HHS: Harnessing the power of open data

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Institute of Medicine (IoM) co-hosted their second annual event focusing on innovative applications and services that harness the power of open data from HHS and other sources to help improve health and health care.

The Health Data Initiative Forum featured more than 45 new or updated solutions that harness the power of HHS and other federal data to help serve the needs of consumers, health care providers, employers, public health leaders, and policy makers. The forum also featured panel presentations from leaders in information technology development, privacy, venture capital financing, health care delivery systems, state and local government, and public health. Other federal cabinet secretaries participated in the promotion of the use of their agencies’ data, including Environment Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson, who announced her agency’s new effort to encourage innovators to leverage EPA data to help power useful solutions for the public. The forum included nearly a dozen announcements of major new initiatives being launched using federally supplied health data. Among these announcements were the public and private sponsorship of new “challenges” to develop data-powered solutions that help improve health, including challenges issued by Walgreen’s Pharmacy, Aetna Foundation, Sanofi-Aventis, and the National Cancer Institute.

Additional key announcements made at the forum included the University of Michigan’s debut of the nation’s first graduate program to focus on consumer health informatics; the launch of Start Up Health, a new seed accelerator/entrepreneur academy in New York City aimed at developing new health and wellness startups; ESRI’s release of a new public community health analytics tool called Community Analyst; and an upcoming “invent-a-thon” focused on developing nursing homes of the future, hosted by Johns Hopkins University and the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.