Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Health Datapalooza 2014

Health Datapalooza 2014 was a rousing success, once again bringing together a diverse audience to celebrate open health data. I was thrilled to be a judge for the apps that presented at the meeting, and impressed with the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. We were treated to remarks from Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer of the US; Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (her last appearance as Secretary); and Dr. Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health, among many other great presentations.


Monday was hosted by Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer at HHS, and Tuesday with Susannah Fox, associate director at the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

On Monday the conference opened with some outstanding keynote addresses:
  • Dr. Elliot Fisher, Director of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice
  • Karen Ignagni, President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)
  • Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer of the United States
  • The Right Honourable Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health of the United Kingdom
  • Jonathan Bush, Co-founder & CEO of athenahealth
  • Dr. Atul Gawande, Director of Adriadne Labs and Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School
We also saw fantastic app demos from (so many great apps were submitted this year, the judging was difficult):
On Tuesday saw these keynote speakers:

Adriana Lukas, Founder & Organizer, London Quantified Self
Vinod Khosla, Founder, Khosla Adventures
Francis Collins, MD, PhD, Director, National Institutes of Health
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services
Steven Brill, author of “Bitter Pill” in conversation with HDC CEO Dwayne Spradlin

Tuesday we also saw an app demo from CareSync, and then there was the awarding of this year’s Code-a-Palooza top three winning teams (I was honored to be a judge for this year's challenge), and the winner this year was Smart Health Hero by LyfeChannel of San Carlos, California. We also saw this year's well deserved Health Data Liberators Award go to ProPublica for their data-driven series The Prescribers. They were honored for the work of their reporting team to leverage prescribing data to evaluate gaps in our system and then demand change. The team consisted of Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, Jennifer LaFleur, Lena Groeger and Jeff Larson of ProPublica.

Also be sure to check out The Kojo Nnamdi Show and their Tech Tuesday which was broadcast live from the event.

Some of my favorite moments were of this year's events were:

Bob Kocher



Elliot Fisher:

Todd Park:

Atul Gawande

Jonathan Bush

Steven Brill


The full playlist of the keynotes is HERE on YouTube.
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