The California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS) has launched its Open Data Portal initiative in order to increase public access to one of the State’s most valuable assets – non-confidential health and human services data. Its goals are to spark innovation, promote research and economic opportunities, engage public participation in government, increase transparency, and inform decision-making. "Open Data" describes data that are freely available, machine-readable, and formatted according to national technical standards to facilitate visibility and reuse of published data.

The California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS) has launched its Open Data Portal initiative in order to increase public access to one of the State’s most valuable assets – non-confidential health and human services data. Its goals are to spark innovation, promote research and economic opportunities, engage public participation in government, increase transparency, and inform decision-making. "Open Data" describes data that are freely available, machine-readable, and formatted according to national technical standards to facilitate visibility and reuse of published data. The portal offers access to standardized data that can be easily retrieved, combined, downloaded, sorted, searched, analyzed, redistributed and re-used by individuals, business, researchers, journalists, developers, and government to process, trend, and innovate. The CalHHS Open Data Handbook provides guidelines to identify, review, prioritize and prepare publishable CalHHS data for access by the public via the CalHHS Open Data Portal – with a foundational emphasis on value, quality, data and metadata standards, and governance. This handbook is meant to serve as an internal resource and is also freely offered to any party that may be interested in improving the general public’s online access to data and to provide an understanding of the processes by which CalHHS makes its publishable data tables available. The handbook focuses on general guidelines and thoughtful processes but also provides linked tools/resources that operationalize those processes. The CalHHS Open Data Handbook is based on and builds upon the New York State Open Data Handbook, and we would like to acknowledge and thank the New York staff who created that document and made it available for public use. The role of the California Health and Human Services Agency is to provide policy leadership and direction to the departments and programs it oversees, to reduce duplication and fragmentation and improve coordination among the departments, to ensure programmatic integrity, and to advance the Governor's priorities on health and human services issues. The Agency coordinates the administration of state and federal programs for public health, health care services, social services, public assistance, health planning and licensing, and rehabilitation. These programs touch the lives of millions of California's most needy and vulnerable residents. The Agency is responsible for balancing the twin imperatives of providing access to essential health and human services for California's most disadvantaged and at-risk residents and managing and controlling costs. The following Departments and Offices are under the direct supervision of the California Health and Human Services Agency: The Agency Secretary also serves as Chair of Covered California, the health benefit exchange established pursuant to the Affordable Care Act. The CalHHS Open Data initiative encourages entrepreneurs, and civic coders and developers to use CalHHS data to create applications, products and services to better the health and lives of Californians. We are eager to hear from you how we can improve the portal and answer your questions, please send us an email at [email protected].