Enhanced Excel data access with our new Data Publishing System
An essential goal of an APCD database is to increase the transparency and accessibility of healthcare data. To make this possible, portions of the database must be made available in multiple ways. It may be necessary to share results within an internal analytical team, or make some limited versions of the data accessible to the public.
Freedman HealthCare has years of experience helping healthcare data managers share data and analytics. We understand the complexity, expense, and IT support needed to do this efficiently. We heard clients’ desire for a simple way to share large amounts of data despite differences in analytical sophistication and software. Excel is a tool almost all data users have in common, but the traditional delivery of plain CSV files is an insufficient and clumsy way to share large amounts of granular data. We developed a simple solution to address this gap.
The result of our research is the newly announced Data Publishing System (DPS), an Excel macro application that makes it super easy for database managers to share data with Excel users.
The consumers of data through DPS have no costs beyond Excel, and they don’t have to learn a new tool. They just open sets of data inside Excel, and view the results. Behind the scenes, data publishers can easily choose which data sets the DPS users see. Publishers have complete control over who sees this data, and what they can do with it.
The Excel DPS app is now available for download from this site in various ways. You can click this link to open a copy of DPS in Excel on your computer, or you can read some of our blog posts on data quality that utilize DPS to share examples of data.
The following image shows a sample data set in a running copy of the DPS app. The data is from this blog post on the issue of proper handling of ICD codes during initial data cleansing.
You can learn more about the ways DPS makes it easy to navigate through any size data set in my next post.