Entrepreneur

In the last few years, the use of mobile health as a tool to improve individual and family health as well as to improve patient-provider communication has grown tremendously.  Personalized tools and the ability to get instant access to information have empowered individuals to be more engaged in managing their health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has taken steps to embrace these new models of consumer education and outreach through programs such as smokefree.txt, text4baby, and challenge opportunities to encourage innovation.

Like many people in Washington, DC, I am not actually from the DC but am from El Paso, Texas.  Often, when I tell people that I am from El Paso they get a puzzled look on their face because they are trying to place it on a map (a hint, it’s the only major city in Texas on Mountain Standard Time).  Texas, being the second largest state in the nation has a lot of diversity in its 254 counties.  A person in El Paso have more in common with people from Mexico and New Mexico than a person in Fort Worth, Texas.   Being the size of a small country, you can imagine that there is a ton of health dat

Early last week I was talking with my best friend about how often each of us exercises and the excise routine of a colleague of his came up.  He noted that due to this woman’s asthma she really doesn’t exercise; she doesn’t like to run, or bike or swim because of the fear of having an asthma attack.   We went on to discuss how she cares about her health but feels limited in what she can do to improve her approach to maintaining health living practices.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Twitter chat held on November 1, 2012.  We had a very interesting and exciting discussion with our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expert, Niall Brennan, Director of Information Products and Data Analytics at CMS.

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 the Archimedes Healthcare Simulator ARCHeS.

Below is a guest post by the Archimedes team.