HHS holds vast warehouses of health data and information. The Department is working aggressively to provide easy access to these data collections and, ultimately, through Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to the data itself.

Taking the Pulse of a Community

How good are the schools? It’s a key question when people are relocating. And there are solid stats to provide answers. How healthy is the community? Until now, there was no way to answer that question.

Working with information made available by various health data APIs, the Healthy Communities Network (HCN) creates local dashboards at city, county and regional levels. The dashboards graphically display information on everything from mental health care to cancer incidence, infant immunization rates to adult fruit and vegetable consumption! HCN, developed by the Healthy Communities Institute, is currently used in 35 states. Take a look at the information available to people living in San Francisco.

HHS has collected more than 284 datasets at healthdata.gov and the inventory is currently growing by almost 100 datasets per year.

Thirty-two of these databases are already API-enabled, providing access to information on the quality of provider, hospital and nursing home care, a directory of federally qualified health centers, National Library of Medicine and Medline Plus resources, and cancer incidence. Access to HHS API-enabled health databases is currently being catalogued on healthdata.gov.