Celebrating Sunshine Week at HHS
By Todd Park, HHS CTO
As Sunshine Week, the national week of dialogue promoting Open Government, comes to a close, we’d like to take a moment to reflect upon the progress of Open Government at HHS and just how far we’ve come.
We’re working on a comprehensive update that we’ll be sharing with everyone on April 7, the one year anniversary of our inaugural Open Government Plan. There is so much to celebrate:
- Massive forward progress on HHS’s effort to become the “NOAA of health data” through our flagship Community Health Data Initiative. Now dubbed simply the Health Data Initiative, we’ve expanded the scope of data being liberated to all kinds of data from HHS’s vaults: community health data, clinical provider quality data, consumer product data, medical/scientific data, government spending data, etc. – all accessible through the new HealthData.gov community site, free of charge and without intellectual property constraint, with much more data to come. I could spend many pages just describing the data and APIs that HHS has published over the last year!
- And we’ve engaged in an energetic campaign over the past year to publicize and promote this data to a rapidly growing ecosystem of innovators across the country – through challenges, codeathons, conferences, data deep-dives, and more. Innovators are harnessing the data to power a fast-expanding array of applications and services that create great benefit for the American people -- and also create jobs of the future in the process. To hear more about the latest (incredibly inspiring) examples of these applications, be sure to sign up for the second annual Health Data Initiative Forum, brought to you by the Institute of Medicine and HHS, coming on June 9.
- Significant progress on HHS’s FOIA backlog through the work of teams across the Department – and teams at FDA and CMS in particular -- that have cut HHS’s FOIA backlog in half (in half!) over the course of just one year .
- Growing embrace of prizes and challenges as a new and really exciting way for HHSers to engage creative thinkers and doers across the country – enabled in very large part by the America COMPETES Act, passed in December, that gave prize authority to all agencies across HHS.
- The landmark FDA TRACK initiative that’s published hundreds of FDA performance metrics for ongoing public view – and which is helping FDA improve its internal operations and achieve greater management success to boot.
I could go on and on – and we’ll share more details on April 7. But what I’d really like to do right now is say thank you so very, very much to all of the heroic folks across HHS who are key drivers of our Open Government successes. We’ve got a lot more to do, but I’m so heartened and inspired by the many HHSers (many and growing) who are doing such remarkable work to embed transparency, participation, and collaboration into how HHS operates. May we continue to make progress at an accelerating clip, go Open Government go, and Happy Sunshine Week to all!
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I am happy to hear that the there is a forward progress on HHS’s effort to become the “NOAA of health data†through our flagship Community Health Data Initiative And i am also glad to hear that the health .gov will be more accesible in the near future. It is important that if people want to comment on health that they could share their opinion.
Thanks to the HHS CTO for your leadership. It's easy to put a bunch of datasets on the web but your commitment to socializing the potential of health data to groups that normally don't think they are part of the health ecosystem is amazing! Go Mr Park Go!