The Liberation of Health Data and Health Datapalooza
The Health Data Initiative (HDI) was launched in 2010 by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) which has now grown into the Health Data Consortium. The Consortium includes 17 organizations that encourage innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health. Next week you will find the consortium sponsoring its fourth annual Health Datapalooza in Washington DC.
Chief Cheerleader in Residence, Todd Park has been touring the country since last year talking to anyone who will listen about the data available from HHS. Park came to HHS as their first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and took on the cause. An entrepreneur himself he rounded up a room full of around 40 innovators to the first Datapalooza. To prove his efforts have been right on, their are more than 1500 entrepreneurs and innovators now involved in using the data to raise awareness and improve population health and healthcare delivery. Now the CTO for the US, Park is a true advocate for not only liberating health data but data from all sectors of the government. Representing the government as one of the keynote speakers this year he will be joined by Secretary Sebilius, newly confirmed CMS Administrator Tavenner, ONC Mostashari, and his replacement HHS CTO Sivak.
And speaking of keynote speakers and Todd Park, representing the Innovation in Health Care keynoters will be Park’s former partner Jonathan Bush. Bush is the co-founder, CEO, and President of athenahealth, a leading EHR vendor. They have enlisted Jonathan this year to help promote Datapalooza with a video interview. Hear Jonathan answer burning questions like; How is athenahealth using data? What’s stopping the free flow of data? What happens when data is liberated?
ONC is sponsoring a Code-a-Palooza with Socrata for the first ever live codeathon at Health Datapalooza. Ten teams will be selected to compete for $25,000 in prizes at the code-a-thon. The selected teams will compete to build an app, tool, or product that could be directly used by primary care providers and/or their office staff to improve the quality of care they deliver to their patients using Medicare data. The exact topic for the Health Datapalooza Code-a-Palooza will be announced on June 2nd at the start of Health Datapalooza IV.
Follow Health Datapalooza IV @hdpalooza on Twitter.