Health Data Consortium

The Health Data Consortium (HDC) is a Washington, D.C.-based public-private partnership that advocates for the availability and use of health data, in particular government health datasets, and the improvement of health and health care through patient data accessibility and innovative use of data. HDC is a 501(c)(3) organization.

History

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the Health Data Initiative to make its data available for public use and, in collaboration with the Institute of Medicine, hosted a public forum featuring various private, non-profit, and entrepreneurial stakeholder groups to explore how the data could be used to promote innovation that would improve people's health. This forum was held again in 2011 and 2012, wherein it was rebranded into its current iteration as the Health Datapalooza.

Due to the success of the forum and growing industry interest, HHS, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California HealthCare Foundation, and other parties involved believed that there needed to be a structured organization independent of the government that could convene stakeholder groups and promote the health data mission year-round. They approached Forum One Communications to help establish this organization as a public-private partnership, which was named the Health Data Consortium.

DATA (band)

DATA were an electronic music band created in the late 1970s by Georg Kajanus, creator of such bands as Eclection, Sailor and Noir (with Tim Dry of the robotic/music duo Tik and Tok). After the break-up of Sailor in the late 1970s, Kajanus decided to experiment with electronic music and formed DATA, together with vocalists Francesca ("Frankie") and Phillipa ("Phil") Boulter, daughters of British singer John Boulter.

The classically orientated title track of DATA’s first album, Opera Electronica, was used as the theme music to the short film, Towers of Babel (1981), which was directed by Jonathan Lewis and starred Anna Quayle and Ken Campbell. Towers of Babel was nominated for a BAFTA award in 1982 and won the Silver Hugo Award for Best Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival of the same year.

DATA released two more albums, the experimental 2-Time (1983) and the Country & Western-inspired electronica album Elegant Machinery (1985). The title of the last album was the inspiration for the name of Swedish pop synth group, elegant MACHINERY, formerly known as Pole Position.

Data (word)

The word data has generated considerable controversy on if it is a singular, uncountable noun, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.

Usage in English

In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g. "80 datums"); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with such plural determiners as these and many or as a singular abstract mass noun with a verb in the singular form. Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example) the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues, but "data" as a singular form is far more common.

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item given". In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common.

Data URI scheme

The data URI scheme is a uniform resource identifier (URI) scheme that provides a way to include data in-line in web pages as if they were external resources. It is a form of file literal or here document. This technique allows normally separate elements such as images and style sheets to be fetched in a single Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request, which may be more efficient than multiple HTTP requests. Data URIs are sometimes referred to incorrectly as "data URLs". As of 2015, data URIs are fully supported by most major browsers, and partially supported in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.

Syntax

The syntax of data URIs was defined in Request for Comments (RFC) 2397, published in August 1998, and follows the URI scheme syntax. A data URI consists of:

Health

Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living organism. In humans it is the ability of individuals or communities to adapt and self-manage when facing physical, mental or social challenges. The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health in its broader sense in its 1948 constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." This definition has been subject to controversy, in particular as lacking operational value and because of the problem created by use of the word "complete" Other definitions have been proposed, among which a recent definition that correlates health and personal satisfaction. Classification systems such as the WHO Family of International Classifications, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), are commonly used to define and measure the components of health. Health is that balanced condition of the living organism in which the integral, harmonious performance of the vital functions tends to the preservation of the organism and the normal development of the individual.

Health (gaming)

Health is an attribute assigned to entities within a role-playing or video game that indicates its state in combat. Health is usually measured in health points or hit points, often shortened as HP. When the HP of a player character reaches zero, the player may lose a life or their character might become incapacitated or die. When the HP of an enemy reaches zero, the player might be rewarded in some way.

Any entity within a game could have a health value, including the player character, non-player characters and objects. Indestructible entities have no diminishable health value.

Health might be displayed as a numeric value, such as "50/100". Here, the first number indicates the current amount of HP an entity has and the second number indicates the entity's maximum HP. In video games, health can also be displayed graphically, such as with a bar that empties itself when an entity loses health (a health bar), icons that are "chipped away" from, or in more novel ways.

History

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson described the origin of hit points in a 2002 interview. When Arneson was adapting the medieval wargame Chainmail (1971) to a fantasy setting, a process that with Gary Gygax would lead to Dungeons & Dragons, he saw that the emphasis of the gameplay was moving from large armies to small groups of heroes and eventually to the identification of one player and one character that is essential to role-playing as it was originally conceived. Players became attached to their heroes and did not want them to die every time they lost a die roll. Players were thus given multiple hit points which were incrementally decreased as they took damage. Arneson took the concept, along with armor class, from a set of a naval American Civil War game's rules.

Health (journal)

Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine is a bimonthly peer-reviewed healthcare journal that covers research in the fields of health and the social sciences. The journal was established in 1997 with Alan Radley Loughborough University) as founding editor and is published by SAGE Publications.

Abstracting and indexing

Health is abstracted and indexed in Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index. According to the Journal Citation Reports, its 2013 impact factor is 1.324, ranking it 70 out of 136 journals in the category "Public, Environmental & Occupational Health (SSCI)" and 18 out of 37 journals in the category "Social Sciences, Biomedical".

References

External links