“… It is knowing the tremendous potential of connected data that has fueled our efforts to make HHS an interoperable health care organization. Imagine what’s possible when information collected and stored in siloes at CMS, CDC, NIH, FDA, HRSA and others can be brought together and leveraged in near real time to understand the effectiveness of a program or to track the emergence of the next public health crisis. Or, simply, to understand how to spend limited resources in the most effective way possible. And, to be able to have outcome metrics for those efforts to determine whether our underlying assumptions were correct or whether we need to shift our approach. For the last 2.5 years, we’ve been working towards this vision.”
“The report being released, ‘Leveraging Data for the Nation’s Health’, outlines the holistic approach we are taking at the Department: the governance of data at the enterprise level, the facilitation of data sharing through a common platform in accordance with applicable law and the development of a workforce with data science and AI training are each essential elements.”
“Earlier this year, we released our minimum viable product for the internal HHS Data Hub, a platform that will enable safe and secure data sharing, analysis, code sharing, reproducibility of results, data use agreements and work flow management. It will also allow us, for the first time, to understand what data gaps exist and what novel data partnerships the Department should explore. We will have a view into requests for data linkages that may have no clear regulatory framework and to begin to develop this with transparency, balancing privacy with the need to inform policy. Launching our Data Sharing Steering Committee comprised of leaders from across the different divisions of HHS has been an enormously important step in developing these principles of data governance at the enterprise level, to operationalize the use of data and to address a new world where the use of our collective health information should first and foremost be seen through the lens of preserving trust and protecting those most vulnerable.”
“Although not mentioned in the report, one of the most important components in which we are investing significant resources is a data science training program for the Department, the Data Science CoLab…” Read the full article here.
Source: Enabling a Data-Driven Institution through Organizational Change Management – By Dr. Mona Siddiqui, December 31, 2019. Health IT Answers.
