Health Heatmap of India: An Open Data Platform
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Health Heatmap of India: An Open Data Platform Akshay S. Dinesh1* , Varnita Mathur1, B. R. Ansil2 , Vijay Chandru3 , Ravi Chellam1 , Abi Tamim Vanak4,5,6 , Uma Ramakrishnan2 and Prabhakar Rajagopal7 Abstract | Health Heatmap of India is an open data platform built for bringing together data from diverse sources and facilitating visualization, analysis, and insight building from such data. In this paper, we describe the context and need for such an open data platform and describe the technical aspects of building it. The beta site of the portal is available at https://healthheatmapindia.org. 1 Introduction and Importance of Open Data in Health Open data is a movement that is gaining momentum all over the world. It not only advances science and scientific communications as open science1, but it also has the power of transforming societies and the process of informed decisionmaking. The availability of open data in different scientific and social spheres contributes to enabling and establishing transparency and accountability, essential pillars of a democratic society. It supports informed discussions and debates among citizens, scientists and governments and drives evidence-driven policy planning2. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom viewed open data as a public good to be shared with citizens and the community as commons3. Open data is driven by four foundational principles—Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability, (FAIR) that should guide all producers and publishers of data4. The large-scale availability of open data will help build synergies and collaborations across institutions and disciplines. In the domain of health, the value of open data for research as well as for public health delivery systems is significantly enhanced by combining datasets on public health with other environmental, social and geographical d ata5. Effectively combining environmental and landuse datasets with health data has helped in building risk landscapes for infectious diseases and for predicting the progress and spread of d iseases6. The ability to plan and provide health infrastructure for communities can be helped by a spatial study of health infrastructure and the social and economic distribution of communities and
J. Indian Inst. Sci. | VOL xxx:x | xxx–xxx 2020 | journal.iisc.ernet.in
abitations7. The NITI Ayog of the Government h of India has used open data in health to create a Health Atlas and along with other indicators, to identify Aspirational D istricts8. The One Health approach to human health and well-being, adopted by the Government of India, involves human health, environmental health and animal health components and requires multi-sectoral transdisciplinary collaborations to achieve better public health outcomes. Assembling and combining open data across domains are absolutely vital for a One Health approach to human health9, 10. The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of human societies to zoonotic diseas
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