Government healthcare data is a public asset with immense potential to enhance care and accelerate progress. When shared responsibly, this resource not only drives innovation and the economy but also importantly improves health outcomes. With the right infrastructure, collaboration, and education, we can unlock powerful insights that lead to faster medical discoveries, proactive health decisions, enhanced patient care, and more effective healthcare operations.
Responsible Data Access: Openness, Security, and Privacy
Responsible and ethical data access means treating health data as a protected resource for public good, while ensuring privacy, security, and appropriate use. This involves sharing deidentified datasets under clear rules, policies, standards, and safeguards to ensure that they are handled in a way that protects and promotes patient rights.
Ensuring data is reliable and standardized is critical for insights to be revealed at the speed of innovation. Clear governance and enabling technologies ensure that as more data becomes open, it’s leveraged in ways that are standardized and benefit society without compromising confidentiality. This type of data stewardship is empowered by cloud platforms that are “secure by design.” For example, establishing strong default security modes as well as automated security updates, continuous monitoring for threats, routine compliance checks, strong access management controls, and regular auditing are all elements of a diligent strategy.
Why It Matters: Researchers, Policymakers, Providers, Administrators, and Patients
Health data, that is appropriately made available, benefits everyone. For example, national datasets empower researchers to discover new treatments, modifiable risk factors, disease trends, prevention targets, and other important public health insights.
By understanding epidemiological data, we can better inform personalized care options and strategies, such as the best treatment options for specific patient demographics. Clinicians can further benefit from advanced decision support systems built on algorithms powered by data. These types of emerging systems allow providers to more quickly diagnose disease, identify optimal treatments, understand adverse events, and prevent illness at the point of care. We are even collaborating to develop advanced tools that can identify subtle combinations of symptoms, history, and test results to reveal rare diagnoses that would otherwise not be apparent.
Furthermore, administrators who leverage these tools can make data-informed decisions that guide strategic planning, resource allocation, management decisions, and system performance assessments. In addition, health policymakers can use these resources to identify ongoing or emerging population risks and respond with data-informed regulations, policy planning, preventive measures, and public awareness campaigns.
Overall, data-driven decisions and the tools that power them lead to more intelligent, effective care, and improved health outcomes. Changing our focus from population to individual data, the same general strategies apply; we need to empower appropriate access for individuals, while also ensuring the highest level of security and privacy.
Tools and Education: Converting Data into Insight and Action
Having data isn’t enough; we need the right tools and skills to transform raw data into information, knowledge, and actionable wisdom. In other words, the required triad of tools needed to produce health value includes data, analytics, and expertise. In this context, advanced technologies such as cloud-based analytics and AI are the engines that convert complex healthcare data into value. And that engine is directed by trained professionals who know how to appropriately use the tools so we can understand the data in context. Doing this well requires fostering interdisciplinary collaboration that combines technical data skills with clinical and operational expertise, so that insights are valid and relevant.
U.S. Government: Fueling Progress with Health Data Access
Responsible data access, that is compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, promotes transparency and collaboration between government, healthcare providers, patients, and society, enabling the realization of massive shared benefits. The U.S. government is fostering this type of progress by making vast amounts of aggregated health data available to the public through initiatives such as, HealthData.gov, data.CDC.gov, ‘CMS Data Available to Everyone’, OpenFDA, and the ‘All of Us Research Program’ for precision medicine.
Effectively providing patients with access to their own medical data is also an important part of the overall strategy. This individual-level access offers many benefits, including greater knowledge of one’s own data and important trends that can spur health awareness, engagement, and foster informed decision-making. To optimize the value of this access, patients would also benefit from tools that translate medical jargon into commonly understandable terms. Furthermore, providing ways for patients to easily compare their data to relevant population-health trends from government data will provide important contextual perspectives, orientation, and perhaps motivation. Healthcare success can be further enhanced with automated education tools that empower them to influence their own health destiny with prevention and wellness strategies.
Conclusion
Responsible access to government health data is crucial for advancing health and wellness. Appropriately collecting and utilizing this valuable resource is a key part of ensuring a positive healthcare trajectory for our country. Continued commitment to privacy, security, infrastructure, and education is fundamental. The collaborative intersection of government, technology, and expertise is accelerating discovery and care enhancements at lower costs.
About Thomas Osborne, MD
Thomas Osborne, MD, is the Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft Federal. He is also Clinical professor at Stanford Health Care (adjunct).
