The CDC has made available two datasets which are of de-identified medical records going back 20 years which are updated yearly. Unforunately it is extremely difficult to find the data. In fact, I went to the correct web page and missed it. One of my colleagues found it instead. The data is in a custom text format which needs a custom parser, and the format changes slightly every year. Then codes and abbreviations are used everywhere in the data set which need to be determined and converted. Then you have the usual misspellings, etc that are common in government data sets.

It is truly a pain to use these CDC data sets even though the data itself is great.

My long-term hope is that people will start sharing data they have already formatted, cleaned, etc. This will save others time. So one of the goals of Datalanche is to make the sharing mechanic dead simple. Doesn't mean sharing will happen, but hopefully it makes it easier for those who do want to share.

Therefore we are populating our own website with public data starting with healthcare. I have personal experience with healthcare data analytics and have some sense of which data sets are useful.