A comparison of public data opening in the global Medical and health field

How should public data in health care be opened? Different countries, because of the health system organization structure, the judicial environment, the history and the political environment, the Open Data strategy also has each characteristic. The medical and health Open Data Committee of the Ministry of Health of France after comparing the public data opening policies and measures in 15 countries in the world, the most reference and Representative 5 countries were selected (UK, USA, Canada, Denmark and Singapore).

The study found that, despite the focus on public data openness in health care in various countries, the ultimate goal was to improve the transparency of health services, facilitate access to patients, and encourage innovation in public and private health institutions.

Main types of Open data

(i) Denmark

Register of Practitioners

The register includes information on all medical and health practitioners who have obtained medical degrees in Denmark, such as name, date of birth, place of work, occupation, time of obtaining a degree, etc. This information can be queried in the database on the sundhed.dk website through information about the health care practitioner and relevant information of the employment organization.

Register of Medical Products statistics

The register includes a record of sales of all pharmaceutical products and is categorized according to year, factory area, Purchaser age and gender.

(ii) Canada

The two large data sets published by the Canadian Institute of Medical Informatics have played an active role in promoting the informatization of health care systems in Canada.

The first dataset contains the average length of hospitalization and the different hospital price lists (depending on area, patient age and medical type). Based on this dataset, the developer introduced a "patient cost evaluation" to help patients predict average hospitalization time and cost.

The second dataset contains the waiting time for all the eight categories of hospital departments. The developer of the ourhealthsystem.ca Web site developed a tool based on the dataset to estimate the waiting times for different types of departments in different regions. The service is very practical in Canada because it must be registered in the queue before you see a doctor in Canada.

(iii) The United States

Hospital comparison (Shetty Compare) dataset

This dataset contains data on patient satisfaction survey and hospital medical quality indicators, and introduces relevant application tools. U.S. citizens can choose a hospital by comparing more than 10 medical quality indicators in different hospitals, such as the average time of pain after a hospital operation, and the data can be downloaded.

Wonder Database

The database contains the number of adverse reactions to different types of vaccines by patients of different ages and genders.

(d) The United Kingdom

NHS Choices website

The site provides patient satisfaction scores across the country's medical institutions to help British citizens choose medical institutions and make appointments online.

In addition, the hospital prescriptions, monthly average dosage, medical costs and other aspects of the data.

Mastodon c, UK, found that prescribing statins could help save 200 million pounds of statins a year.

(v) Singapore

Epidemiological data sets

Singapore has opened a number of epidemiological datasets, particularly the number of dengue cases and hotspots. Dengue is a major health problem in Singapore, and preventive work has been arranged beforehand to help reduce the risk of dengue infection.

Ii. Open Data purposes

(i) Increased transparency in the health care system

The open health public data of Denmark and Canada have the characteristics of wide coverage, suitable depth and large amount. At the same time, Denmark and Canada are among the few countries that have opened up health-care consumption data (albeit with limited openness). Denmark publishes data about each patient's visit to each hospital in its National Patient Registry (NPR), and the searcher can download the form by simply entering relevant search criteria (such as age, sex, year, etc.) in the system.

Canada has opened up the five key data on Canada's health system to the public on the Ourhealthsystem.ca Web site, including: the difficulty of visiting each hospital, the level of medical care, the cost of disease prevention, and changes in the health status of the national population. The website uses the Canadian Institute of Medical Information (CIHI) database, which has the features of intuitive information, convenient access and easy to understand.

However, the reuse of these open data is still restricted to some extent by law. For example, Denmark's data available on the National Serum Institute website is limited to patients themselves.

(ii) Facilitation of access to patients

Britain and the United States are characterized by opening up data on the quality of medical care for health institutions and health workers, such as the UK's announcement of hospitalization mortality, while the United States has released data on the quality of health-care services reported to patients after a survey. But due to the limited coverage of the patient's public database, few health-care consumption data are publicly available, and inquiries into open data are often charged.

In addition, the United Kingdom and the United States have launched a special service, namely the provision of search tools to help the public choose the appropriate health institutions and professionals. The UK's NHS Choices website not only helps patients look for medical information, but also online: simply type in keywords or symptoms, the site can find information about 500 drugs or 700 diseases, and help patients find the right doctor and related treatment information.

(iii) Encouraging data reuse and innovation

Although Singapore has only opened a limited set of health data to the public, it has encouraged social reuse of fully open data. The Government of Singapore Open Data portal specifically provides data reuse applications, such as the ability to provide data set virtualization to developers through the Onemap platform. In addition, the Singapore public institutions up Singapore also held an Open data innovation competition, especially the Tiyatien up challege competition in health care, to encourage the use of open data for health care.

Analysis on the favorable factors of public health data opening

(i) strong willingness to open public data on health care

Five countries have developed public data-opening strategies. Canada and Denmark are the oldest countries in the public data-opening strategy: The Government of Canada unveiled its first "Open Data Initiative" in 1990; Denmark opened the government data into law in the late 80, and published the Open Data Innovation strategy in 2009 to further promote public data openness, Encourage economic innovation and transparency of government information. In addition, the United States in 1996 passed the federal government data to open to the public law, the 2010 "Open Government Initiative" and "Parity Medical Act" opened the opening of health data, then the U.S. government launched the Health data Open portal healthdata.gov.

(ii) Improved database system

The collection, processing and summarization of medical and health data have influence on the scope and depth of data opening. The public institutions responsible for pooling health data in these countries have contributed significantly to the establishment of wide-area databases. If the Danish government has created a patient register since 1970, which records each patient's visit, it is equivalent to establishing a comprehensive database system that matches the patient identification system, and the researchers can query for detailed data.

On the contrary, there are numerous public or private data-aggregation systems in the United States, but limited access to national databases has led to fragmentation of data and an impediment to data openness.

(iii) Sound policy and regulatory environment

In addition to Singapore, all four other countries have all laws relating to the right to information. In addition, some countries have requested the public sector to open data through laws, regulations or government documents.

For example, the Canadian government's access to Information Act of 2010 requires regional public bodies to publish lists and open data in the relevant format, and the U.S. Medical Insurance Portability and Accountability Act has facilitated the establishment of the "Medicare and Medicaid" database.