Creating Value through Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Capgemini Consulting, the global strategy and transformation consulting arm of the Capgemini Group, today published two new reports on the state of play of Open Data in Europe, to mark the launch of the European Open Data Portal. The first report addresses “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play” and the second focuses on “Creating Value through Open Data: Study on the Impact of Re-use of Public Data Resources.” The countries covered by these assessments include the EU28 countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland – commonly referred to as the EU28+ countries. The reports were requested by the European Commission within the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility program, supporting the deployment of European Open Data infrastructure.

Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by public bodies and can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone.. For the period 2016-2020, the direct market size for Open Data is estimated at EUR 325 billion for Europe. Capgemini’s study “Creating Value through Open Data” illustrates how Open Data can create economic value in multiple ways including increased market transactions, job creation from producing services and products based on Open Data, to cost savings and efficiency gains. For instance, effective use of Open Data could help save 629 million hours of unnecessary waiting time on the roads in the EU; and help reduce energy consumption by 16%. The accumulated cost savings for public administrations making use of Open Data across the EU28+ in 2020 are predicted to equal 1.7 bn EUR. Reaping these benefits requires reaching a high level of Open Data maturity.

In order to address the accessibility and the value of Open Data across European countries, the European Union has launched the Beta version of the European Data Portal. The Portal addresses the whole Data Value Chain, from data publishing to data re-use. Over 240,000 data sets are referenced on the Portal and 34 European countries. It offers seamless access to public data across Europe, with over 13 content categories to categorize data, ranging from health or education to transport or even science and justice. Anyone, citizens, businesses, journalists or administrations can search, access and re-use the full data collection. A wide range of data is available, from crime records in Helsinki, labor mobility in the Netherlands, forestry maps in France to the impact of digitization in Poland…..The study, “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play”, uses two key indicators: Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity. These indicators cover both the maturity of national policies supporting Open Data as well as an assessment of the features made available on national data portals. The study shows that the EU28+ have completed just 44% of the journey towards achieving full Open Data Maturity and there are large discrepancies across countries. A third of European countries (32%), recognized globally, are leading the way with solid policies, licensing norms, good portal traffic and many local initiatives and events to promote Open Data and its re-use….(More)”

RethinkCityHall.org

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release (Boston): “Mayor Martin J. Walsh today announced the launch of RethinkCityHall.org, a website designed to encourage civic participation in the City Hall campus plan study, a one-year comprehensive planning process that will serve as a roadmap for the operation and design improvements to City Hall and the plaza.

This announcement is one of three interrelated efforts that the City is pursuing to reinvigorate and bring new life to both City Hall and City Hall Plaza.   As part of the Campus Plan Request for Qualifications (RFQ) that was released on June 8, 2015, the City has selected Utile, a local architecture and planning firm, to partner with the city to lead the campus plan study.  Utile is teamed with Grimshaw Architects and Reed Hilderbrand for the design phases of the effort.

“I am excited to have Utile on board as we work to identify ways to activate our civic spaces,” said Mayor Walsh. “As we progress in the planning process, it is important to take inventory of all of our assets to be able to identify opportunities for improvement. This study will help us develop a thoughtful and forward-thinking plan to reimagine City Hall and the plaza as thriving, healthy and innovative civic spaces.”

“We are energized by Mayor Walsh’s challenge and are excited to work with the various constituencies to develop an innovative plan,” said Tim Love, a principal at Utile. “Thinking about the functional, programmatic and experiential aspects of both the building and plaza provides the opportunity to fundamentally rethink City Hall.”

Both the City and Utile are committed to an open and interactive process that engages members of the public, community groups, professional organizations, and as part of that effort the website will include information about stakeholder meetings and public forums. Additionally, the website will be updated on an ongoing basis with the research, analysis, concepts and design scenarios generated by the consultant team….(More)”

Infographic: World Statistics Day 2015

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The U.S. Census Bureau will join statistical organizations throughout the world to celebrate the second World Statistics Day on Oct. 20, 2015.

This interactive infographic is a compilation of news graphics that highlights the wide range of ways the Census Bureau supports this year’s theme of “Better data. Better lives.”

The Census Bureau uses statistics to provide critical and timely information about the people, places and economy of the United States.

For more information on World Statistics Day 2015, please see the links provided below.

Hacking the Obesity Epidemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The de Beaumont Foundation, in collaboration with the Health Data Consortium and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is pleased to announce the winners of the U.S. Obesity Data Challenge at NHS England’s Health and Care Innovation Expo 2015. The challenge is part of a joint U.S.-England initiative designed to harness the power of health data in tackling the epidemic of adult obesity in both countries….

The winning entries are:

  • Healthdata+Obesity (1st place) — This simple, curated dashboard helps health officials tell a powerful story about the root causes of obesity. The dashboard provides customizable data visualizations at the national, state, and local level as well as an interactive map, national benchmarks, and written content to contextualize the data. Developed by HealthData+, a partnership between the Public Health Institute and LiveStories.
  • The Neighborhood Map of U.S. Obesity (2nd Place) — This highly-detailed, interactive mapincorporates obesity data with a GIS database to provide a localized, high-resolution visualization of the prevalence of obesity. Additional data sources can also be added to the map to allow researchers and health officials greater flexibility in customizing the map to support analysis and decision-making on a community level. Developed by RTI International.
  • The Health Demographic Analysis Tool – Visualizing The Cross-Sector Relationship Between Obesity And Social Determinants (3rd Place) — This interactive database maps the relationship between the social determinants of health (factors like educational attainment, income, and lifestyle choices) and health outcomes in order to illustrate what plays a role in community health. The powerful images generated by this tool provide compelling material for new health interventions as well as a way to look retrospectively at the impact of existing public health campaigns. Developed by GeoHealth Innovations andCommunity Health Solutions….(More)

President Obama Signs Executive Order Making Presidential Innovation Fellows Program Permanent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Press Release: “My hope is this continues to encourage a culture of public service among our innovators, and tech entrepreneurs, so that we can keep building a government that’s as modern, as innovative, and as engaging as our incredible tech sector is.  To all the Fellows who’ve served so far – thank you.  I encourage all Americans with bold ideas to apply.  And I can’t wait to see what those future classes will accomplish on behalf of the American people.” –- President Barack Obama

Today, President Obama signed an executive order that makes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program a permanent part of the Federal government going forward. The program brings executives, entrepreneurs, technologists, and other innovators into government, and teams them up with Federal employees to improve programs that serve more than 150 million Americans.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is built on four key principles:

  • Recruit the best our nation has to offer: Fellows include entrepreneurs, startup founders, and innovators with experience at large technology companies and startups, each of whom leverage their proven skills and technical expertise to create huge value for the public.
  • Partner with innovators inside government: Working as teams, the Presidential Innovation Fellows and their partners across the government create products and services that are responsive, user-friendly, and help to improve the way the Federal government interacts with the American people.
  • Deploy proven private sector strategies: Fellows leverage best practices from the private sector to deliver better, more effective programs and policies across the Federal government.
  • Focus on some of the Nation’s biggest and most pressing challenges: Projects focus on topics such as improving access to education, fueling job creation and the economy, and expanding the public’s ability to access their personal health data.

Additional Details on Today’s Announcements

The Executive Order formally establishes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program within the General Services Administration (GSA), where it will continue to serve departments and agencies throughout the Executive Branch. The Presidential Innovation Fellow Program will be administered by a Director and guided by a newly-established Advisory Board. The Director will outline steps for the selection, hiring, and deployment of Fellows within government….

Fellows have partnered with leaders at more than 25 government agencies, delivering impressive results in months, not years, driving extraordinary work and innovative solutions in areas such as health care; open data and data science; crowd-sourcing initiatives; education; veterans affairs; jobs and the economy; and disaster response and recovery. Examples of projects include:

Open Data

When government acts as a platform, entrepreneurs, startups, and the private sector can build value-added services and tools on top of federal datasets supported by federal policies. Taking this approach, Fellows and agency stakeholders have supported the creation of new products and services focused on education, health, the environment, and social justice. As a result of their efforts and the agencies they have worked with:….

Jobs and the Economy

Fellows continue to work on solutions that will give the government better access to innovative tools and services. This is also helping small and medium-sized companies create jobs and compete for Federal government contracts….

Digital Government

The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is a part of the Administration’s strategy to create lasting change across the Federal Government by improving how it uses technology. The Fellows played a part in launching 18F within the General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Digital Services (USDS) team within the Office of Management and Budget….

Supporting Our Veterans

  • …Built a one-stop shop for finding employment opportunities. The Veterans Employment Center was developed by a team of Fellows working with the Department of Veterans Affairs in connection with the First Lady’s Joining Forces Initiative and the Department of Labor. This is the first interagency website connecting Veterans, transitioning Servicemembers, and their spouses to meaningful employment opportunities. The portal has resulted in cost savings of over $27 million to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Education

  • …More than 1,900 superintendents pledged to more effectively leverage education technology in their schools. Fellows working at the Department of Education helped develop the idea of Future Ready, which later informed the creation of the Future Ready District Pledge. The Future Ready District Pledge is designed to set out a roadmap to achieve successful personalized digital learning for every student and to commit districts to move as quickly as possible towards our shared vision of preparing students for success. Following the President’s announcement of this effort in 2014, more than 1,900 superintendents have signed this pledge, representing 14 million students.

Health and Patient Care

  • More than 150 million Americans are able to access their health records online. Multiple rounds of Fellows have worked with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand the reach of theBlue Button Initiative. As a result, patients are able to access their electronic health records to make more informed decisions about their own health care. The Blue Button Initiative has received more than 600 commitments from organizations to advance health information access efforts across the country and has expanded into other efforts that support health care system interoperability….

Disaster Response and Recovery

  • Communities are piloting crowdsourcing tools to assess damage after disasters. Fellows developed the GeoQ platform with FEMA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that crowdsources photos of disaster-affected areas to assess damage over large regions.  This information helps the Federal government better allocate critical response and recovery efforts following a disaster and allows local governments to use geospatial information in their communities…. (More)

IMF Publishes Worldwide Government Revenue Database

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IMF Press Release: “The IMF today published for the first time the World Revenue Longitudinal Dataset (WoRLD), which provides data on tax and non-tax revenues for 186 countries over the period 1990-2013. The database includes broad country coverage and time periods, and it is the result of combining in a consistent manner data from two other IMF publications — the IMF Government Finance Statistics and World Economic Outlook (WEO)– and drawing on the OECD’s Revenue Statistics and Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Vitor Gaspar, Director of the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, said the purpose of releasing the database for general use is to “encourage and facilitate informed discussion and analysis of tax policy and administration for the full range of countries, the need for which was highlighted most recently during the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa.”

Constructing the database was a challenging exercise. An accompanying background note will be released in the coming weeks to explain the methodology. The database will be updated annually and will include information from IMF staff reports.

The database is available for download free of charge on the IMF e-Library data portal (http://data.imf.org/revenues).”

 

Helping the public sector get innovative while saving money

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “Innovation procurement is a public procurement practice according to which public authorities request businesses to develop or buy innovative products or services that fit these organisations’ specific needs. For example, it could help hospitals use e-health tools allowing doctors to monitor their patients’ condition from a distance; it could allow local authorities to improve traffic management in their region, hence reducing congestion and pollution, improving road safety and using the road network effectively; it could also help cities better manage street lighting to make roads safer and more attractive, while increasing energy efficiency; it could help public administration improve efficiency through the use of cloud solutions. Public Procurement in Europe represents a 19% of GDP in Europe -or around € 2,400 billion a year. Innovation procurement also helps boost smaller, more innovative companies, as it means using public procurement funds to buy products or services also from smaller suppliers who are trying to find new ways of dealing with specific needs.

The European Assistance for Innovation Procurement (EAFIP) initiative will help those in charge of public procurement design and implement processes to access such services.

More specifically:

  • it will provide them with a toolkit to help in the procedure;
  • It will offer training: 9 workshops, each dedicated to a different subject area such as health or transport will be organised across Europe, providing participants with good practice approaches and hands-on support. Events will be announced on this page;
  • It will raise awareness around public procurement of ICT solutions through 3 EU-wide events, where new ideas and initiatives for EU-wide cooperation on public procurement will be discussed….(More)

CMS announces entrepreneurs and innovators to access Medicare data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Press Release: “…the acting Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator, Andy Slavitt, announced a new policy that for the first time will allow innovators and entrepreneurs to access CMS data, such as Medicare claims. As part of the Administration’s commitment to use of data and information to drive transformation of the healthcare delivery system, CMS will allow innovators and entrepreneurs to conduct approved research that will ultimately improve care and provide better tools that should benefit health care consumers through a greater understanding of what the data says works best in health care. The data will not allow the patient’s identity to be determined, but will provide the identity of the providers of care. CMS will begin accepting innovator research requests in September 2015.

“Data is the essential ingredient to building a better, smarter, healthier system. Today’s announcement is aimed directly at shaking up health care innovation and setting a new standard for data transparency,” said acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt. “We expect a stream of new tools for beneficiaries and care providers that improve care and personalize decision-making.”

Innovators and entrepreneurs will access data via the CMS Virtual Research Data Center (VRDC) which provides access to granular CMS program data, including Medicare fee-for-service claims data, in an efficient and cost effective manner. Researchers working in the CMS VRDC have direct access to approved privacy-protected data files and are able to conduct their analysis within a secure CMS environment….

Examples of tools or products that innovators and entrepreneurs might develop include care management or predictive modeling tools, which could greatly benefit the healthcare system, in the form of healthier people, better quality, or lower cost of care. Even though all data is privacy-protected, researchers also will not be allowed to remove patient-level data from the VRDC. They will only be able to download aggregated, privacy-protected reports and results to their own personal workstation.  …(More)”

WFP And OCHA Join Forces To Make Data More Accessible

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Food Programme Press Release: “The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have teamed up to provide access to global data on hunger and food insecurity. The data can be used to understand the type of food available in certain markets, how families cope in the face of food insecurity and how WFP provides food assistance in emergencies to those in need.

The data is being made available through OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), an open platform for sharing crisis data. The collaboration between WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide, and OCHA began at the height of the Ebola crisis when WFP shared its data on food market prices in affected countries in West Africa.

With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WFP has since been able to make large amounts of its data available dynamically, making it easier to integrate with other systems, including HDX.

From there, HDX built an interactive visualization for Food Prices data that allows a range of users, from the general public to a data scientist, to explore the data in insightful ways. The same visualization is also available on the WFP VAM Shop….(More)“

Health Big Data in the Commercial Context

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

CDT Press Release: “This paper is the third in a series of three, each of which explores health big data in a different context. The first — on health big data in the government context — is available here, and the second — on health big data in the clinical context — is available here.

Consumers are increasingly using mobile phone apps and wearable devices to generate and share data on health and wellness. They are using personal health record tools to access and copy health records and move them to third party platforms. They are sharing health information on social networking sites. They leave digital health footprints when they conduct online searches for health information. The health data created, accessed, and shared by consumers using these and many other tools can range from detailed clinical information, such as downloads from an implantable device and details about medication regimens, to data about weight, caloric intake, and exercise logged with a smart phone app.

These developments offer a wealth of opportunities for health care and personal wellness. However, privacy questions arise due to the volume and sensitivity of health data generated by consumer-focused apps, devices, and platforms, including the potential analytics uses that can be made of such data.

Many of the privacy issues that face traditional health care entities in the big data era also apply to app developers, wearable device manufacturers, and other entities not part of the traditional health care ecosystem. These include questions of data minimization, retention, and secondary use. Notice and consent pose challenges, especially given the limits of presenting notices on mobile device screens, and the fact that consumer devices may be bought and used without consultation with a health care professional. Security is a critical issue as well.

However, the privacy and security provisions of the Heath Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) do not apply to most app developers, device manufacturers or others in the consumer health space. This has benefits to innovation, as innovators would otherwise have to struggle with the complicated HIPAA rules. However, the current vacuum also leaves innovators without clear guidance on how to appropriately and effectively protect consumers’ health data. Given the promise of health apps, consumer devices, and consumer-facing services, and given the sensitivity of the data that they collect and share, it is important to provide such guidance….

As the source of privacy guidelines, we look to the framework provided by the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) and explore how it could be applied in an age of big data to patient-generated data. The FIPPs have influenced to varying degrees most modern data privacy regimes. While some have questioned the continued validity of the FIPPs in the current era of mass data collection and analysis, we consider here how the flexibility and rigor of the FIPPs provide an organizing framework for responsible data governance, promoting innovation, efficiency, and knowledge production while also protecting privacy. Rather than proposing an entirely new framework for big data, which could be years in the making at best, using the FIPPs would seem the best approach in promoting responsible big data practices. Applying the FIPPs could also help synchronize practices between the traditional health sector and emerging consumer products….(More)”