Posts tagged health

Well, Alex Fair from @FairCareMD and the rest of the great team at Health 2.0 NYC has done it again! Sold out event, star speaker and a mission - a mission to change our healthcare system. Please see below from Alex and re-tweet, blog, shout, poke and enthuse the health data geeks around you to participate!  

“Announcing the first ever Health 2.0 NYC UXathon/ Hackathon

Health 2.0 NYC is not about passively listening, we DO stuff.  So let’s meet Todd Park (CTO of HHS) halfway and live the dream he has been proselytizing so well.  Let’s liberate all that crunchy data he has Opened Up from Government Data Sources and make some killer apps for health living!

This contest is for the Designers, Programmers or Companies that can use the Healthdata.gov datasets out there.  Everyone else, please ignore or pass on to your friendly neighborhood designer or programmer with a little time on their hands.  Potential sponsors who want to tap into the creativity of the developers and designers of New York, please read on too…

The Challenge.

Do this:

1.  Go to the www.healthdata.gov site

2.  Imagine a useful application you could build with the many data sets there or ask a potential sponsor to help dream one up - see below if you need an idea.

3.   Mash it up and build a prototype and/or design a killer User Experience (UX) by the 10th at Noon (EST) and post it to the forumfor general review and comment. We will send a survey to gather votes. The members of Health 2.0 will serve as judges for the big prize. 

(Note, you could win with just an amazing design, but it is better if you team up with a programmer to make a prototype too.)

The Big Prize

The top 2 entries get to be displayed as part of the Health 2.0 Meet Todd Park Event. 

Sponsorship winners will be determined by individual sponsors.

Qualifications:

1.  No companies or teams, just individual programmers and / or designers - max team size = 2

2.  It has to be the work that was substantially done now, don’t dust off an old project and submit it.  You can build on previous work, just note what is new.

3.  It has to be beneficial to the delivery or practice of healthcare

4.  You need to be able to attend live or via webcam on 8/12 in NYC @ 3 PM and do a demo.

Sponsorship:

• If you would like to sponsor a team or a challenge please do so through the Hackathon/ UXathon Discussion topic here or email me. 
• Designers and / or Programmers can be sponsored by companies

Example: 

FairCareMD Physician Profiles make choosing a doctor easy but no great dataset exists that incorporates all the data freely available.  Demographics, Quality and Cost data for every Practicing Physician, Dentist, Hospital, Urgicare center, or Allied Health Professional in America should be readily and easily available to all patients.  FairCareMD is willing to sponsor the project but we need a great leader for it and to kickstart the development cycle.  The data are interspersed among many of the .gov data sets. Mash them up and if you knock our socks off we will sponsor further development and pay a $1,000 cash prize. 

Why do this?

1. Hackathons are great for hiring and jobs.  If you have the stuff and can strut it here you will get hired and have rock star status.

2. National Exposure - this event is big and will be livestreamed as well as published and tweeted online

3. Get Paid in Cash and maybe Equity - Sponsors like FairCareMD are looking for great new team members who can handle big data but we can’t afford to hire non-producers and most of us have been burned at least once.  Get into a great startup by showing your skills and don’t just be a programmer, earn some sweat equity in the next big thing.

4. UXathon? Well, because often the hacked up creations are often not all that usable - so usability is also part of this contest, where relevant

Please feel welcome to pass this on to others who might be interested.

To see more about Todd Park or the event, click here.

Once again, thank you for making our group and events what they are.

Best Regards,

Alex Fair”

I dont make predictions but I feel so strong about this one so I will!

2011 is the year of self-reported health & wellness #quantifiedself tools- there I said it!

I wrote about “Self-reported data portability” almost 1 year ago. Interestingly enough it was right around the time when New Year resolutions are set for weight goals, physical activities, quitting nasty habits - so here I am again just about 2 weeks shy of the anniversary of my original post. It is an interesting reflection of the last 351 days and I must admit there has been progress.

1. Withings really got me going in 2010. The ease of the setup, the slick graphs and tracking tools as well as the multi-user recognition (whole family can do this!) and dont forget a very clean Google Health integration. I am definitely looking forward to the blood pressure monitor coming out shortly. #Winner in my book

  2. I ordered my Wakemate on November 24th, 2009. After losing all hope for it to  ever be delivered, I finally received it on December 30th, 2010. I was away working out my @fitbit (more on that below) on the slopes of Jack Frost and received an email on December 31st that the USB power adapter that ships with it is faulty and could cause fires. When I got home, I anxiously ripped open the envelope, the wakemate device was in a plastic sandwich-bag looking packaging (#packagingFAIL). I grabbed a different USB power adapter, plugged it in, let it charge and NOTHING - it will not turn on to do a Bluetooth sync with my iPhone. The wristband itself and the design is really weak, the setup is not smooth, the execution of the launch of the product was the worst I have ever seen #BIG #FAIL for 2010. I feel bad enough for these guys to give them one more chance - 2011 redemption?

3.  It took some time for it to arrive but the @fitbit was delivered and I started tracking on December 18th. From packaging, to the setup of the device (WOW!) to the online tracking tools that include precise and supposedly very accurate sleep tracking - oh and once again a great Google Health integration (I missed that at first and in fault called it weak - retracted that tweet). The greatest feature of the Fitbit is the motivation. I find myself taking the stairs instead of the elevators just to beat myself. #kudos #win

4. I will stop at Google Health  - I finally got my primary physician to release the Quest Diagnostics data, I now have Withings logging there, Fitbit data is streaming every night - it is all about trends and the more data I gather about myself, the more information I will have that hopefully will turn into knowledge - the knowledge of what makes my body tick

Let 2011 be the year of the #quantifiedself 

I use LoseIT and I am not ashamed of it :), but I also have a slew of other apps that I started and stopped using and when I stopped - my data was left hostage (unless I wanted to re-enter all of it again).

With proliferation (see a list of 100 iPhone apps for Health & Fitness) and increased usage of mobile health applications - we, as consumers, are creating an abundance of self-reported and useful data. There is also Nike, Garmin, and now Adidas joining the family (http://bit.ly/6nFZRE) of devices to track distance, heart-rate and much more. For some people this self-tracking is motivational, for others a hobby and I am sure there is a whole spectrum of reasons that drive us to use this wide array of tools. (What is yours??)

The problem, as I alluded to before, is that it is all tracked in complete siloes with a goal of engaging captivity (while providing immediate satisfaction of pretty charts and graphs).

As an engaged patient I already have my claims records housed at my HealthPlan’s website, I already have my medication history at a PBM  and I am already self reporting additional meds, allergies and other info at sites like Keas & Google Health. I just ordered WakeMate to keep track of my sleep cycles. I paid $399 for a spit-kit for 23andme and loving every moment of it. I already collected copies of all my doctor’s notes. I forced my PCP to allow me access to Quest Diagnostics through Google Health. This is all data, valuable data, valuable to me and valuable to my team of physicians. This is a full 360 degree view into the Eugene ecosystem. But this post is not about integrating all this data into a single view - the nirvana of the engaged patient, this post is only about solving a slice of the overall problem.

I want to be able to transfer my self-reported data such as weight, calories burnt, food eaten anywere and everywhere. I want to share it, and not in any unstructured manner like looseit’s twitter posts, but graph my data across mutliple inputs. Maye I don’t want to invite my friends to join LoseIT - maybe they are all on SparkPeople :) I want to share my data just not necessarily at the point of input. In order to explore the possibilities of self reported structured data we need data portability!

So how do we standardize on this? What standards are on their way, if any? Is an aggregation business model feasible, as a cloud-based service to the slew of “input” devices? Let these apps compete on usability and value added services and outsource the “logging” of data into the cloud.

In order to explore the possibilities of self reported structured data we need it to be portable. Thoughts?