The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care

Abstract

The United Kingdom has been a leader in the open data movement – a new movement by governments around the world to open up the vast repositories of data they hold across agencies and departments, and to collect new kinds of data for public use. Open data is publicly available data that can be universally and readily accessed, used, and redistributed free of charge. It is changing the way governments, nonprofits, and the private sector use data to understand public issues and solve problems in areas as diverse as financial regulation, energy, education, and more. Open data holds particular potential in the health sector. By releasing health data to patients and, when appropriate, on an anonymized basis to researchers and the public, governments and healthcare organizations are betting on the power of greater openness of data to improve the quality of care, lower healthcare costs, and facilitate patient choice. The NHS has made and continues to make significant investments in opening data. Over the past several years, it has launched a series of initiatives that have already had a positive impact on patient education, healthcare choice, healthcare costs, and patient outcomes. Now the NHS is planning a broader, more ambitious programme that has the potential to serve as a worldwide model for the opening of data in healthcare. The purpose of this report is to help design this programme, establishing priorities and ways of measuring impact to guide this and future efforts at data transparency