Health IT 2014: Interoperability, Ebola And Healthcare.gov 2.0

Health IT in 2014 continued its path toward a system of interoperable and open data to improve patient care with IT systems.  “Consumers should be able to access their data,” then U.S. CTO Todd Park said in May at the 2014 Health Datapalooza, echoing the sentiments of other open health data pioneers. “Secure online access to their data is a right under [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].”

At that event, the Food and Drug Administration introduced a model of how open health data could benefit the nation. Called OpenFDA, the program featured millions of reports of drug adverse events and medication errors that have been submitted from 2004 to 2013.

“Through this new and novel approach to data organization, these reports will be available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help signal potential safety information, derive meaningful insights and get information to consumers and health care professionals in a timely manner,” said Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, FDA’s chief health informatics officer. “OpenFDA offers a scalable platform that can be easily searched and queried across many distinct data sets, can be easily redeployed or altered to fit a variety of purposes and provides an innovative public data search and analytics solution.”...