Wearables and patient-centric startups evolve in health data ecosystem

If you're contemplating how technology is driving changes in society, few areas matter fundamentally to how we live as much as healthcare. That's why I hopped on the Metro last week here in Washington, D.C. and traveled up to the Health Datapalooza, the annual health data conference that has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding in 2010. The conference, which began as a small gathering to feature new or existing health applications and services that used government data, is now a bigger stage than ever, moving from abstractions to applying data towards demonstrating care and outcomes to over 2,000 attendees.

As I've observed here in previous columns, personal data access opens new doors for patients, open recall and adverse events data protects consumers, and Medicare data releases enables more accountability and transparency into the healthcare system.

After the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released another round of inpatient Medicare provider utilization and payment data during this year's datapalooza, The New York Times reported that "Charges for some of the most common inpatient procedures surged at hospitals across the country in 2012 from a year earlier, some at more than four times the national rate of inflation." The role that similar works of data journalism have played in delivering accountability and insight from such releases for the public was specifically honored at this year's Health Datapalooza

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