New HHS Web portal to drive innovative disease state management

WASHINGTON — The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday launched a new Web portal that very well could make niche marketing of pharmaceutical and over-the-counter medicines easier to execute.

The portal, called the Health Indicators Warehouse, represents a collection of health and healthcare indicators that can be parceled out by:

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  The health of a population (e.g., life expectancy, mortality, disease incidence or prevalence, or other health states);

  
  


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  Determinants of health (e.g., health behaviors, health risk factors, physical environments and socioeconomic environments); and

  
  


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  Healthcare access, cost, quality and use.

  
  

A health indicator may be defined for a specific population, place, political jurisdiction or geographic area.

“We recognize that one of the keys to better health and health care is data-driven decision-making at all levels, and the HHS warehouse lowers the barrier for development of technologies to achieve this goal,” stated Todd Park, HHS chief technology officer.

“The Health Indicators Warehouse provides a new public resource needed to fuel development of innovative information technology applications needed to improve health and healthcare decision-making,” stated HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Presently, the Health Indicators Warehouse includes nearly 1,200 health indicators derived from more than 170 different data sources.

For more information about the Health Indicators Warehouse, visit HealthIndicators.gov.