Statistical data for more open use

There are numerous bodies in the social and health sector involved in producing statistical data. The trend in recent years has been to provide an increasingly wide variety of statistical products, and thus make more accurate information publicly available. The availability of statistical information has proceeded rapidly, according to MSAH senior officer Antti Alila and ministerial adviser Sari Kauppinen.

Consideration is now being given to how raw, unprocessed data, such as the benefit registers of the Social Insurance Institution, the social assistance registers of the National Institute for Health and Welfare or even the research data of the School Health Survey could be more widely utilised and reused.

The aim is to greatly expand the availability of open data resources in government, which in turn enhances the transparency of government.

“Openness means that information resources are opened up in a technically usable form for use by everyone,” explains Alila.

Open data boomMuch of the thinking around open data use has been pioneered by the United Nations in its various agencies. Governments in the EU and beyond are rapidly pursuing the possibilities offered by open data programmes.

At the end of 2011 the EU Commission established an Open Data Strategy for Europe, which hopes to realise the great potential of existing stores of data as an information and economic resource.

National governments and intergovernmental organisations, and the EU as a whole, hold vast stores of information that can have almost limitless ICT uses, for instance in developing new data applications from smart phone and tablet apps to online mapping, consumer information, and many more.

The EU strategy will seek to secure a level playing field for open data handling across the EU and fund research into new data-handling technologies.

The principles of open data promoted by the EU and member states aim to ensure that all documents made accessible by the public sector can be reused for commercial or non-commercial purposes, unless they are covered by third party copyright. The aim is also to keep the costs charged marginal and to ensure easy technical accessibility.

Public and corporate accessIn Finland, the promotion of open data access is prominent in the government programme. This states that information resources produced using public funding will be opened up for public and corporate access.

The aim, according to the programme, is to “make digital data materials managed by the public sector available to citizens, companies, enterprises and organisations, authorities, and for research and education purposes”. Open data will be accessible in readily reusable format through information networks.

The strategy is the subject of numerous ministerial committees, and the MSAH has been actively involved in the process. One of the committees, led by the Ministry of Finance, which Antti Alila sat on, was dealing with the promotion of the availability and use of data resources both within government and for further distribution to citizens and businesses.

“The committee proposed that the release of standardized data between authorities, free of charge, should feature in next year’s draft budget. The release of data for citizens and businesses would be done in stages,” says Alila.
 
Boosting transparencyKey social and health sector institutions in Finland, such as the National Institute for Health and Welfare, the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health and the Social Insurance Institution are jointly considering how the data they have accumulated in raw form can be more readily used and made available.

“It’s a question of data processing. When data is freely available, you can work out how to do something completely different with it, and this creates new information,” says Kauppinen.

Publishing data also increases the transparency of government, and furthers research and business opportunities and citizen participation.

“If data, say, on access to health care was freely available, it could be used as a basis for an electronic mapping service where you could compare treatment waiting lists regionally, for instance,” explains Alila.

Preserving data securityA major issue involved in releasing and publishing data concerns the protection of personal data. When data sources such as social and health care registers are considered within the ambit of open data strategies, there is a special need for caution to ensure that people’s personal information does not end up in the wrong hands.

“Developing open data aims to do just that, to make sure that data is more easily disseminated without compromising data security,” says Kauppinen.

Measured approachFinland has been comparatively slow in opening up public sector data, even though the potential to do so is there. “For instance, we have good registers in the social and health sector and a lot of data that has been stored over a long period,” observes Alila.

In recent years, though, increasingly more data has begun to be published, and in more diverse formats.

“This proceeds in two ways. First, the production of concise statistical data is being developed so that it is available publically. Second, we are looking at how raw data in registry formats can be made more readily available for everyone to use,” explains Kauppinen.

The National Institute for Health and Welfare and the Social Insurance Institution run extensive statistical databases that are openly available online. Last year the Finnish Centre for Pensions also opened its own data service.

But these are not quite the same as totally opening up all statistical data.

 “Having a service where you can get concise but up-to-date statistics is only a part of opening up statistical and registry data,” says Alila.


Maija Luotonen and Mark Waller