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App Challenge: Battle Obesity with Public Health Data

 |  By gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com  
   June 28, 2011

You don't need an app to tell you too many Americans are fat. But what if there were an app that could not only analyze public data from your own community—down to a specific zip code or individual level—but also tell you what your healthcare organization could do about it?

That's the idea behind one of the latest Health 2.0 developer challenges—this one from The Aetna Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Hartford, CT-based insurer Aetna Inc. The foundation is offering a prize pool of $50,000 for the three best browser-based applications that make the reams of government public health data more accessible for healthcare professionals and leaders.

There are two especially helpful sources of public government data that are most useful in the fight against obesity, says Anne Beal, MD, the foundation's president. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHNES) can help healthcare professionals identify obesity problems. It includes biometric data on cholesterol and blood pressure levels, height and weight measurements of a national population sample, and the number of people that have diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes, for example.

So that data identifies the problem. That just leaves data to answer the question "What can healthcare leaders do about it?"
"The literature has shown that it's actually the micro changes that we make in our daily lives every day that really impacts rates of obesity for a specific population," Beal says. "How walk-able is the community, how many supermarkets are there, how many playgrounds are there per square mile? All of those [environmental] factors help determine the small decisions that we make every day as far as food choices as well as caloric expenditure."

The answers to those questions lie within the second government data trove—data.gov—which includes environmental information such as the ratio of grocery stores, liquor stores, and playgrounds in any given neighborhood.

And so the app developers will be working to harness the data from those and other sources to help physicians, healthcare leaders, public health workers, researchers and the rest of the healthcare community to start addressing obesity on that micro-level.

"The data might tell you that you don't need one playground, you need 100 playgrounds. Or the data might tell you [that] you can get away with five playgrounds if you open up two more supermarkets," Beal says. "They say that healthcare, like politics is local. And the real opportunity that exists is to make those data much more locally available and meaningful."


What can healthcare leaders do with all of this information? They can use it to improve the health and wellness not only of their own patients, but potential patients as well.

"Most hospitals have big community benefit work that they do. And I can see using this kind of information to say, on the part of the hospital, 'Here's what we're going to do around promoting walking trails or parks or supporting farmer's markets,'" Beal says.

Beal says she hopes developers—who will partner with public health professionals while working on the apps—will come up with something hot, new, unique—a game-changer, if you will. Yes, it has to make use of data and it has to make that data useful by presenting it at a micro-level—specific to the patients of an individual provider. But she also hopes developers will present all that data in a way that is compelling, and that can be easily shared through social media.

Data, Beal adds, could be the key to solving a number of health issues. It can be used to improve care coordination and to facilitate integrated care models. "Providers, in particular, need to figure out how to talk to one another and how to share data and information about an individual patient in their care."

Aetna's projects have included not only obesity but also racial inequities in healthcare. It used its own data to help ensure that all of its enrollees were getting the same quality of care, access, and outcomes and, where that was not the case, develop programs around diabetes and hypertension, for example.
Other healthcare organizations can do the same, Beal says. 

"Everyone is sitting on data—whether you're a hospital or a health plan—everyone is sitting on data. And we really need to think creatively about the utility and application of our data to … create evidence-based and informed interventions to improve health and wellness."

The top prize for Aetna's Health 2.0 Developer Challenge is $25,000 and two free passes to the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this fall. Second and third prizes are $15,000 and $10,000, respectively. Applications will be judged on their user-friendliness and interactive capabilities; the quality of health data integration; creativity and innovation; and potential for impact, Aetna says.


Additional points will be given for including a health services researcher on the developer team and for incorporating non-health data sources and data sets that enable analyses at the individual, zip code or county level.

Five other Health 2.0 developer challenges were also issued this month:

 

  1. The Medicare Claims Data Developer Challenge: Create an online dashboard for comparative effectiveness and health policy research that is suited for health researchers, data entrepreneurs, students, journalists, and others who would like to access Medicare claims data.
  2. Walgreens Health Guide Challenge: Design an application that aggregates Health and Human Services data for both consumers and Walgreens' new, in-store Health Guides.
  3. Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control Challenge: Create innovative health applications using data from the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences and other Federal agencies.
  4. The Academy Health challenge, Relevant Evidence to Advance Care and Health: Create applications that provide high-quality, evidence-based, useful information that builds on data generated in the process of care.
  5. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Apps for the Environment: Develop apps that engage students, colleges and universities, and software developers to create solutions to help people understand environmental conditions that could impact health and help communities make informed decisions about environmental impacts.

See Also:
3 Mobile Apps to Help Cut the Fat

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