CMS chief data officer awarded as data liberator
Niall Brennan, chief data officer and director of the Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), is the recipient of the Health Data Consortium's Health Data Liberators Award.
The public-private partnership whose mission is to ignite innovation and foster collaborations using data to improve health and healthcare, awarded Brennan for his efforts to share CMS data in innovative ways to help improve the quality and value of care delivery. The award was presented at the recent Health Datapalooze 2015 in Washington, D.C.
HDC's Health Data Liberators Award recognizes extraordinary contributions to the liberation of health data, helping to accelerate the pace and volume of data available to innovators, and in turn foster the creation of products and services that will improve the healthcare system, according to the organization.
"The American healthcare consumer is better served today thanks in large part to Niall's tireless, behind-the-scenes work to make public health data readily available and accessible, helping to refocus our system of care to be patient centered and more cost effective," said HDC's CEO Chris Boone, PhD. "Through Niall's leadership and as the first chief data officer at CMS, open data remains a priority within the federal government. We are excited to give this award to Niall, a longtime health data champion and Health Datapalooza contributor, and recognize his important work in making CMS a healthcare innovator."
"I am extremely proud of the work CMS has done to expand the availability and utility of CMS program data to drive innovations that improve health and healthcare," said Brennan. "This includes the release in recent years of information on hospital changes, physician utilization, and prescription drug utilization, that are enabling innovation--both through the development of new tools and resources, and through research, quality improvement, and fraud protection, and the announcement this week at the Health Datapalooza of access to more granular CMS data in a secure, privacy-protected manner for entrepreneurs and innovators. CMS will continue to promote innovation through data use in order to improve lives."
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.