Unleashing the Power of Data and Innovation to Improve Health

Three decades ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began publishing weather data in electronic form for free download. Today, entrepreneurs and innovators across the country leverage this freely available, easily accessible data to power a wide array of applications and services that benefit the American people, including weather newscasts, websites, mobile applications, insurance, research and much more. Similarly, the government's decision in the 1980s to make Global Positioning System data openly available has spawned a vast array of private-sector innovations that have created large-scale public benefit and economic value.

In much the same way, HHS has begun "liberating" health data through the Health Data Initiative -- making more and more data from HHS' vaults (from CMS, CDC, FDA and NIH, to name a few sources) easily available and accessible to the public and to innovators across the country. This information includes clinical care provider quality information, nationwide health service provider directories, databases of the latest medical and scientific knowledge, consumer product data, community health performance information, government spending data and much more...