Dig Out the Data
Today, I’ve read the article “Long Live the Database State”, published in July 2009 at the Prospect, after a twit from @Richard56. Although this was published almost a year ago, its content is nowadays even more updated and relevant. This article mainly focus the limited access to the enormous amount of data that is generated everyday in the British National Health Service, data that has been kept away from providers and end-users, hence impairing the main core of the system to adapt to the needs and to evolve by itself.
Every time we interact with a public service we leave a record—a medical report, perhaps, or an exam result. Those records should be the lifeblood our public services. If shared and analysed—securely—they can help services to improve the quality of their performance. They can also help to prevent problems: identifying, for instance, those at risk from diabetes or even child abuse. And the economic downturn brings new urgency: if public services don’t improve productivity they will soon be unaffordable. (…)
If we want to have good public services, we are going to have to trust them with our data; and if our public services want us to pay for them, they will have to show us that they are using our data effectively and securely. But armed with the type of data created by Brian Jarman, and the tools built by Richard Webber, we can build safer, cheaper public services that know their users better.
Leaders and stakeholders all throughout the world should realize that data sharing and analyzing is the next step for the healthcare systems survival and sustainability, from global to local settings. More than never, we need an effective, statistical, secure and responsible interpretation of the information that is being collected by healthcare providers.
In summary, only knowledgeable healthcare systems are capable of becoming true complex adaptive systems. Only then, they will face effectively the increasing needs and demands of the future.
