3.1 HHS Data Currently Available for Download
HHS has already posted 117 data sets and tools on Data.Gov since its debut in May 2009. Check out the inventory of them on our Open Government website www.hhs.gov/open or at www.data.gov. These data sets and tools include:
- Hospital-by-hospital quality performance statistics compiled by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and which can help inform consumer choices regarding where to get care. Also available: similar information on nursing homes, dialysis facilities, home health agencies
- A regularly updated data set representing all technologies available for licensing from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), helpful to entrepreneurs and companies looking to drive innovation
- A household cleaning products data set that links over 4,000 consumer brands to health effects as submitted by manufacturers and which allows scientists and consumers to research products based on chemical ingredients
- Detailed summaries of Medicare expenditures on physician services, which allow the public to understand patterns of Medicare spending and analyze the types of services being delivered to address the health needs of the Medicare population. (This data set was first added on January 22 as one of HHS’s new “high value” data sets under the Open Government Directive)
- CDC WONDER, which provides access to online databases, reports, references, and links to external data systems containing a wide range of highly valuable public health information. Data sets that can be queried online from WONDER are continually updated and include data sets related to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (from 1981), births (starting in 1995), cancer registry statistics (beginning in 1999), mortality data (1979-2006), population estimates (beginning in 1970), sexually transmitted disease (STD) morbidity (1984-2008), tuberculosis case reports (1993-2007), and vaccine adverse events reports (1990-2010). CDC WONDER currently hosts 42 searchable online databases, holding over 200 gigabytes of data. In addition, CDC WONDER allows access to reports, statistics, standard reference tables, and historical guidelines. The wonder.cdc.gov website services over 47 million requests a year. CDC WONDER is widely used by public health programs, researchers, and schools of public health curricula. CDC WONDER has over 1000 citations as a data source for scientific papers and articles
- A downloadable data set which lists all NIH-funded research grants, contracts, and intramural projects from 2005-2009, abstracts for these projects, citation information for publications that acknowledged support from any of these projects, and patents reported by investigators funded by these NIH projects. This data set was published on January 22 as one of HHS’s new “high value” data sets under the Open Government Directive. NIH had received many public requests for this information to be made available in downloadable form. Patient advocates are enthusiastic about this dataset because it makes information available on grants and publications that they had been amassing manually. The biomedical research community is interested in analyzing the data to find collaborators, develop literature bases, and analyze trends in biomedical research. Policy makers and evaluators are interested in analyzing research funding, programs supported, and the results of those programs. Venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies are interested in analyzing the files to understand the latest trends in federally-funded research
- And much more
I may be in the wrong part of the HSS website, but after almost an hour of frustrated searching, I am unable to find statistics on child abuse and neglect in the U.S., which I need for a grant proposal. The new site is visually very nice, but not user-friendly. It's apparent that the designers didn't think about the end-user, as even entering such basic terms as "child abuse" or "abuse and neglect" in the search box for the Admin. for Children and Families site repeatedly yields responses of nothing found. The data is in their somewhere. It's just been buried so deep that it's virtually impossible to find.
I am a student nurse and I think that this information is important to help consumers make better choices about decisions that may affect their lives. The health care personnel will also benefit if they are able to see first hand what is being said about hospital reviews and what changes should be met. This information should be open to the public and the public should utilize it to their advantage.
As a nursing student I think this is a very interesting topic because of the new uses and opportunities we all have in connecting to new information because of our technology we have today. These tools will do a great job in increasing the transparency we have between what goes on in the hospitals and what the public sees. I think these applications will provide more opportunities for other areas in the health care field to be more transparent.