New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Nirav R. Shah to give keynote address at Big Data Conference
This year’s conferences on Big Data and on open data in healthcare, a day of speeches and panel discussions by public officials and open data pioneers, will take place Jan. 21 and 22 in Sacramento.
Big Data 2014: Managing Government Information, which takes place on Wednesday, Jan. 22, will focus on how managing large amounts of data can help the government work more efficiently. The speakers and panels will also discuss how to reduce fraud and recover from disasters.
The Big Data 2014 conference will include such notable speakers as Department of Health Care Services Chief Deputy Director Karen Johnson and New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Nirav R. Shah.
Attendees will also have the opportunity to vote for the Big Data 2014 Awards in the categories of State Government Big Data Innovator, Local Government Big Data Innovator, Big Data Project Showcase, and Leadership in Big Data Success.
The awards currently have 26 nominees, including the California state government, the city of Fresno, the Sacramento Fire District and Los Angeles City Controller.
The Health and Human Services Open Datafest will be on a parallel lecture track on Tuesday, Jan. 21 and Wednesday, Jan. 22. The symposium will overview the Open Data movement in California, particularly in how it has benefited the state’s health and human service programs.
The Stewards of Change Institute, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Health Data Consortium are sponsoring the event. Speakers will include Daniel Stein, president of Stewards of Change; Shell Culp, interim director of the Office of Systems Integration for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Shah and Illinois Department of Public Health Director LaMar Hasbrouck will be participating in a roundtable discussion on "Open Data Case Studies by Early Innovators."
In a talk Shah gave last December for the ECRI Institute’s 20 Annual Conference, Shah said that big data can be used to identify where money is being wasted so that it can be spent elsewhere on more effective programs.
Shah, who is in charge of the public health insurance program covering 5 million New Yorkers, specifically cited how the rate of sepsis in New York hospitals were dramatically cut by looking over which areas were uncommonly susceptible to sepsis deaths and focusing on making improvements to those hospitals.
The Big Data 2014 forum registration is available on http://pspinfo.us/events/big-data-2014 and online registration is open until Jan. 17, at which point attendees will have to register on site at the Sacramento Convention Center on the day of the event.
Public sector attendees will be able to attend for free; non-sponsor private sector attendees will pay $250 for a full conference pass.
The Open Datafest is currently full, so new registrants are being added to a waiting list.
