The New York State Department of Health (DOH) includes new hospital discharge data on its Health Data NY website at http://health.data.ny.gov to provide 24/7 access to important health information on inpatient treatment in New York State hospitals. “When public health partners, academia, researchers, or others are asked what type of health data they would like to access to support research and analysis, they very often request hospital discharge data,” said State Health Commissioner Nirav R. Shah, MD.
The Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative (SPARCS) Inpatient De-Identified Data for 2011 is now available on the Health Data NY web site and contains inpatient hospital discharge level detail on patient characteristics, diagnoses, treatment, services, and source of payment for all hospitals in the state. This data expands upon previous summarized SPACS data that was published on the web site in March.
The Health Data NY web site is the only known open data site in the U.S devoted solely to state health data accompanied by targeted public health messaging, extensive metadata, and customized visualizations.
The web site not only provides raw data but enables healthcare providers, researchers, legislators, advocates, academics, and the general public to be able to analyze and download valuable health data in a variety of formats.
It is now also possible to review the comprehensive metadata, create visualizations of the data, and embed the data and visualizations into their respective web sites with automatic refresh from the Health Data NY site. It is also possible to use Application Programming Interfaces (API) to build mobile applications and share data and visualizations through popular social media tools.
All the health data available on Health Data NY is also accessible at http://open.ny.gov as well as on the federal government’s http://HealthData.gov.