The State of Data Sharing at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Analytics
The State of Data Sharing at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
September 2018 report from the Office of the Chief Technology Officer on the state of data sharing between agencies of the U.S. Department of HHS.
Across the twenty-nine distinct agencies of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), data essential to understanding the nation’s health are collected every day.
Whether surveillance, survey, or claims data, HHS expends an enormous amount of financial resources to report on the state of the health of the population it serves.
These data, however, are largely kept in silos with a lack of organizational awareness of what data are collected across the Department and how to request access. Each agency operates within its own statutory authority and each dataset can be governed by a particular set of regulations. As such, each discrete analysis of the data often gets reviewed for legal purposes and leads to data sharing occurring largely on a project-by-project basis. The individuals involved negotiate the nature and extent of data sharing arrangements often
A cohesive enterprise-wide data governance strategy that promotes data sharing, drives business value from leveraging data as an asset, and bases policies on evidence is essential to a long-term data-driven vision of HHS.