Community Health Data Forum: Harnessing the Power of Information to Improve Health
By Todd Park
On behalf of the HHS Open Government team, I’m really excited to share some important news in our continuing work to liberate HHS data in the name of improving health!
As those of you who checked out our Open Government Plan may recall, one of our flagship Open Government efforts is a campaign we’re calling the Community Health Data Initiative. The purpose of the Initiative is to help Americans understand health performance in our communities and to spark action to improve health – by making HHS’s vast stores of data on community health easily accessible by the public and putting it in the hands of innovators who can turn it into super cool new applications.
On Wednesday, June 2, HHS and the Institute of Medicine will host a big public meeting on the Community Health Data Initiative that will showcase what early innovators have been able to do with our data -- the Community Health Data Forum: Harnessing the Power of Information to Improve Health. You can join a webcast of this Forum at http://www.hhs.gov/open on June 2 at 9 a.m. ET. (View Agenda). Come join Secretary Sebelius, Deputy Secretary Bill Corr, Harvey Fineberg, Aneesh Chopra, and me as we celebrate an initial glimpse into what community health data combined with innovation mojo can do and discuss the path forward!
Let me share a bit of the story behind this. On March 11, the Institute of Medicine and HHS convened health care experts, technology developers, Web 2.0 visionaries, and others to explore what could be done with HHS’s community health data. The group brainstormed an incredibly cool set of ideas – and then, even more impressively, volunteered to pursue the development of many of them, roping in additional folks along the way. In the less than 90 days since that meeting, more than a dozen new or improved data applications using HHS’s community health data have been developed! These are applications that can help raise awareness of community health performance, help civic leaders and consumers understand how best to improve health, and put vital health information at one’s fingertips in creative new ways. I am dying to tell you more about these apps, but have been sworn to secrecy. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to check out the webcast on June 2.
And we’d very much like to hear your thoughts about the different applications that get presented on June 2 and on the Community Health Data Initiative overall. If you’re willing, please post your comments here on my blog. Looking forward to hanging out with folks on the webcast next Wednesday!
To learn more about and download HHS data resources being provided as part of the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI), select this button to go to the interim CHDI data sources webpage.
More information about the Community Health Data Initiative and HHS Data Sources can be found here.
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Health is like the investment and in fact our biggest asset. It's ironic how many people take their health, their life for granted.Many of them are not aware of health as important factor in their life. Its good to see that HHS came forward this idea. Community health data will help to give lots of information as well as will give platform for many people to participate in health discussion.This will give us chance to think and do research in health sector. http://www.realpharmacyrx.net/
Thanks a lot for sharing this nice information I would like to read few more such articles from you. keep posting such a nice post. I would like to read few more articles from you.
Such kind of attempts will be one of the progressive factors in health care industry. Regards, Diana
It is very impressive to see how HHS has been stepping up and demonstrating leadership in the Open Government Directive. Keep up the good work. I have one minor suggestion though. www.hhs.gov/open is not accessible if you enter the URL without "www". With a quick reconfiguration on the server, you can allow users to access the website just by typing hhs.gove/open without "www". A little convenience like this can invite more citizens to participate. Just a thought. http://diethealth.weebly.com/food-murderer-destroys-your-good-stature.html
I just watched the video on Youtube. It's a great continuation of HHS' initiative to empower decisionmakers (from individuals to presidents) with more knowledge. Some comments: 1. Thanks for the kind words about NOAA. There are many dedicated folks that try. Of course, data go beyond the streams that you mentioned. There are three data centers with "archives", forecasts at http://www.weather.gov (including stuff like heat warnings that have health implications). 2. Your own dedicated folks have been a help to me. Not long ago I released arguably the first global Human Security Index, and am now working on one at the "community" level in the USA, to help visualize situations. Health data are important in such an effort, clearly. Your folks just provided a higher resolution map on obesity than is on your Website (though I wish there were 4 categories in your data: "underweight", "normal" weight, "overweight", and "obese." 3. There are some spreadsheets on county health indicators by some Harvard researchers in PLoS Medicine that would be nice to bring into a wider audience (and wider discussion both on the data and their implications), indicating decreases in female life expectancy in many counties, and on higher than normally assumed racial-ethnic-gender disparities in life expectancy. 4. Crosscutting issues abound. As a former topographic data editor/manager, questions arise on potential pacemaker user services (if my mom-in-law has a pacemaker and lives at sea level, should she adjust it for a hike in the alps - and we can provide specific elevations and climate info?), on aircraft flight safety, etc. It would seem worthwhile to many in the public spatial/thematic data community to be facilitated to share ideas, so that any initiatives on greater access to data get an improved balance/focus from the top, bottom, and middle. Keep up the exciting work!
Technology and the electronic health record are particularly useful in that they allow us to look at populations of patients who meet very complex sets of descriptive requirements. In turn, this allows us to do research that we couldn't do before. http://www.medexpressrx.com/
It is very impressive to see how HHS has been stepping up and demonstrating leadership in the Open Government Directive. Keep up the good work. I have one minor suggestion though. www.hhs.gov/open is not accessible if you enter the URL without "www". With a quick reconfiguration on the server, you can allow users to access the website just by typing hhs.gove/open without "www". A little convenience like this can invite more citizens to participate. Just a thought.
Opening HHS data to the developers of the Health 2.0 world will be a great advance. I hope that the data includes stats on the factors that keep us out of the health care system in the first place, and those with a history of beneficial, low cost outcomes. People look first to well being. Our health data is primarily focused on what happens when well being is compromised, injured, hurt. Are green buildings, schools, and initiatives part of HHS data? Adoption of nutritious foods in schools? The real demands of changing personal behavior? Provision of acupuncture and massage therapy as out-of-pocket therapies in hospitals? We badly need to point Web 2.0 thinking and innovation to solutions that reinforce vitality and optimal wellness in the first place. Otherwise we may end up with fabulously mashed up pictures of the grim and costly landscape with which we are already too familiar. Congrats to HHS for its innovative pushing out to reach people and communities; and to its internal squads of web seditionists who have made the case and prepared the ground in the last couple of years.
Todd, I built an initial warehouse and dashboard for your data and would like to participate in the June 2nd event. See http://healthitgov.wik.is/
I suggest the community build a Community Health Data Science Library for the 2010 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge - see http://federaldata.wik.is/@api/deki/files/1519/=BrandNiemann06032010.ppt