Live Blog: Department of Health and Human Services' Community Health Forum

Good morning!  Today we will be live blogging the Community Health Forum: Harnessing the Power of Information to Improve Health, put on by the Department of Health and Human Services.  The event runs from 9:00 until 10:30, and will feature a number of fantastic speakers.  We are waiting for everything to get started, and will update this post regularly with coverage.

By way of background, the Community Health Forum centers around the Community Health Data Initiative, designed to “launch a national initiative to help consumers and communities get more value out of the Nation’s wealth of health data.”  Data has already been made available on the web, which will “form the basis for the content anticipated to be available through the Indicator Warehouse and which will further the success of the Community Health Data Initiative.”  Today’s event promises to focus on tools and applications in development as part of the project, as well as an overview of current efforts and the future direction of the initiative.

NOTE: all updates here should be considered notes on the information presented at today’s event, and not direct quotes from the participants.

9:21 am – Matt Miller from the Washington Post is welcoming the audience, and noting that this is a preview of “data technology to improve health and health care.”  The official hashtag for the event is #healthapps for anybody interested in joining the conversation on Twitter.

9:26 am – Harvey Fineberg is thanking visitors and introducing the Honorable Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

9:29 am – Fineberg: The Community Health Data Initiative is a prelude to democracy of the 21st Century.

9:33 am - Sebelius: The Community Health Data Initiative is a participatory venture that was launched by a simple belief: people in communities can improve the public health system if they have the information to do it.

9:34 am – Sebelius: Having a transparent government is a step, but the next step is making it interactive – inviting expertise, advice and ideas from citizens in a participatory fashion.  It not only makes for a more accountable government, it makes for a more dynamic government.

9:35 am - Sebelius: The second goal at the heart of the initiative is building a health care system that meets the needs of every American.

9:38 am – Sebelius: moving forward, Americans will have options for their own health care.  What they’re going to need is better information to help them make choices.  We have the data on everything from smoking rates to obesity rates to access to healthy food.  We have hospital information and information from a variety of agencies.  Lots of divisions within HHS collect information – and a lot of what this Initiative is about is making this information available to the public, which has never happened before.

9:39 am – Sebelius is outlining examples of where patients could go online and utilize HHS data to make decisions about their own health care, such as what hospitals to attend, where to live based on community health data, or where to locate a business based upon health data as a component of that decision.

9:40 am – Sebelius: We think that making that information free and user-friendly is just common sense – but to get the full value of the data, we need ideas from all of you.

9:43 am – Bill Corr, Deputy Secretary, HHS: We wanted to answer this important question – if we make data available, would innovators be interested in using it to improve health?  The answer was a resounding “yes,” so we got to work.

9:44 am – Corr: there are many creative developers here today that have already started working on innovative projects, such as interactive health maps and video games that use the data we’ve made available.

9:46 am – Corr: what you’ll be seeing today is only the beginning.  This December, HHS will launch a new website available to the public containing information on national, regional, state and county level health performance data, as well as information on how to improve it.  Users can download this information free of charge and integrate it into their efforts.

9:47 am – Corr: HHS is not controlling, choreographing or paying for the development of these applications – rather, our role is to provide the data to the developers and let them take it from there.

9:50 am – Corr has concluded, and they are preparing the stage for the “Showcase of Tools of Applications in Development.”  As a reminder, you can view this morning’s agenda here.

9:52 am – Presenters from Palantir – a “leader in cutting edge data visualization” – is are on stage now, featuring Alex Fishman.  They are a “Silicon Valley Company created in 2004 by the founders of Paypal,” with the goal of “emancipating information to make government more effective.”

9:56 am – Palantir is demonstrating how using the datasets available can identify high risk populations, understand the services in place to serve those populations, and understand how the government is impacting those populations.  Currently, the team is focusing on child poverty rates in Texas, and using all of the data sets together to derive the relative prevalence of child poverty to overall poverty rates.  Palantir can use the data to filter out other counties on this metric and further hone the dataset to learn where child poverty rates are especially high, relative to overall poverty.  The key takeaway is the ability to drill down into very specific, honed information from the datasets available.  From this, they’ve identified an area northwest of San Antonio with a certain child poverty rate, and are now able to look at the community services available to that population, such as the availability of boys and girls clubs or acute care facilities in the counties they’ve identified.  This gives them a sense to the population’s access to this level of community care.

10:00 am – Palantir is further demonstrating how this data can then be analyzed in the context of the grants that have been awarded to specific areas of the country, how that money is being spent, and what the community is focusing on in terms of their own improvement efforts.

10:02 am – Palantir announces a new site called analyzethe.us, that “allows anyone to use Palantir to explore vast amounts of data only recently released into the public domain.”

10:04 am – Next up, Microsoft Bing.

10:05 am – Alan Rappaport manages a team at Bing that is focused on health search – his background is as a physician and technologist.  Will provide three examples of how HHS data and search have been combined.

10:06 am - First example is finding information on hospital performance using a search engine, which is a complicated task because the data was previously buried deep in the HHS web.  Using the new data, it is brought to the forefront of search results that provides information like patient ratings compared to the state averages for other hospitals.

10:10 am - Rappaport is demonstrating how Bing Health Maps can be used to identify where different counties and areas have specific health issues, such as access to fruits and vegetables.  Drilling down into the data gives specific information on the people in a given county.  Bing Health Maps can be used to explore how many people report having access to fruits and vegetables in their diet in Baltimore County, MD, and then can overlay that data with searches for supermarkets in the area.  This can help drill into issues such as “food deserts,” and provide useful data for the health ramifications – such as cases of diabetes in that area.

10:15 am – Matt Miller notes that data quality is going to be a national imperative.  Once we have the access to use and manipulate the data, we have to ensure that the data is of the highest quality to ensure the applications are accurate.

10:16 am – Valerie Brown, president of the National Association of Counties, is on stage now.  Introducing her team that worked on their applications for “Network of Care for Health Communities,” a public project that is working for and with the National Association of Counties.  It is a web portal at the county level that is offered as a free service to everyone – it is currently up and running and operational in Sonoma County – and provides a wealth of data relevant to their county.

10:22 am – There is a lot of information here, so focusing on obesity as a user-thread to demonstrate how the tool can be used to address an issue.  The system uses a color coded indicator to show how a county is doing on a given issue.

10:26 am – Data on obesity gives a huge range of information on obesity issues in Sonoma County, and provides easy access to promising practices that have been used to address that issue.

10:28 am - Demonstrating how the Sonoma County data can be correlated against the “Healthy People” data.  This allows communities to identify where they are doing well and where they need to focus on improving.

10:31 am - Next up, Asthmapolis, a program begun to help reduce issues with asthma by providing more information about asthma attacks and exposure.  The aim is to identify locations where there is a particular threat for people with asthma, which has been a large challenge for public health officials.

10:34 am - Asthmapolis is showing this video:

10:35 am – By tracking inhaler use, Asthmapolis could quickly identify patients that were having asthma control issues.  Providing patients with an intelligent feedback system helped them improve asthma management.

10:40 am – Ingenix and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) are now on stage – they are working together to look at “data across the continuum,” and how it can be used for improvement within a community.  The idea is centered on IHI’s “TripleAim,” which is working simultaneously to improve the health of the population, enhance the patient experience of care, and reduce the cost of care.

10:41 am – Demonstrating how data can be used to unlock information about the cost of patient care in a given state or community, which can then be compared against similar states and communities.

10:44 am – A key takeaway from all of today’s presentations is how data can demonstrate successes, challenges, and how to improve by allowing people to access information about how others have dealt with the same issues.

10:50 am – Looking at data collectively and comprehensively helps us make improvements without adversely impacting other areas unintentionally.

10:52 am – Google is up next, with a presentation titled “The Best Places to Have Chest Pain in the United States.”

10:53 am – Google Fusion Tables is a cloud-based database that makes it really easy to look at data, visualize it, analyze it, share it and publish it.  Google is demonstrating how this tool can be used in conjunction with the hospital compare database to identify information on heart attacks for New York area hospitals.

10:55 am – Google is now looking at Newark, New Jersey, to drill down to specific information about a hospital.  Google Fusion Tables lets the user customize information that pops up on a map, to provide specific information about the services offered at a given hospital, pulled from the overall database.

10:58 am – Google makes all of the data from Fusion Tables easily embeddable, so it can be pulled on to other web sites.  The data remains fully functional and interactive when it is embedded on a different web site.

11:00 am – Google: the take home message here is that we can start to have conversations – patients, doctors and policymakers – and demand new data as a result of this analysis and conversation.  This data is being made available not only to patients, doctors and policymakers, but also to inventors that will help to change health care.

11:05 am – Final presenter this morning is Healthways, introduced as a company that has created a social networking game that “could become the next FarmVille.”  Today, the company is launching “Community Clash,” a card game that provides health information and taps into social networking conversations to bring alive community health metrics.  The beta of the game is now available.

11:08 am – Community Clash melds video game-type scoring with health data analysis and comparison among cities and communities.  It incorporates about a dozen community health metrics, and includes about 100 million tweets, refreshed with about 1-2 million each day.  The Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index is also included, featuring over 800,000 surveys on health.

11:12 am - Next up, Todd Park (Chief Technology Officer, HHS) and Aneesh Chopra (U.S. Chief Technology Officer).

11:15 am – Todd Park describes how HHS was inspired by NOAA and weather data, and how the federal government has led in providing data for applications.

11:16 am – Park: very important to not only make data available, but to market it to innovators so they can find it and use it.

11:17 am – Park: three step process – liberate the data, build applications from the data, and catalyze change as a result.

11:20 am – Park: What’s to come: 1) Interim Community Health Data Initiative website currently available with downloadable data; 2) New HHS Health Indicators Warehouse, launching December 2010; and 3) New Medicare community-level indicators.

11:22 am – Aneesh Chopra takes the stage to talk about the changes across government related to more open and transparent government.

This concludes our coverage of this morning’s events.  Thanks very much for tuning in!