HHS aims to drive down health care costs with transparency

The Health and Human Services Department wants to use the "NOAA model" to bring down health care costs, its chief technology officer said Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "collects tons of weather data and publishes it online in machine-readable, downloadable form for anyone for free," HHS CTO Todd Park said. "That has seeded, over the decades, a massive array of innovations in the private sector, ranging from weather websites to weather insurance and weather mobile apps."

In a similar fashion, HHS hopes by publicly releasing as much government-gathered health data as possible, it can spur private sector innovations that improve biomedical research, raise the quality of public health programs and introduce new efficiencies that lower the cost of health insurance, Park said...