Health Datapalooza 2012
The program was densely packed, including demonstrations of 100 health apps (selected from a field of 240 entries) and presentations from 25 organizations, including one by musician/humanitarian Jon Bon Jovi which was a standout moment of the forum.
Bon Jovi's talk was one of several that showcased mobile technology solutions to community health problems. Quickly dispelling any suspicions that he was a shallow "celebrity endorser," he spoke with feeling about how Project REACH was inspired by his and his wife's frustrating attempt to help a homeless employee in their nonprofit restaurant in affluent Red Bank, New Jersey. Project REACH challenged developers to come up with a mobile phone app that would allow caseworkers, or anyone who wants to help a homeless person, to find local shelter openings in real time. The five finalists presented their impressive entries later in the day, and Bon Jovi's Soul Kitchen will debut the apps.
The Healthy Communities Network, which won first place in the Community category of apps, exemplified the strong role that public health departments have taken in using data to improve health. The Network's community dashboard presents a wide range of information (eg, housing affordability, obesity, diabetes) at a local level to illustrate the state of the community's health, and it drills down to different populations so that health departments and other organizations can address specific problems in those populations.
Many attendees seemed impressed by Health Insights in Real-time from the University of Rochester, which uses tweets to take snapshots of individuals' illnesses and literally put them on the map. In the demonstration, pins on a map of New York City located several sick people and their entire social networks of Twitter friends. Laying that over a map of pollutants, or traffic, public health officials can examine the relationship between sickness and pollutants, traffic, etc.
To show HDI's commitment to empowering consumers, apps for consumers were a big part of the forum. Highlights included Castlight Health's transparency portal, where consumers can shop for what they need and compare cost, and Aetna's iBlueButton, which can be downloaded by Aetna customers for the iPad or iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.
The third category of Apps Demos was "For Care," and much of this was missed by the webcast watchers because of technical difficulties. Virtual attendees did get to see the demonstration of Archimedes IndiGO, an individualized decision support tool that spans multiple diseases and promises physiologically and clinically realistic modeling. It has been adopted by a few dozen hospitals and is well received by both doctors and patients, who find IndiGO's quantitative advice helpful: not simply "Lose weight," but "If you lose weight, x, y, and z will happen." The webcast came back online in time to show the winners of the Go Viral Collegiate Challenge. The first-prize app was VaxNation, designed to help families keep track of their immunizations and created by students from Baylor College, Rice University, and the University of Texas.
The afternoon webcasts only covered the Apps Demos and not the breakout sessions, so virtual attendees missed hearing about such tantalizing topics as "How to Turn Data into Meaningful Information for Business Problems," "Consumer Engagement Using Health Data," "Novel Data Sources & Crowdsourcing for Powering Business, Public Good & Health," and "Protecting Privacy & Security in the New Health Data Ecosystem." One item from the consumer engagement panel discussion was immediately made available online, though: the Society of Participatory Medicine's announcement of the beta version of its Seal Program, which will identify clinicians and patients who follow the principles of participatory medicine.
Presentations
The program was densely packed, including demonstrations of 100 health apps (selected from a field of 240 entries) and presentations from 25 organizations, including one by musician/humanitarian Jon Bon Jovi which was a standout moment of the forum.
Bon Jovi's talk was one of several that showcased mobile technology solutions to community health problems. Quickly dispelling any suspicions that he was a shallow "celebrity endorser," he spoke with feeling about how Project REACH was inspired by his and his wife's frustrating attempt to help a homeless employee in their nonprofit restaurant in affluent Red Bank, New Jersey. Project REACH challenged developers to come up with a mobile phone app that would allow caseworkers, or anyone who wants to help a homeless person, to find local shelter openings in real time. The five finalists presented their impressive entries later in the day, and Bon Jovi's Soul Kitchen will debut the apps.
The Healthy Communities Network, which won first place in the Community category of apps, exemplified the strong role that public health departments have taken in using data to improve health. The Network's community dashboard presents a wide range of information (eg, housing affordability, obesity, diabetes) at a local level to illustrate the state of the community's health, and it drills down to different populations so that health departments and other organizations can address specific problems in those populations.
Many attendees seemed impressed by Health Insights in Real-time from the University of Rochester, which uses tweets to take snapshots of individuals' illnesses and literally put them on the map. In the demonstration, pins on a map of New York City located several sick people and their entire social networks of Twitter friends. Laying that over a map of pollutants, or traffic, public health officials can examine the relationship between sickness and pollutants, traffic, etc.
To show HDI's commitment to empowering consumers, apps for consumers were a big part of the forum. Highlights included Castlight Health's transparency portal, where consumers can shop for what they need and compare cost, and Aetna's iBlueButton, which can be downloaded by Aetna customers for the iPad or iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.
The third category of Apps Demos was "For Care," and much of this was missed by the webcast watchers because of technical difficulties. Virtual attendees did get to see the demonstration of Archimedes IndiGO, an individualized decision support tool that spans multiple diseases and promises physiologically and clinically realistic modeling. It has been adopted by a few dozen hospitals and is well received by both doctors and patients, who find IndiGO's quantitative advice helpful: not simply "Lose weight," but "If you lose weight, x, y, and z will happen." The webcast came back online in time to show the winners of the Go Viral Collegiate Challenge. The first-prize app was VaxNation, designed to help families keep track of their immunizations and created by students from Baylor College, Rice University, and the University of Texas.
The afternoon webcasts only covered the Apps Demos and not the breakout sessions, so virtual attendees missed hearing about such tantalizing topics as "How to Turn Data into Meaningful Information for Business Problems," "Consumer Engagement Using Health Data," "Novel Data Sources & Crowdsourcing for Powering Business, Public Good & Health," and "Protecting Privacy & Security in the New Health Data Ecosystem." One item from the consumer engagement panel discussion was immediately made available online, though: the Society of Participatory Medicine's announcement of the beta version of its Seal Program, which will identify clinicians and patients who follow the principles of participatory medicine.