Open Health Hackdays: operating on open data

At the panel discussion opening the Open Health Hackdays 2012 in Basel and Geneva, the tone was set clearly from the outset:

“A third of healthcare costs are the result of missing data and poor communication!”

said Martin Denz, a Swiss eHealth pioneer from the very beginning. And biotech entrepreneur Marcos Garcia Pedraza asked:

“What role should the state play in healthcare so that information can flow transparently and efficiently, and every citizen gets the best medical care at the best price?”

The importance, urgency and potential of open data in healthcare were thus established right from the start. Under these auspices, the more than 100 hackday participants in total – from designers and software developers to doctors and start-up entrepreneurs – set about tackling the challenges of open health data with sound expertise, a great spirit of innovation and a refreshing delight in experimentation.

In a unique constellation, the thinkers, doers and “hackers” present – in the positive sense of the word – created, in parallel workshops in Basel and Geneva, a series of applications, tools and visualisations for handling open health data better. The health insurance premium visualisation healthinsurance.opendata.ch (see picture above), the iPhone doctor and pharmacy finder instaCare, the air pollution calculator iPollution and a whole range of other innovative projects showed what “open data” could mean in healthcare too. The social and economic potential of open data for more innovation and participation became clearly apparent once again. 

The concept of “hackdays” – community-driven, interdisciplinary innovation days – once again proved to be an excellent means of taking a topic concretely forward, even at short notice, with great intensity and intensive exchange. 

At the same time, the political debate in Federal Bern was running its course. After the Graf-Litscher interpellation and the Hugues question, issues around open healthcare data will continue to occupy politics – in the councils, at ePower as well as in the Parliamentary Group for Digital Sustainability.

The Opendata.ch association is on hand with advice and support so that the Swiss “operation on open data” for a more transparent and innovative healthcare system may indeed succeed. For current news, we recommend subscribing to the Opendata.ch mailing list.

Further links: