Datapalooza Spotlights Public, Private Hunger for Health Innovation

Innovators are using federal health and population data to jumpstart online and mobile applications to make information more usable and relevant to clinicians and consumers. The Health Data Initiative Forum is featuring the work of 100 companies or applications solutions culled from 245 that applied to demo at the show.

The Health and Human Services Department, along with the Institute of Medicine and other members of the Health Data Consortium, are co-hosting the third annual “Datapalooza,” which spotlights innovative applications and services that use open data from HHS and other sources to improve health and health care.

Government and primarily private organizations, such as Health Data 2.0, have issued “a smorgasbord of challenge competitions,” said Todd Park, White House chief technology officer and previous HHS CTO. “What’s interesting about this group of companies that applied is that they were founded just in 2011 and 2012. This is the latest proof that this ecosystem of applications based on health data is out of control,” he exclaimed at the June 5 conference, adding that these tools are fueling potential commercial healthcare markets...