Health data scientist Fred Trotter joined Vice President Joe Biden and other national healthcare leaders today for the invitation only National Cancer Moonshot Summit. The Vice President announced that Trotter’s company, DocGraph, will release an open cancer dataset this year. The new dataset contains summarized information about almost a million Medicare cancer patients and more than 10 million specific claims events, providing the most accurate picture to date of how cancer is treated by Medicare.
Use of this dataset will be open to anyone, including scientists, oncologists, and digital health entrepreneurs. DocGraph will work with analytics organization CareSet Systems to develop data challenges that engage the data science community in deriving insights from this data. According to Trotter, “we’re interested in exploring important differences in the experience of cancer patients based on factors such as treatment pathway, geography, and types of physicians and providers.”
CareSet CEO Laura Shapland said, “We are honored to support Vice President Biden’s efforts to end cancer as we know it. DocGraph will release the dataset in the fourth quarter, and it will illustrate how Medicare patients travel through the healthcare system in the years before and immediately after their cancer diagnoses, including data about their treatment providers, procedures, medications and survival.”
Trotter is the founder of DocGraph and pioneered the release of the first national provider referral data made available by the US government. DocGraph data releases have empowered researchers and entrepreneurs to create new data-backed healthcare solutions, and has spawned a growing community of problem solvers who have used the data to create new, innovative solutions. The DocGraph analysis is based on Medicare claims data made possible by the Obama Administration’s open data policies.