It is Saturday in Washington DC. I am at the Kaiser Permanente Center For Total Health for Health 2.0's Code-A-Thon. The focus for the Code-a-Thon is the Weight of the Nation campaign (#WOTN) - the fight against Obesity. This is part of the Washington DC Health Data and Innovation Week.
There is a great turn out for this 2 day event. There are probably about 40-50 people in attendance - a great mix of developers and other experts.
There will be presentations from Dr. Robert Post (USDA), Jesse Givens (AETNA), Dr Alan Greene from DrGreene.com.
At 10:40 there will be the Idea Pitch session. Then at 11am teams will self-form and begin coding. At noon there will be tech talks over lunch. These include: Tyler Norris of KP.
The event concludes at 5:00pm on Sunday after final presentations and the winners of the Code-a-thon are announced. After that I have to get ready for HealthCa.mp/DC on Monday morning.
Some facts about Obesity:
97M Americans are classed as Obese. This is an epidemic. Estimated Annual Cost of $190B combatting obesity issues. That doesn't include the downstream costs of disease driven by obesity.
Obesity is a challenging issue. It is a cultural, environmental. societal and genetic issue that creates amazing complexity when trying to solve the problem.
The objectives:
Leverage Federal Health Data such as :
- Health Indicators warehouse
- data.gov
Use any available datasets and APIs
Judging Criteria:
- Use of Data (40%)
- Creativity and Impact (25%)
- Productivity (15%)
- Presentation (10%)
- Functionality (10%)
-Presentation Rules:
- 5-7 minutes
- Live Demos Rule
- 2 Slides Max
- Submit your project
Aman Bhandari now provides some context to the day.
HHS is building an open data ecosystem for Health.
Companies have developed out of ideas at Code-a-thons.
Data.gov has over 500,000 data sets available.
The objective is to take policy in to action. NOAA is the model for health. HHS to provide raw data and have companies develop ideas in to businesses.
HHS: $892 Billion, 11 Agencies, 80,000 Employees, 100M Americans served by Medicare and Medicaid.
Pubmed has 21M articles published.
ClinicalTrials.gov has access to 120,000 clinical trials in 177 countries.
Some outcomes from freeing data:
- Bing incorporated quality data in to search results (Hospital Compare)
- Blue Button
- Think about Data gaps...
- Think about making data useful
- Think about making data actionable
There are huge gaps in the obesity space.
