HHS Touts a ‘Huge Year in Data Liberation’ With ‘Health Datapalooza IV’

As the IRS scandal grows, the Department of Health and Human Services today published a blog post titled "Health Datapalooza IV Tops Off a Huge Year in Data Liberation":

Health Datapalooza IV wrapped up last week with over 1900 attendees and 80 companies, this was the biggest ‘palooza’ yet. Kicked off by Secretary Sebelius for the second year in a row, this year’s event was a tremendous display of health data in action...
At HHS, we have evolved and improved how we make health data available to the public. Last year, we launched a new version of healthdata.gov and made it significantly easier for our internal publishers to get their datasets listed, both manually and through an application programming interface (API)...

Although the data that the HHS is "liberating" is not linked to personal individual health information, the government will soon be in possession of new datasets of just such personal information once the Affordable Care Act kicks in on January 1, 2014, and individuals are required to prove via the IRS that they have health insurance.


Note: This article first appeared at The Weekly Standard.