Todd Park can be proud of the Health Data Initiative Forum. The forum is building a partnership mentality in Health. Government is providing large data sets and entrepreneurs are rising to the challenge to make sense of that data and mix it with other data sources to create actionable information that creates the potential to improve health care.
Secretary Sebelious points out that we have a triple loss in the USA. Our Government spends more on Health Care than other Governments. Our Private Health Care industry is the most expensive in the world and we still have 50M uninsured people. [Ed: That is almost the size of the entire UK population!]
The biggest news of the day so far has to be AETNa's announcement that they will be implementing Blue Button functionality for their 10M members in 2011. This is great news! Back in March I posted an article saying we need a campaign "Blues - give me my button!" ... Well AETNA just raised the stakes and creates more pressure for the rest of the Private HealthCare industry to follow the great example set by the VA thanks to Todd Park and his team's instigation of new ways of sharing health data.
