California HHS Open Data Portal Paves Way for State Health Data

Estella Geraghty says the birth of California’s first Health and Human Services (HHS) open data portal is much like the birth of a child: It took about nine months to create and is the object of great affection. Geraghty, the deputy director for California’s Department of Public Health and the portal’s project leader, met with public officials Thursday, Aug. 7, to announce the official launch of the site at health.data.ca.gov and to elaborate on next steps. She was joined by ranking officials that included California Department of Public Health (CDPH) Director Ron Chapman, California HHS Secretary Diana Dooley, and Google’s Healthcare.gov consultant and fix-it man Mickey Dickerson, among other supporters ... To aid citizens in these ambitions, the site is equipped with a subscriber email list for data set updates, user tutorials and developer tools to help civic hackers in linking apps to the portal’s API -- or application programming interface, a system that processes data requests from apps online.  Long term, the state hopes the portal will be a public single point of entry for all state health data. It will be used for reportage, reference information, and Web and mobile applications that provide additional data tools for  residents. In coming weeks,  Geraghty said the portal will be fed with more data sets, listing statistics for disorders in newborns, the locales of licensed medical device retailers, smoking information, and data highlights for leading causes of death in California ..."