The Health Data Consortium (HDC) is a

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

–based public-private partnership that advocates for the

availability In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...

and use of health data, in particular government health datasets, and the improvement of

health Health has a variety of definitions, which have been used for different purposes over time. In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, p ...

and

health care Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...

through patient data accessibility and innovative use of data. HDC is a

501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, Trust (business), trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of ...

organization.

History

In 2010, the

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the US federal government created to protect the health of the US people and providing essential human services. Its motto is "Im ...

launched the Health Data Initiative to make its data available for public use and, in collaboration with the

Institute of Medicine The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), known as the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineerin ...

, hosted a public forum featuring various private, non-profit, and entrepreneurial stakeholder groups to explore how the data could be used to promote innovation that would improve people's health. This forum was held again in 2011 and 2012, wherein it was rebranded into its current iteration as the Health Datapalooza. Due to the success of the forum and growing industry interest, HHS, the

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is an American philanthropic organization. It is the largest one focused solely on health. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the foundation focuses on access to health care, public health, health equity, ...

, the California HealthCare Foundation, and other parties involved believed that there needed to be a structured organization independent of the government that could convene stakeholder groups and promote the health data mission year-round. They approached Forum One Communications to help establish this organization as a public-private partnership, which was named the Health Data Consortium.

Leadership

In February 2013, Dwayne Spradlin was announced as acting CEO of HDC. He was succeeded by Dr. Christopher Boone, who was appointed Executive Director in October 2014.

Work

Health Datapalooza

The Health Datapalooza conference continues the work of the Health Data Initiative Forum by convening stakeholders annually. In particular, Health Datapalooza is known for highlighting health care

startups A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses tha ...

that use health data to develop programs and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

by way of a coding challenge or through demos of the applications.

Health Data All Stars

The Health Data All Stars is a directory of organizations and websites that offer open health datasets for public viewing and use. The directory currently features over fifty open health data entries.

References

{{reflist

External links

Health Data Consortium website

Health Datapalooza website
Health charities in the United States Charities based in Washington, D.C. Open data Public–private partnership projects in the United States Medical and health organizations based in Washington, D.C. 2012 establishments in Washington, D.C. Organizations established in 2012