June 2-8: Celebrate D.C. Health Data & Innovation Week

Celebrating health IT innovation and entrepreneurship, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray has declared June 2-8 as D.C. Health Data & Innovation Week. In the very official-looking proclamation, the week’s events are intended to “encourage innovators to utilize health data to develop applications, tools and services that improve health system efficiency and effectiveness and support community action to improve health.”

The declaration comes in conjunction with Health DataPalooza IV, an event hosted by the Health Data Consortium featuring numerous health IT heavyweights, including Kathleen Sebelius; Secretary of the Dept. of Health & Human Services (HHS); Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CIO); Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health IT and many more.

In effort to spur innovation and provide the tools needed for developers and medical experts to design healthcare software to advance the industry, the HHS recently reported on the release of new big health data, including:

• Country-level data on Medicare spending and use
• Selected data on hospital outpatient charges, including clinic visits, echocardiograms, endoscopies and more
• Data sets on Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions
• U.S. cost and use of healthcare services and insurance coverage obtained via large-scale surveys

Other efforts to encourage health technology development include a few national competitions:

• Code-a-Palooza, a competition held during DataPalooza, during which ten teams compete to build an app, tool or product that could be directly used by primary care providers and/or their office staff to improve patient care.
• Blue Button Co-Design Challenge, designed to spur creation of new apps allowing patients to make better use of their own health data to improve their own care.

Recently, the National Day of Civic Hacking from June 1-2 was held across the country with the intent to bring together software developers and entrepreneurs to tackle a list of challenges from federal government departments and agencies, as well as other national partners. The hacking challenges were not limited to health IT – one interesting request for an app came from Backyard Poultry Farmer in need of an app with the objective of getting individuals and households back into agriculture through backyard chickens.

Balancing health IT innovation and security concerns can be challenging but not impossible with strategic planning. Educate yourself on HIPAA compliance, HIPAA hosting and HIPAA compliant data centers in our HIPAA Compliant Hosting white paper.

References:
D.C. Health Data and Innovation Week Proclamation (PDF)
Secure Health Data Helping Patients, Doctors Improve Care and Health
National Day of Civic Hacking: Challenges