mHealth Apps are Just the Beginning of the Disruption in Healthcare from Open Health Data

Two years ago, the potential of government making health information as useful as weather data felt like an abstraction. Healthcare data could give citizens the same "blue dot" for navigating health and illness akin to the one GPS data fuels on the glowing map of geolocated mobile devices that are in more and more hands. After all, profound changes in entire industries, take years, even generations, to occur. In government, the pace of progress can feel even slower, measured in evolutionary time and epochs.

Sometimes, history works differently, particularly given the effect of rapid technological changes. It's only a little more than a decade since President Clinton announced he would unscramble global positioning system data (GPS) for civilian use. President Obama's second U.S. chief technology officer, Todd Park, estimated that GPS data is estimated to have unlocked some $90 billion dollars in value in the United States.

In the context, the arc of the Health Data Initiative (HDI) in the United States might leave some jaded observers with whiplash. From a small beginning, the initiative to put health data to work has now expanded around the United States and attracted great interest from abroad, including observers from England National Health Service eager to understand what strategies have unlocked innovation around public data sets...