Healthcare Network
Government plans open data push
Initiatives aimed at supporting economy to be included in chancellor's Autumn Statement
Mark Say
Mon 28 Nov 2011 10.24 EST First published on Mon 28 Nov 2011 10.24 EST
Open data initiatives for the NHS, transport, weather and house prices, along with the creation of an Open Data Institute are due be announced to coincide with the chancellor's Autumn Statement tomorrow.
It is understood that George Osborne will relate the opening up of public sector data to efforts to boost the growth of the UK economy, at a time when there are fears of the country slipping back into recession.
The government hopes that the moves will boost investment in digital and medical technology, encouraging small and medium sized firms, support the development of applications by entrepreneurs and make business logistics and computing more efficient.
A raft of measures are planned for the wider use of data produced by the health service. They include the linking of datasets from primary and secondary care to provide NHS and pharmaceutical professionals with more anonymised information about the journeys of patients through the care system and the outcomes of different treatments.
This is aimed at making commissioning more effective and helping to drive up productivity and improve patient outcomes. The government believes that the Veterans Affairs healthcare system in the US has shown that linked data can provide significant improvements in the quality of care.
There will also be new healthcare data release services for industry and academia, aimed at helping them to develop new products and services, and more detailed prescribing data to support research in analytics, electronic data management and other digitial technologies.
On transport, the chancellor will announce that the Department for Transport will work with Network Rail on providing real time running data on trains, and with Traveline, which provides public transport information, on the release of the Next Buses API service of planned and real time information at 350,000 bus stops in Great Britain. These are expected to be in place by April 2012.
The department will also work with local highway authorities to release information, at least monthly, on roads and roadworks. This follows the recent initiative to release information on strategic roads across England, and is expected to be in place by the end of next year.
The data will be released free of charge to encourage application developers to create apps for smartphones and the web.
From March 2012 the Land Registry will make available information showing prices on all residential property sales in England and Wales, downloadable for re-use and updated monthly.
In addition, the Met Office will release a large proportion of the Public Weather Service forecast and real time observations in an open data format and under the Open Government Licence for apps developers. This is believed to represent the largest volume of weather data and information made available by a national meterological organisation anywhere in the world.
More widely, the government is to create a Data Strategy Board from data users, which will be responsible handling the public sector contracts of the Public Data Group. It will have up to £7m over the next three years to spend on making more data freely available.
The Open Data Institute will be based in Shoreditch, London, and co-directed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. It will involve academia and business in the research and exploitation of relevant opportunities.
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