April 7 was open government day, the day when federal agencies revealed plans for data transparency and citizen participation.

The plans ranged from round ups of existing efforts to the unveiling of new efforts, such as a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services dashboard for comparing states' Medicare spending in hospitals--by 25 top diagnosis-related groups, and by top 10 hospitals for each state and diagnosis-related groups over time.

Much of the data on the CMS dashboard has been publically available before, acknowledges the Health and Human Services Department open government plan. However, "analysis of the data required retrieval of it from disparate places and having your own computer programmer and in-house Medicare expert to pull it together--barriers which the Dashboard now eliminates."

In all, HHS says it will undertake five flagship open government initiatives, including two efforts at the Food and Drug Administration, an overview of its FOIA process, and a "Community Health Data Initiative." The CHDI seeks to "catalyze the advent of a network of community health data suppliers (starting with HHS) and 'data appliers' who utilize that data" in order to create software applications.

The Energy Department pointed to an online site, Open Energy Information, it launched in December. The site will make a range of DOE resources and open energy data widely available to the public, the DOE open government plan states.

Other plans were less specific. "A number of the agencies say they will be providing certain types of information in the future, which skeptics can easily criticize as 'planning to plan,'" said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, in a press statement.

For more:
- read the HHS open government plan (.pdf)
- click to the CMS dashboard (still in beta)
- read the DOE open government plan (.pdf)
- go to Open Energy Information
- links to all the open government plans are here

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