Golden Age Of Healthcare: Open Health Data

Healthcare is  complex, complicated, and touches every single individual on this planet. The average spend per capita on healthcare costs is rising tremendously year over year and the governmental focus seems to be on increasing premiums, changing tax rates and focusing completely only on efficiency gains. There is a great article by Clay Christensen that in short states that the focus has shifted to efficiency gains and not innovation. And innovation is what is needed, because the supply siders are dancing now and Keynsian policies are not working (that is my macroeconomic addition to the summary)...

There are numerous reforms being pushed across the world and whether a country has completely socialized healthcare, completely privatized or somewhere in between the issues are the same - complete and utter lack of transparency.

The other day we visited a friend in the hospital and my daughter grabbed a few masks and those fun gloves that can be blown up into balloons - seems pretty innocent and it is difficult to stop a child in a hospital to grab a few of those “toys” to play with, but those “toys” also cost money and while this is a silly example, no one has an idea what an average spend is on these costs for a hospital. Things obviously get more and more complicated for procedures, tests and treatments whether you are in the ER, visiting your GP or heading over to see your dentist. Let’s not even talk about quality metrics that are associated with any of the above visits. What is the discharge rate for a particular hospital and of course even more important re-admission rates and the root causes for these?...