In open data we trust: Exploring data openness as a critical tool against the COVID-19 pandemic
In July 2012, while on a business trip away from home, Scott Tooker woke up in the middle of the night with a light chest discomfort. When the discomfort turned into an extremely sharp pain, Tooker quickly realized this could be something more serious than what he initially thought. After an unsuccessful call to his hotel’s front-desk for directions to the closest hospital, he remembered having iTriage on his smartphone, one of the many healthcare apps that use open government data. It helped him reach the nearest hospital, where he was rushed to the emergency room and treated for experiencing a cardiac arrest. As impossible as it might sound, an open health data app had just saved this man’s life.
Even though iTriage has disappeared from the appstore, the world of open data in healthcare has moved a long way since 2012. For approximately 10 years, the so called “open data revolution” has contributed to the widespread availability of governmental data by making them publicly accessible. This process has brought together academics, journalists, the civic tech community, and other stakeholders in order to empower the public with information about their healthcare providers, and to find solutions on how to improve the general population’s health. Yet today, the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a greater need for openness in the data collection and sharing efforts of governments and private organizations, around the world, in order to mitigate the effects of an unprecedented health crisis.
Before the long-awaited rollout of the vaccine, government policies focused on the restriction of population mobility and the encouragement of good hygiene, such as wearing facial coverings and washing hands frequently. However, open data have arguably been an undeniable critical tool in the global response against COVID-19, and I will further explain that they can be leveraged beyond this pandemic by exploring their opportunities and challenges. In my opinion, a vigorous open data ecosystem can benefit the mitigation of public health emergencies, just as once open data saved Scott Tooker’s life.
Enlisting open data initiatives to curb COVID-19 contagion
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic the collection and analysis of population-wide epidemiological data has been a critical element of the COVID-19 response. From publishing statistics about the spread of the virus to location-tracking apps, governmental and private actors have used open data to curb the COVID-19 contagion.
In the western world, the first examples of open data initiatives come from the field of research. For instance, CORD-19 in the United States provided open access to scientific literature to benefit the common good, while the European COVID-19 Data Portal facilitated data sharing and analysis in order to accelerate the coronavirus research within the European Union. However, one of the most prominent and highly publicized open data initiatives was the research done by the Johns Hopkins University. The Johns Hopkins University researchers synthesized publicly available data to create an epidemiological map and help public health authorities track the pandemic.
The common thread between all these initiatives has been the exchange of trusted and transparent information about COVID-19. As a matter of fact, these cases illustrate how non-governmental users have creatively leveraged open data to facilitate our understanding of the pandemic, while also helping government bodies around the world prepare their response against it.
Opportunities and challenges
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, I see an opportunity where the enhanced access to high-quality publicly available data can potentially generate additional solutions in the fight against the novel coronavirus and future health emergencies. In other words, investment in the ongoing development and release of open health data about the pandemic has the potential to create new solutions from a diverse set of users, rebuild the public’s trust in government, and empower open data efforts in the long term. Such efforts in healthcare, as an example, can boost precision medicine, which tailors each patient’s treatment.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the thorniest problem for open data now is privacy. Governmental and private organizations that are rushing to release individual-level medical data might as well be walking into a minefield. A privacy scandal can cause a backlash and undermine all future open data efforts. Avoiding such scandal is dependent on the de-identification, reformatting and publishing processes of existing data. These processes require considerable resources and are extremely complex, as the balance between privacy and transparency can differ from country to country. So, ensuring that open data initiatives achieve their full potential would require government and private actors to undertake considerable financial investments to make open data sustainable.
Tracing the future of open data
In conclusion, the continued release and maintenance of open data is challenging, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when healthcare systems need to address the most acute needs of the public. However, this public health emergency has underlined the need to prioritize transparency and that includes making data publicly available. At this moment it is impossible to predict where this new open-data revolution will lead. In 2009, President Obama in his first day in office made government data available to the world. Back then, no one could have imagined that this would, one day, help save lives.