In pursuit of its open government goals, the Department of Health and Human Services is expanding access to financial data and to the results of its funded scientific research, HHS Deputy Secretary Bill Corr said in a blog post.
Although HHS has made over 1,800 datasets accessible to the public throughhealthdata.gov, Corr said the department’s goal now is, “to maximize the value of HHS information by ensuring that our stakeholders have access to the fullest spectrum of health and human service data in formats that are readily consumable and lend themselves to meaningful re-use.”
To that end, HHS released plans for making the results of government-funded research freely available to the public. This will include making peer-reviewed publications stemming from HHS funded scientific research freely available, as well as the underlying data supporting these publications.
Full-text articles will be available through the PubMed Central repository, and metadata about these articles, including supplemental information, will also be made freely available to the public. The efforts will expand HHS’s holdings to new fields such as public health research, emergency preparedness and comparative effectiveness, Corr said, creating more opportunities for insights that can improve health care.
Additionally, the department is leading a two-year pilot that will test the application of data standards to grantee reporting and will explore the benefits of standardized financial reporting.
That way, “consumers can follow the complete life cycle of federal spending – from appropriations to the disbursements of grants, contracts and administrative spending,” Corr said.
Although HHS is committed to releasing heath data, “creating openness and transparency at HHS is not a sprint but a marathon,” Corr said.
Date: March 18, 2015