DocGraph Omni was a website that we used to display a merged set of the open data that is available on healthcare providers.
It was a good idea, but it did not work. Or at least, it is used so infrequently that it is not worth the resources that DocGraph is spending on it. Omni was interesting only to the degree that it could serve as a crowdsourcing mechanism for even more awesome open data about doctors and hospitals. Omni is just not doing its job as a crowdsourcing tool.
More importantly, two of our informal journalism partners, Propublica and US News, have both begun offering more popular consumer facing systems, using our data.
We would rather invest in doing a better job providing US News and Propublica with data, then offer a clearly inferior consumer facing product ourselves. We will do our best to ensure that both Propublica and US News at least have the option of replicating the all of the functionality of DocGraph Omni.
More importantly, CareSet Systems, the sister company to DocGraph which focuses on healthcare system analytics, is offering a commercial product called Patch that does far more than Omni ever did. But Patch functionality is focused on the needs of healthcare organizations, like Hospitals, ACOs, SNFs and LTACs.
We have decided to retire Omni, and invest in our relationships with other data journalists and in CareSet Patch service. We will leave the Omni server up for the next few days, but expect that site to forward to DocGraph.org soon.
-Fred Trotter