Fred, This database is a goldmine for investigative journalists, activists, research groups, grantwriters etc. I have seen it being used more and more to provide data to these sorts of activities. For instance, a CHC might mine the data to show thing are diverging health outcomes by race (health disparities). This may then go into a grant application for money to improve the health status in a particular area for a particular population and with geospacial data, a particular location.
It will become more and more important as the data gets refined and the investigators become more skilled. m On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 1:42 PM, fred trotter <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi, > More and more, I get interview requests asking for me to give the > open source perspective to healthcare issues. Sometimes, the questions are > excellent, showing pretty deep insights into the problems (other times the > reporter has no clue what our movement is about) > > When a reporter asks me good questions, I like to reward them by > giving them not only me own insights and opinions but also a sampling of > what the community at large thinks. The better the question, the less > likely > I am to be certain of the answer. > > Recently, a reporter wanted my take on the information available > from data.gov from the perspective of the FOSS health IT community. She > asked the following specific questions that I wanted to pass on to the > community at large. Feel free to reply to me privately if you have opinions > you would prefer not to be recorded publicly. > > 1. What is your view of the healthcare related data sets available on the > www.data.gov Web site? How useful are they? Who are the likely users? Are > there enough? Which ones do you find most promising? > > 2. What additional healthcare related data sets would you like to see > available on www.data.gov? > > 3. How significant do you think www.data.gov is as an open source of > health > information? How would you like to see it evolve? > > 4. Do you foresee any barriers to more healthcare data being shared via > www.data.gov? > > -- > Fred Trotter > http://www.fredtrotter.com > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
