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HHS Center for New Media

Podcast: Opening health data to spur innovation

 

You’re listening to the HHS Center for New Media podcast, where new and innovative media projects are introduced, shared, and discussed.

At the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, is a source for weather data.  NOAA releases that data to the public for their use, and with it, innovators have created The Weather Channel, iPhone weather apps, and nightly weather reports, among other things. 

“Why don’t we become the NOAA of community health data and publish all this community health data online and have a ton of innovators across the country then turn it into applications and services and products that people can use to help make better decisions and improve health.”

Todd Park is the Chief Technology Officer at HHS, and is a forerunner of the Open Government Initiative. 

“The gist of the Open Government movement is to, as part of the Presidents wishes, make government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.”

The Open Government Initiative is encouraging interaction between government and the public, all through open data.  Releasing data on important health issues was the starting point for new ideas.

“Let’s take all of the vast data stores that we have, on smoking, on obesity, on hospital quality, on availability of fresh food, etc.  Let’s take all that data and publish it online in a downloadable form for free without intellectual property constraint.”

The Community Health Data Initiative, launched at HHS earlier this year, challenged innovators to take that data and turn it into new applications for innovation.  The challenge produced new community health dashboards, integration of health data with search, online educational games, and analytical tools.

“People built an amazing array of new applications or new features on existing applications that took our data and turned it into something really useful. We didn’t pay for any of these applications.  We just put the data out there and marketed it and challenged the world to come up with apps.  And sure enough, the world came up with these amazing applications that we never could’ve come up with ourselves.”

The Community Health Data Initiative was also the platform for launching the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge.  Health 2.0 is a platform for issuing and sponsoring challenges to spur innovation in the health community. 

“It’s actually a fantastic vehicle to market a data set or market a cause.  So it’s a great way to actually put the spotlight on a cause you care about and spotlight on data sets you actually want to publicize, as well as actually, you know, getting actual apps built.”

The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge was launched this June.  Twelve organizations, including HHS, have come together on Health 2.0’s website, Health2challenge.org, to issue health challenges.  Today, 400 developers are registered on the website.  Six challenges have now been completed. 

“So I see nothing but an incredibly bright, accelerating future that contests and challenges can do in the context of open government and just advancing the mission of HHS in general.”

You’ve been listening to the HHS Center for New Media podcast, where new and innovative media projects are introduced, shared, and discussed.  If you have a project, media tool, or idea that you want to share with other HHS employees, please contact newmedia@hhs.gov.

Thanks for listening.  I’m Nicholas Garlow.