By Todd Park

This week the Health 2.0 team will be at Health Innovation Week DC, and the biggest event there will be the Health Data Initiative Forum. One day, 50 demos, mixing more government and private data than you can imagine. We’ve been helping at the periphery of the Health data Initiative and we’ll be be having a special session talking more about the Health 2.0 Challenge, including our upcoming work running Challenges for ONC. We’re incredibly excited and enthusiastic, but no one is as enthusiastic as Todd Park! Here’s the CTO of HHS telling you about his brainchild, Health Data Palooza–Matthew Holt

Almost exactly one year ago, we launched a vital new HHS Open Government effort: The Health Data Initiative (HDI). The Initiative was publicly launched by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Deputy Secretary Bill Corr, Institute of Medicine (IoM) President Harvey Fineberg, and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra at a forum held at the National Academy of Sciences.

The Health Data Initiative is an incredibly exciting public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize data made publicly available by HHS and others to help fuel applications and services that can help improve health and health care. Over the past year HHS has been working very hard to make our data ever more accessible to the public – both publishing brand new data and making more of our existing data machine-readable, downloadable, accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs), free, and vastly easier to find. We’ve launched major new data and information websites (the HealthData.gov community, the Health Indicators Warehouse; and HealthCare.gov).

Equally importantly, we’ve been energetically publicizing our data, through challenges, code-a-thons, and many sessions with innovators of all kinds – educating folks around the country about what data we’ve made available and its potential to help power health  improvement. Innovators from across America are taking our data and are using it to build and power an amazing and rapidly growing array of applications in creative and powerful ways to help advance health. This movement has included entrepreneurs and change makers from all sectors: startups, major businesses, nonprofits, public health, health care delivery system, federal and local government, and academia.

On June 9th, 2011 at the National Institutes of Health, in partnership with the IoM, we will be holding our 2nd Annual Health Data Initiative Forum (or, as I like to call it, our second annual Health Data Palooza!). Over 45 private sector and non-profit entities from startups to major organizations will showcase their use of HHS and health-related data to fuel applications and services that can help consumers, providers, employers, and communities advance health – a wide array of solutions that help fill gaps in “food deserts,” augment the analytics needed for care providers to proactively keep people healthy, provide location-based information on the country’s health system infrastructure, and much, much more. There will be plenary talks, an Apps Expo, and a “data deep dive session.” Just as importantly, leading experts will be discussing protecting privacy, data-based investigative journalism, the role of prizes and challenges in developing solutions and building communities, and multiple other exciting topics.

Multiple major new challenges or “action beats” will also be announced by government and non- government entities, so you will want to tune in live to the meeting. We expect 600 attendees in person, joined by 8 universities that are hosting viewing parties, and encourage you to join us from one of these satellite locations or online where we will be live streaming the entire event (http://www.hhs.gov/live/) beginning at 9 a.m. ET.

There has never been a better time to be an innovator and entrepreneur at the intersection of health, health care and data. A combination of historic polices such as the Affordable Care Act, HITECH Act, Open Government Directive, and Strategy for American Innovation are contributing to an environment of unprecedented opportunity for innovators. We hope you will join the growing community of American innovators who are jumping into the work of helping to improve health through the power of information! See you (online or in person) at the Forum!