Ozioma Puts Locally Relevant Health Data in the Hands of Journalists

Charlene Caburnay from the Health Communications Research Lab presented to the Health Data Initiative Forum today about Ozioma, winner of the Health 2.0 and National Cancer Institute Developer Challenge.

The name "Ozioma" is a Nigerian word for "good news," and it's a tool created for just that--spreading news by helping journalists access locally relevant health information. It brings together data from sixty sources, like the CDC and NIH, and 200 datasets, from cancer surveillance data to environmental risk factors and health policies.

The Ozioma team wanted to address three major issues, particularly for minority communities: disparities in cancer outcomes related to race, minority-serving media that hasn't been fully tapped, and the ability to bring a local angle to journalists--critical to getting stories published. The tool has significantly increased cancer coverage among newspapers using its information by combining community-level health data in plain language with an easy-to-use, free online system.