simultaneously working with a growing array of technology companies, researchers, health advocates, consumer advocates, employers, providers, media, etc. to identify and deploy uses of the data that would be most effective at (1) raising awareness of community health performance, (2) increasing pressure on decisionmakers to improve performance, and (3) helping to facilitate and inform improvement efforts. Such applications and programs include interactive health maps, competitions, social networking games that educate people about community health, enhanced web search results for health searches, etc. At the public launch of the Community Health Data Initiative on June 2, attended by 400 people in person and 300 people online, innovators demonstrated more than a dozen amazing applications that had been built or significantly improved using HHS data in less than 90 days, in response to an initial challenge issued by HHS in March. A group of Initiative collaborators, including Health 2.0, the Sunlight Foundation, and HHS, also announced a new challenge on June 2, the 2010 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, which will involve a growing array of innovators in the development of an expanding array of applications to be showcased at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco in October 2010. By leveraging the power of transparency, participation, and collaboration, the Community Health Data Initiative seeks to help significantly improve the health of our communities.
We at HHS are very excited about our path forward on Open Government. We view transparency, participation, and collaboration as vital enablers of maximum success in our mission to improve the health and welfare of the United States.
We see this Open Government Plan as just the beginning of our journey toward a more open and effective HHS. It’s a plan and course of action that we will continue to update over time as we seek to change how HHS operates for the better. And it’s a plan that will evolve in significant ways to encompass how we’ll be applying the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration to the historic work of implementing health insurance reform.
Any and all input you can provide is more than welcome – it’s essential to our ability to advance openness at HHS and do the best job we can for the American people. To provide feedback on our plan, please visit us at our Open Government website, www.hhs.gov/open, where our plan will be posted for comment on an ongoing basis. Thank you very much for your thoughts and consideration.
