The DocGraph Alliance is a new group of organizations committed to supporting data journalism and data science community efforts. Three global leaders in healthcare, athenahealth, CareSet, and Merck (known as MSD outside the United States and Canada), have signed on as founding members of the Alliance.
The DocGraph Alliance’s community mission is to encourage an ecosystem of innovators to collaborate and share tools and research methodologies around open healthcare datasets. This Alliance will help further develop technical analysis and methods around data released by federal, county, and state entities, as well as those originated by the community.
The DocGraph Alliance is a project of The DocGraph Journal, who shares data with a community of quantitatively minded professionals who mine publicly available clinical datasets to uncover interesting and meaningful insights. Support from the Alliance members means the DocGraph Journal can continue providing support for the growing community of data scientists focused on leveraging initiatives of transparency in healthcare. As a result of the community’s work, specific news coverage has incorporated DocGraph data, including work from US News, Propublica and Kansas City Star.
“The DocGraph project created a platform for data scientists to collaborate openly on publicly available health data sources where nothing existed before”, said James Ciriello, Associate Vice President of Merck IT Strategy and Innovation, “and as we watched this community become more and more active in trying to address significant problems, we wanted to support it and help it grow. As publicly available healthcare data continues to grow at a fast pace, coordination and comparatives of care become commonplace, and insights on therapy start to drive novel innovation.”
“We are thrilled to partner with the DocGraph Alliance. Fred Trotter in particular has taken on ambitious and important work to socialize open data assets in healthcare and to leverage data in meaningful ways to advance the industry,” said Todd Rothenhaus, chief medical officer, athenahealth, Inc. “At athenahealth, we believe healthcare could benefit from more data openness and transparency. Access to expanded and new types of data through the DocGraph Alliance will support our work to improve our cloud-based services and further innovate based on evidence-based insights and industry trends.”
“Our business, as well as countless others, rely on the availability of Open Healthcare datasets. Our healthcare system modeling tools improve with every Open Data release..”, said Ashish Patel, founder of CareSet Systems. “We want to ensure that DocGraph continues to flourish! The healthcare system needs a cadence of Open Data in order to effectively pursue the Triple Aim.”
DocGraph will work to grow and nurture an open community of data professionals through a series of trainings and events with a focus on further use of open health datasets and development new methods and tools to analyze those datasets.
About The DocGraph Journal
The DocGraph Journal seeks to create and disseminate new open healthcare data sets, and to foster a community of data scientists who contribute tools and expertise to the analyses of open healthcare data. The Journal was founded after Fred Trotter’s crowdfunding of the first DocGraph data set demonstrated a demand for open healthcare data. The original data set, created from a FOIA request, showed how physicians and other healthcare providers collaborate to deliver care to Medicare patients. This original DocGraph data set remains the largest real-‐name social graph available to the public.
Contact
DocGraph Journal
Alma Trotter, atrotter@docgraph.org<mailto:atrotter@docgraph.org>