  The open data movement constitutes an approach to achieving accountability
for government organizations, and is aligned with one of the sustainable
development goals outlined by the United Nations. In the area of health care,
government agencies at the Federal and State levels have released open health
data consisting of de-identified patient outcomes, costs and ratings. We have
applied big data analytics to understand patterns and trends in open health
data. We envision the use of this data by concerned citizens to understand both
national and local trends in health expenditures. We have built an open-source
tool, BOAT (Big Data Open Source Analytics Tool,
https://github.com/fdudatamining) to facilitate analytical exploration of open
health data sets. We used BOAT to analyze data from the New York Statewide
Planning and Research Cooperative System and determined that there has been a
significant increase (40 percent) in the incidences of mental health issues
amongst adolescents from 2009-2014. Using BOAT we analyzed costs for hip
replacement surgery for 168,676 patients is in New York State, and showed that
88% of these patients had surgery costs of less than \$30,000. This figure
provides a basis to understand the decision by The California Public Employees'
Retirement System to cap hip replacement reimbursements at $30,000, resulting
in significant savings. Our tool could enable researchers, hospitals, insurers
and citizens to obtain an unbiased view on health-care expenditures, costs and
emerging trends. Our tool is especially valuable in the current economic
environment, where a significant amount of reporting is controlled by special
interests groups and lobbies.
