A framework for analyzing publicly available healthcare data

Many government agencies worldwide are releasing public datasets about the services provided in healthcare, such as Medicare in the US. These datasets can be queried by multiple classes of users, including hospitals, patients, physicians and policy makers. However, to realize the true value of the information present in these datasets, appropriate analysis, including classification and clustering needs to be performed. Additional insight can be gained by combining the healthcare data with other data sources such as demographics and epidemiology. We provide an analytics framework based on open-source tools that facilitate the exploration of these datasets. We illustrate our framework by providing a detailed analysis of physician and hospital ratings data. Our technique should prove valuable to hospital administrators and policy makers.