Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Institute of Medicine President Harvey Fineberg have announced a national initiative for sharing community health data. The Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI) is planning to use web developers, mobile phone applications and other technology to help disseminate public health data.

"Our national health data constitute a precious resource that we are paying billions to assemble, but then too often wasting," Secretary Sebelius said in a press release. "When information sits on the shelves of government offices, it is underperforming. We need to bring these data alive. If made easily accessible by the public, our data can help raise awareness of health status and trigger efforts to improve it. The data can help our communities determine where action is most needed and what approaches might be most helpful. As a nation, we can and should harness the exploding creativity in our information technology and media sectors to help us get the most public benefit out of our data investments."

During the announcement of the initiative, some applications were demonstrated to show health data in new formats. These applications included features to show a community's health status, games to learn health status facts, and web searches integrating hospital performance data in web search results on hospitals.
In addition, Sebelius stated that by the end of the year HHS would have an HHS Health Indicators Warehouse online, providing data on national, state, regional, and county health issues, available for download and implementation into other web sites and applications.

Data sets are currently available on an interim site from the Center for Disease Control: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/chdi.htm. One such link leads to HHS' Community Health Status Indicators web-based tool, featuring county health status profiles. Using the drop-down menus in the tool allows the user to choose a state and county, and from there access information on county demographics and peer counties. The information available includes: summary measures of health, leading causes of death, relative health importance, risk factors for early death, environmental health and more.

Adapted in part from an HHS press release.

Link: http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2010pres/06/20100602a.html

More on the Initiative may be found, including a video demonstrating the applications, at: http://www.hhs.gov/open/datasets/communityhealthdata.html

Back to HCB News

More Industry Headlines