Niall Brennan, Chief Data Officer and the Director of the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics at the CMS has been announced as the recipient of this year’s Health Data Liberators Award for his efforts to share CMS data in innovative ways to help improve the quality and value of care delivery. Chris Boone, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of HDC, and Charles Ornstein, presented the award in front of nearly 2,000 innovators, healthcare industry executives, policymakers, venture capitalists, startups, developers, researchers, providers, consumers and patient advocates in attendance at Health Datapalooza 2015 in Washington, D.C.
Health Data Liberators Award Background
HDC’s Health Data Liberators Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to the liberation of health data, helping to accelerate the pace and volume of data available to innovators, and in turn foster the creation of products and services that will improve the healthcare system.
“The American healthcare consumer is better served today thanks in large part to Niall’s tireless, behind-the-scenes work to make public health data readily available and accessible, helping to refocus our system of care to be patient centered and more cost effective,” said Dr. Boone. “Through Niall’s leadership and as the first Chief Data Officer at CMS, open data remains a priority within the federal government. We are excited to give this award to Niall, a longtime health data champion and Health Datapalooza contributor, and recognize his important work in making CMS a healthcare innovator.”
Mr. Brennan embodies the definition of a health data liberator through his work in the development of policies and programs to provide open access to usable data, and as an advocate for greater understanding of the role data play in providing the insights needed to increase transparency and improve quality within the healthcare system.
“It’s an honor to be recognized by Health Data Consortium as a health data liberator,” said Mr. Brennan. “I am extremely proud of the work CMS has done to expand the availability and utility of CMS program data to drive innovations that improve health and healthcare. This includes the release in recent years of information on hospital changes, physician utilization, and prescription drug utilization, that are enabling innovation – both through the development of new tools and resources, and through research, quality improvement, and fraud protection, and the announcement this week at the Health Datapalooza of access to more granular CMS data in a secure, privacy-protected manner for entrepreneurs and innovators. CMS will continue to promote innovation through data use in order to improve lives.”
Niall Brennan’s Background
As the first CMS Chief Data Officer, Mr. Brennan engages in activities to promote innovation in the public and private sector through the use of data. He is the lead architect of the agency’s effort to support value-based healthcare through the creation of new infrastructure and policies to provide healthcare providers, researchers, and other stakeholders’ timely access to CMS data and information products. Through Mr. Brennan’s work, the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics (OEDA) was established as a coordinating hub for CMS’s data management and dissemination. Under Mr. Brennan’s leadership, CMS launched the Virtual Research Data Center which provides researchers with secure, timely and lowcost access to privacy protected CMS data.
Mr. Brennan’s vision for the U.S. healthcare system is one where data serve all stakeholders across the continuum of care – patients, providers and payers – in order to improve care outcomes and lower costs. His work to establish programs to provide broad access to Medicare claims files within a secure infrastructure has supported their public use, creating additional value in the Medicare program and inspiring data liberation and innovation efforts across America’s healthcare enterprise.
