At the 10th annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C., AcademyHealth named Robert Krughoff the winner of this year’s Health Data Liberator award. The award recognizes his work to publicly report data to help consumers make smarter choices.
Health Datapalooza is a national conference bringing together the companies, startups, academics, government agencies, and individuals with the newest and most innovative and effective uses of health data to improve patient outcomes.
Krughoff, who was the first director of the Office of Research and Evaluation Planning in what was then known as the U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare, launched the Center for the Study of Services in 1974 to conduct, encourage and publicly report studies on the quality of services available to the public. Since then, its publication, Consumers’ Checkbook, has reported on healthcare services cost and quality across settings including hospital emergency departments, nursing homes, health plans and pharmacies’ prices.
Krughoff was also instrumental in the release of Medicare claims data identified at the physician level. The release of the data in 2014 led to the creation of Checkbook’s Surgeon Ratings, a website based on analyses of data on more than 5 million surgeries done in hospital by more than 50,000 surgeons. It shows consumers which surgeons' patients Checkbook found had the lowest (or highest) rates of deaths, prolonged lengths of stay or need to be readmitted to hospital, after risk-adjustments for patient characteristics.
“Data liberation doesn’t happen unless people believe strongly in the idea and are creative in finding ways to make it happen,” Krughoff said in a prepared statement accepting the award. “We had our share of obstacles and future liberators will face different ones. It’s reassuring to be amongst a community like this at Datapalooza, where innovators are hard at work, pushing us all to adjust so we’re prepared to overcome whatever barriers to open and useful data the future brings.”
Prior recipients include Sarah Telford and Ahmadou Dicko of Humanitarian Data Exchange (2018); Tom Delbanco and Jan Walker of OpenNotes (2017); Fred Trotter, CEO, DocGraph (2016); Niall Brennan, former director and chief data officer, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2015); Charles Ornstein, senior reporter, ProPublica (2014); and Nirav Shah, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Kaiser Permanente (2013).
