Todd Park Congratulates the Winners of the NCI Challenge

I want to be among the first to congratulate the new winners for the National Cancer Institute-sponsored Health 2.0 Developer Challenge for Enabling Community Use of Data for Cancer Prevention and Control.  On behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, kudos to all of the participants in this challenge!  We also want to acknowledge the contributions of our partners at Health 2.0 for their work in promoting the challenge and working with the challenge participants.

Use of community cancer data to develop tools for visualizing and understanding cancer rates and outcomes can inform a wide variety of stakeholders – from researchers to patient groups to policy makers. These tools can help unlock some of the complex challenges in cancer data that have been barriers to implementing cancer prevention strategies.

I’m very excited by the contributions made by Drs. Tarek Rashed and Naci Dilekli from the Geospatial Applied Research Experts House (GSAREH) – a small start up in Austin, Texas. Cheers also to Dr. Charlene Caburnay and Team Ozioma at the Health Communications Research Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Both teams have created terrific tools that help visualize cancer data sets from communities across the U.S.

The winners will be gathering the 2011 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January to share their findings. I look forward to hearing more about these tools and featuring them in upcoming Community Health Data Initiative activities.  Congratulations!!

Todd Park is the Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services