This morning’s HHS briefing about the new Community Health Data Initiative, part of the Open Government Initiative, covered a lot of ground, with a number of web application developers showing off what they’ve done with government health data. Among the highlights for me:
Microsoft has launched Bing Health Maps
It’s a little clunky to access now, but we’ll forgive Bing since the application was launched early this morning. Go to http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ and look for the “Map Apps” button at the bottom of the page. Click on that and, on the next screen, choose Bing Health Maps. From there, you can pick a state and then community health indicators. Those indicators include birth measures, death measures and health risk factors. An overlay on the map shows the results and you can click on specific areas to delve further into the numbers.
Visualizing the data may make it easier to spot some health disparities that might deserve a closer look and it’s an easy way to get numbers on some health measures for an area. I am disappointed that there doesn’t appear to be an option to embed the health maps.
TechCrunch points out that Bing Health Maps are similar to Google’s Flu Maps.
Google Fusion Tables make health data accessible
Not to be outdone, Google demonstrated how its Fusion Tables – “a database service in the cloud” – could be used with HHS data about hospitals. In the example, you can zoom in on a hospital and get stats on whether it is “heart friendly” and “people friendly.”
Tech helps asthma management
Another application gathers data on where and when people are when they suffer asthma symptoms. Asthmapolis showed how its product, the Spiroscout, uses GPS to track the time and geographic location of symptoms. The data can then be displayed and, presumably, patterns can be detected. Asthmapolis produced a video to explain a little more.
Analyze the U.S.
Palantir Technologies announced http://AnalyzeThe.US which uses tools to explore data released by the government as well as datasets compiled by nonprofits and policy centers, in areas that include federal spending, contracting, lobbying, and campaign finance.
And more …
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that HHS will release a Health Indicators Warehouse by the end of the year that will have “currently available and new HHS data on national, state, regional, and county health performance – on indicators such as rates of smoking, obesity, diabetes, access to healthy food, utilization of health care services, etc. – in an easy-to-use ‘one stop data shop.’”
According to the HHS press release, there were 16 applications presented at today’s forum. I’m hopeful that HHS will find a better way to present such things before future announcements. I spent much of my time during the webcast trying to find the web sites and applications that were being demonstrated, and thus missing parts of the discussion. Releasing a list of URLs in advance or providing them via Twitter during the webcast would have helped keep my attention on what was being presented.
In the end, the release of more data is always a good thing and making it accessible to as many people as possible is even better. But journalists will probably still want the underlying datasets so they can perform their own detailed analysis of the data.
For more about some of the applications demonstrated, see “Making community health information as useful as weather data” from Alex Howard.
