By Stephen Murphy, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy and Innovation

The cause celebre today is the emergence of the electronic health record (EHR), an online site where doctors can place everything they know about a patient’s medical history, and patients can log on to check their health records. The leading edge of this innovation is the personal health record (PHR), a health-management tool that people are using to access (and control) their own health information. Good-bye, paper records-eventually.

Not many people have PHRs yet, but the rate of adoption is accelerating through services like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. A recent report from the California HealthCare Foundation shows that 1 in 14 Americans has used a personal health record, twice the number of users from the previous year. The new research reveals that people with PHRs “know more about their health, ask more questions, and take better care of themselves.” One-third of respondents say they use their PHRs as a vehicle for taking specific action to improve their health.

Health data can drive positive change when people who are engaged with their PHRs start taking better care of themselves. Plenty of health mobile apps are emerging that support personal interaction with one’s health data, and that’s a great step forward for the individual. But as a society, and within Government, we could be doing a much better job of sharing our health data resources. We need to fully integrate our data in a social sense to realize its full value.

Today’s Government websites contain massive amounts of information about grants, publications, and research resources. They’re built on an underlying infrastructure of data and information technology (IT). But the purpose of creating these systems is not to inform audiences about data and IT. The goal is to connect, tell a story, educate, and effect change-not easy tasks when the data are floating on disconnected islands. If I put up a website about nutrition, I want people to read my material and look for ways that they can adapt it to their lifestyle and needs. I want to pursue new opportunities to create positive behavioral change for a healthier America.

Six Ideas To Make Data Social

1. What if you could coordinate a communications plan, an outreach plan, a mobile plan, and an evaluation plan at the same time that you design your EHR system or website?

2. What if, at the outset, you built a solution that could feed a mobile application, an EHR record, a grantee website, and your Facebook and Twitter feeds so others could create their own mashups from your data?

3. What if you consider how the data you house could inform the EHR record of a health provider and build a data link to make it happen? Wouldn’t links to research data or evidence-based best practices provide a richer data set than just a blood test?

4. What if you could harness the data warehouse, the taxonomy that classifies your publications, and product description data to fuel a story bank of short-form messages for social media?

5. What if you could build in extensible data architecture that provides output information that can be meshed with Google maps to show publication shipments by mapped ZIP codes? What if you could overlay that information with data on disease prevalence, drug use, and homelessness?

6. What if your data architecture was designed to support a mashup of data to grantees that could help them write their next grant application or allow them to embed a shopping cart for your agency products on their site?

A Killer App

John Donne is famous for saying, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.” He also said, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Donne was referring to the custom of ringing a bell to inform the community when someone in the village died.

So imagine if John Donne, Steve Jobs, and Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, met to update Donne’s communications approach for our data-driven time. My guess is that they would come up with a mobile app that would inform you every time a useful piece of health information is produced that affects you. This message may be worth remembering the next time we’re tempted to invest more health dollars in another data island.