Blog Entries
 By Steven Randazzo On Monday, July 30, 2012 - 3:37pm
The following is entry is cross-posted from the Office of the National Coordinator's Health IT Buzz Blog on July 27, 2012 authored by Dr. Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Can we really prevent a million heart attacks and strokes in the next five years? The Million HeartsTM initiative is a public-private effort to do just that by implementing proven, effective, and inexpensive interventions. It’s doable only because so many individuals at high risk for heart attacks and strokes are not being adequately treated, and in many cases, are not in treatment at all. Only 47 percent of people at high risk are on aspirin; less than half of those with high blood pressure or cholesterol have it well controlled; and about one fourth are unaware of their condition. Million HeartsTM Risk Check Challenge Read more » |
 By George Thomas On Monday, July 30, 2012 - 3:16pm
We’d like to thank you for participating in the Health Data Platform Challenges webinar held this past Thursday, July 19. We appreciate your interest in our developer challenges, and hope you'll register and submit innovative works. The webinar recording and presentation are embedded below. We'd also like to clarify our answer to a question at ~28 minutes in the webinar recording regarding international participation in our HealthData.gov challenges, which may have incorrectly given the impression that non-US citizens and entities cannot participate. To be clear, the correct answer is that non-US citizens and entities are welcome to participate. Read more » |
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By Steven Randazzo On Monday, July 23, 2012 - 3:58pm
The first of three rounds of HealthData.gov’s developer challenges are currently open for submission! Health Data.gov is hosting three rounds of challenges that focus on one of two areas, domain or platform. The first round features two challenges that are putting developers to the test; the first to focus on data integration and liquidity is the Metadata Domain Challenge. The Metadata Domain Challenge requests the application of existing voluntary consensus data standards for metadata common to all types of government data, and invites new designs for health domain specific metadata to classify datasets in our growing catalog, creating entities, attributes and relations that form the foundations for better discovery, integration and liquidity. Open to submission until October 2, 2012, the winner will demonstrate the application of voluntary consensus and de facto cross domain and domain specific standards to as many of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services datasets available on HealthData.gov. The two objectives are to: Read more » |
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By Steven Randazzo On Monday, July 23, 2012 - 3:10pm
The next installment of HealthData.gov’s blog post series highlighting applications that have been developed leveraging U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data features My Cancer Genome. Developed by a team at Vanderbilt University, My Cancer Genome leverages the National Cancer Institute’s PDQ clinical trial registry to connect people to clinical trials. My Cancer Genome was featured on the main stage at this year’s Health Data Initiative Forum III: Health Datapalooza. Below is a guest post by Christine Micheel Ph.D., Program Manager for Content, Vanderbilt Univerity. Read more » |
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By Steven Randazzo On Thursday, July 5, 2012 - 9:55am
For the past three years, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has been liberating vast amounts of data for public use, which can be found here on HealthData.gov. Our theory is that if we take the vast stores of data HHS already has, stripped out the personal information and made it available to developers, the data would then be used to create incredible tools; and that’s exactly what’s happened. Since focusing on liberating data, more than 200 applications have been developed with the use public health data. To illustrate the true power of liberated data, periodically, organizations and individuals that have taken open health data and made it useful to communities, consumers and providers will be featured on HealthData.gov. First in a series of applications to be featured on HealthData.gov is the Healthy Communities Network, which won “Best Community Health App” at this year’s Health Datapalooza. Read more » |