This week the Health 2.0 team will be at Health Innovation Week DC, and the biggest event there will be the Health Data Initiative Forum. One day, 50 demos, mixing more government and private data than you can imagine. We’ve been helping at the periphery of the Health data Initiative and we’ll be be having a special session talking more about the Health 2.0 Challenge, including our upcoming work running Challenges for ONC. We’re incredibly excited and enthusiastic, but no one is as enthusiastic as Todd Park! Here’s the CTO of HHS telling you about his brainchild, Health Data Palooza–Matthew Holt
Almost exactly one year ago, we launched a vital new HHS Open Government effort: The Health Data Initiative (HDI). The Initiative was publicly launched by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Deputy Secretary Bill Corr, Institute of Medicine (IoM) President Harvey Fineberg, and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra at a forum held at the National Academy of Sciences.
The Health Data Initiative is an incredibly exciting public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize data made publicly available by HHS and others to help fuel applications and services that can help improve health and health care. Over the past year HHS has been working very hard to make our data ever more accessible to the public – both publishing brand new data and making more of our existing data machine-readable, downloadable, accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs), free, and vastly easier to find. We’ve launched major new data and information websites (the HealthData.gov community, the Health Indicators Warehouse; and HealthCare.gov).
Equally importantly, we’ve been energetically publicizing our data, through challenges, code-a-thons, and many sessions with innovators of all kinds – educating folks around the country about what data we’ve made available and its potential to help power health improvement. Innovators from across America are taking our data and are using it to build and power an amazing and rapidly growing array of applications in creative and powerful ways to help advance health. This movement has included entrepreneurs and change makers from all sectors: startups, major businesses, nonprofits, public health, health care delivery system, federal and local government, and academia.
On June 9th, 2011 at the National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the IoM, we will be holding our 2nd Annual Health Data Initiative Forum (or, as I like to call it, our second annual Health Data Palooza!). Continue reading…
