The Department of Health’s NHS information strategy

The Department of Health’s new information strategy sets out plans to standardise data collection in NHS bodies, and to share and use it more effectively. Colin Marrs examines a trailblazer for the open data agenda

The Department of Health’s NHS information strategy, released last week, blazes a trail for other government departments by outlining the department’s approach to using open data as a way to improve service delivery. Although the strategy (see box) doesn’t envisage giving people new rights to access data currently kept out of the public domain, it does require NHS service providers to improve the way they collect, hold and release information – with the intention of improving patients’ experiences, providers’ performances, and the opportunities for private companies. The challenges facing those implementing the strategy will provide lessons for the rest of government, and help shape the future of the coalition’s open data initiative.

http://network.civilservicelive.com/pg/features/csw/read/658968/open-datas-healthy-life-signalsNHS Information Strategy: key points

• Create a single comprehensive online ‘portal’ – provided by government from 2013 – to present information on health, care, support services and public health;
• Move away from a national NHS IT system to locally-commissioned systems;
• Give all NHS patients secure online access to their personal GP records by 2015;
• Ensure that all GPs make available electronic booking and cancelling of appointments, and ordering of repeat prescriptions, by 2015;
• Introduce systems to ensure that medical information is recorded only once – at first contact with professional staff, and using nationally-defined data standards – and shared securely between healthcare providers.

If you are interested in this you might also be interested in the following sessions at Civil Service Live:

• Day 1: 15.10 - 16.10 - Transparency and Open Data
• Day 2: 15.20 - 15.50 - How digital channels transformed Health for Work

US CTO seeks to scale agile thinking and open data across federal government

US CTO seeks to scale agile thinking and open data across federal government

Todd Park is looking for Presidential Innovation Fellows to help government work better.

by Alex Howard

"We're looking for a few good men and women"

In the context of the nation's new digital government strategy, Park announced the launch of five projects that this new class of Innovation Fellows will be entrusted with implementing: a broad Open Data Initiative, Blue Button for America, RFP-EZ, The 20% Campaign, and MyGov.

The idea of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, said Park, is to bring in people from outside government to work with innovators inside the government. These agile teams will work together within a six-month time frame to deliver results.

The fellowships are basically scaling up the idea of "entrepreneurs in residence," said Park. "It's a portfolio of five projects that, on top of the digital government strategy, will advance the implementation of it in a variety of ways."

The biggest challenge to bringing the five programs that the US CTO has proposed to successful completion is getting 15 talented men and women to join his team and implement them. There's reason for optimism. Park shared vie email that:

"... within 24 hours of TechCrunch Disrupt, 600 people had already registered via Whitehouse.gov to apply to be a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and another several hundred people had expressed interest in following and engaging in the five projects in some other capacity."

To put that in context, Code for America received 550 applications for 24 fellowships last year. That makes both of these fellowships more competitive than getting in to Harvard in 2012, which received 34,285 applications for its next freshman class. There appears to be considerable appetite for a different kind of public service that applies technology and data for the public good.

Park is enthusiastic about putting open government data to work on behalf of the American people, amplifying the vision that his predecessor, Aneesh Chopra, championed around the country for the past three years.

"The fellows are going to have an extraordinary opportunity to make government work better for their fellow citizens," said Park in our interview. "These projects leverage, substantiate and push forward the whole principle of liberating data. Liberate data."

Junar gets $1.2M to make open data more useful - from Gigaom.com

The open data movement holds that much of the information garnered using public funds should be freely accessible to interested parties as long as what they do with that information is also made available to everyone. Organizations that are opening up at least some of their data include NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, the UK’s data.gov.uk, and Data.gov.

“A ton of data has been opened up by governments, think tanks, academia, NGOs — it’s an iceberg of data,” said Junar CEO Diego May in an interview last week. The issue is finding the right ways to look at that data to attack real-world problems. Open data projects have grown around genomic data, other public and private health data, even around food data.

“Many organizations are opening their data up to be more transparent, to foster collaboration, to help innovation … Many put out HTML tables or PDFs on their web sites, but they do a crappy job and it’s not really their fault. The tools [for really good visualization] are lacking,” May said.

Junar’s Open Data Platform promises to make it easier for users to find the right data (regardless of its underlying format); enhance it with analytics; publish it; enable interaction with comments and annotation; and generate reports. Throughout the process it also lets user manage the workflow and track who has accessed and downloaded what, determine which data sets are getting the most traction etc.

The most direct competitors to Junar’s software as a service are Tableau and Google visualization tools, and Socrata but those products focus on the display/visualization piece of the solution, not all the other components, May said.

http://gigaom.com/cloud/junar-gets-1-2m-to-make-open-data-more-useful/

Presidential Innovation Fellows: Open Data Initiatives | The White House

Presidential Innovation Fellows: Open Data Initiatives | The White House

The Presidential Innovation Fellows will pair top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, or academia with federal government employees to collaborate on game-changing solutions that aim to deliver significant business results in just six months.

Open Data Initiatives

Stimulate a rising tide of innovation that utilizes government data to create tools that help Americans better navigate their world, whether it’s finding the right health care provider, identifying the college that provides the best value for their money, saving money on electricity bills through smarter shopping or keeping their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled, and much more.

Stay updated, follow @ProjectOpenData on Twitter.

Description

The Open Data Initiatives program aims to “liberate” government data and voluntarily-contributed corporate data to fuel entrepreneurship, improve the lives of Americans in many tangible ways, and create jobs. As a model, decades ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began making weather data available for free electronic download by anyone. Entrepreneurs utilized these data to create weather newscasts, websites, mobile applications, insurance, and much more. Similarly, the government’s decision to make the Global Positioning System (GPS) freely available has fueled a vast array of private sector innovations ranging from navigation systems to precision crop farming, creating massive public benefit and contributing significantly to economic growth. More recently, the Health Data Initiative, launched by the Institute of Medicine and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2010, has opened growing amounts of health-related knowledge and information in computer-readable form from the vaults of the government and publicized the availability of these data to entrepreneurs and innovators. Hundreds of companies and nonprofits have utilized these data to develop new products and services that are helping millions of Americans and creating jobs of the future in the process.

for more details, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/opendata