Agencies Unveil Open Government Plans

April 7 was open government day, the day when federal agencies revealed plans for data transparency and citizen participation.

The plans ranged from round ups of existing efforts to the unveiling of new efforts, such as a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services dashboard for comparing states' Medicare spending in hospitals--by 25 top diagnosis-related groups, and by top 10 hospitals for each state and diagnosis-related groups over time.

Much of the data on the CMS dashboard has been publically available before, acknowledges the Health and Human Services Department open government plan. However, "analysis of the data required retrieval of it from disparate places and having your own computer programmer and in-house Medicare expert to pull it together--barriers which the Dashboard now eliminates."