open data in health care organizations

Open data definition: Data that is easily accessible, machine-readable, accessible for free or at negligible cost, and with minimal limitations on its use, transformation, and distribution.
See the video: #opendatafilm 12m

Why Open Data in health care organization?

Transparency. 
In a well-functioning, democratic society citizens need to know what their health organizations are doing. To do that, they must be able freely to access data and information and to share that information with other citizens.

• Transparency isn't just about looking for what the managers or the personnel are earning (an old fashioned idea). It is also about people empowering themselves to be better able to make decisions about their lifes: choosing the hospital with better treatment outcomes after analyse and compare different data procedures.
• Transparency isn’t just about access, it is also about sharing and reuse — often, to understand material it needs to be analyzed and visualized and this requires that the material be open so that it can be freely used and reused. Open data helps organizations to create data more efficient.

Participation.
Citizens are not able to engage with their health organizations.
By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed. This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full “read/write” society, not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governing or managing a health care organization but being able to contribute to it. Patients, their families and citizens in general push the organization to be more responsive.

[Want to know how a Catalan Health Care organization are tackling open data?: SAGESSA Open Data]

Other useful information: 
Health Open Data Catalan Health Service
The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care NHS England (2014)

photo: galaxy IDCS 1426 (NASA)
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