Data as platform for improving health

The innovation around data and social change continues - live today the Institute of Medicine, HHS and the White House are kicking off a new initiative to make health data more useful for people and communities. The event, which is being live-cast here, http://videocast.nih.gov, will feature new applications for combining and using data for disease prevention, community management, health promotion, and community interactions with health providers and the medical community.

Here is some more information on the event, and some blog posts written about it already:

Two sites where you can watch the video cast: http://www.hhs.gov/open/ or http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=9347

Meeting information: http://www.iom.edu/communityhealthdata

HHS Blog Post: http://www.hhs.gov/open/discussion/chdi.html

RWJF Blog Post: http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2010/05/introducing-data.html

You can also follow along and participate on Twitter: #healthapps

This is a kick off event so there will be more activities to come. Health data is one of the richest resources we have and the opportunity to experiment with community-built and serving applications of the data is exciting, and will have much to teach other issue areas as well.

This event was mentioned at the DataJam so its great to see this actually happening. I also want to thank Chris Lindquist who took me up on the wiki idea to help track these events and has built a wiki frame for this info. I've been so busy (and am now sick) that I haven't taken the next step to begin putting info in here, but it is on my to do list and certainly welcome anyone else's help. To get you started, here's the list I posted last week:
Apps for Democracy (one of the first. This link includes pdf on "hosting your own")

Design For America - from Sunlight Foundation, my super co-conspirator on the DataJam

Apps for Healthy Kids

The Health Games Challenge

Apps for the Army

Mobile App Contests - A meta list of app challenges - some for social good, others not.

List of Apps contests - list maintained by GovLoop

NYC App contest winners

Community Health Initiative - note mention of contests in the plan. No announcement yet.

And I just learned about a new California apps contest, which all of my west coast DataJam schemers and I ought to connect with:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/apps-for-california-unlocking.html

And this organization in Canada

http://www.apps4good.ca/

Anyone who attended the Gov2.0 conference, Games For Change Festival or Games for Health last week or is headed to NYC tomorrow and Friday for the Personal Democracy Forum - let us know if other data driven apps or game contests are announced. Please add them to the list, to the comments, or to the wiki. Thanks!

Tags: philanthropy, #opendata, #apps, #datajam, #disruptphil, #healthapps