So, it would be fair to say that Eugene is duck-country. But usually when you find a Duck in your backyard, it’s a wayward student.

And with that I’d like to introduce Hank, the unofficial mascot of the Health 2.0 Eugene office.

Hank is, it would appear, a domesticated duck that wandered into our backyard this morning (presumably) in search of food, water and shelter, which I provided gladly. His appearance also provided a brief respite from our weekly Health 2.0 team meeting. (BTW – have you looked at the San Francisco agenda lately? It’s Hank-approved!) As we search for Hank’s owner (Found Duck posters printing as we speak), we wonder… how can we make our conference more duck-friendly? Do YOU have any ideas for making a Hank-friendly conference?

Also, if you’re ever in Eugene, let us know! We love to meet Health 2.0 folks in our neighborhood.

This highly innovative effort is presented as part of the ONC’s Investing in Innovations (“i2″) Initiative, and is being managed by Health 2.0 through the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge program. Teams are asked to develop an application that has the potential to integrate with existing health information technology platforms and addresses targets at one or more points on the cancer control continuum, using public data that are relevant to cancer prevention and control.

Teams are required to address challenges faced by consumers, clinicians, or researchers on the continuum of cancer control. Suggested targets include promoting healthy behaviors (e.g., nutrition, physical activity, smoking cessation), early detection and screening, informed decision-making, and adherence to treatment plans.

This is a two-phase challenge. Submissions for Phase I are due August 26, 2011, and will be judged on their use of cancer-related data, as well as potential for impact, innovation, and usability. Finalists from Phase I will receive a $10,000 award at a major health IT conference in September 2011. In Phase II, up to two winning teams from the slate of finalists will each receive a $20,000 award at an international system sciences conference in January 2012.

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!

Thursday June 9, 2011, 9:00am EDT
Watch the Live Webcast: http://videocast.nih.gov or http://www.hhs.gov/live/

Harnessing the Power of Data to Improve Health

Featured Speakers: Aneesh Chopra, US CTO; Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media; Matt Miller, NPR; Harvey Fineberg, IOM President; Todd Park, HHS CTO; and many others

The Health Data Initiative is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators, entrepreneurs, startups, data geeks, community activists and policy makers to utilize health data to develop products and applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark action to improve health.

On June 9th the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine will hold a second health data forum that will bring together over 500 people in person to showcase how health data can create tools and applications to support more informed decision-making by consumers/patients, health care systems, and community officials.

The innovators presenting are a great example of how data and technology can be harnessed in powerful ways to help provide better care and better health.

Over 40 companies will be featured. This event will be live streamed throughout the day with a series of major announcements (challenges issued, new university programs and partnerships, and new major activity in the startup world).

Follow along on twitter: #healthapps

Sign up for a reminder!

See the Agenda (The full day will be webcast live)

Attend a Viewing Party near you

I know I’ve written about Make before – they’re leading the maker movement. Bringing together families and individuals that celebrate the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) lifestyle, Maker Faire is the premier event for grassroots American innovation – bringing in an estimated 95,00 attendees!

We’ll host a curated agenda of speakers, presentations, makers, technology demos and sponsored project areas over the 2 days of the Maker Faire Bay Area – focusing on topics like Quantified Self, DIY Clinical Trials, hacking health devices, and utilizing the Microsoft Kinect.

As you may recall, we partnered with Make: Magazine in February for our Boston Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Code-a-thon – and they brought out all of the toys, including Arduinos, 3-D printers and Kinects. We were so excited to see some of the new innovation that we came out of that day – including Team Triangle, who went on to win the Spring Health 2.0 Developer Challenge competition.

Don’t miss out on all of the amazing new tools that we’ll be showing for the first time – register today! Sponsorship is still available – for more information, contact Hillary McCowen.

When Preston’s not practicing as an OB/GYN at the Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center, he’s a pioneer for getting organic food into the hands of KP’s patients, creating the KP Farmers Market in 2003. We’re extremely excited to have Preston joining us at the Health 2.0 Spring Fling on the Wellness 2.0, Prevention, Exercise & Food panel. In the interview below, you’ll hear about how organic food and wellness fits in with Kaiser’s mission (it’s not just about arugula for anesthesiologists) – and get a sneak peek at an exciting new challenge that will be announced from stage at the conference. To learn more about our speakers and demos, check out our exciting agenda here.

That’s exactly what Alexandra Drane, Eliza and Matthew Holt, Health 2.0 are hoping you can do. I was able to sit down for an interview with Alex and Matthew, co-founders of Engage With Grace, to discuss their viral movement, their inspirations for creating Engage With Grace, and their new Health 2.0 Developer Challenge. I encourage you to listen to their inspirational story.

Matthew Holt and Alex Drane Discuss Engage with Grace Challenge

Health 2.0 was so excited to be able to have TWO team members out in Las Vegas last week at CES. It’s always great to see and play with new health technology – and with over 1000 people stopping by the Digital Health Summit this year, we’re sure the innovation will just keep coming! While everyone is doing their roundups, here’s ours:

• Holy interoperability! I love interoperability. In fact, I believe that at the Happy Hour Meetup after a day at the Digital Health Summit, I declared “I’m an interoperability junkie!” Well – color me delighted when I was able to sit down with two different alliances dedicated to interoperability in health care. ANT+ is a device technology that allows for the collection, transfer and tracking of personal activity and have the ability to connect with other partner devices. Our friends at Continua Health Alliance were there as well, establishing a system of interoperable personal teleheatlh solutions (one of which was featured at Health 2.0 last fall!) It’s great to see these companies (even competitors!) coming together. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

• They’ve called in the Army. The keynote at the Digital Health Summit was Colonel Ron Poropatich, MD, Deputy Director for the Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC). Keep an eye on TATRC as it’s leading the way in government adoption of technology, telemedicine and “unplatforms” – and the immense amount of data that they’re collecting.

• The simplest things are sometimes the coolest. Walgreens recently launched an iPhone, Andriod & Blackberry app that can automatically refill your prescription by using your camera phone to scan the barcode on your bottle. If you’re traveling you can also use this feature to refill your prescription at a local Walgreens.

• Devices everywhere! BodyMedia is using technology and wellness to provide monitoring for the general public. They highlighted the arm band monitoring system which is worn during sleep, exercise and daily activity to receive constant data and assist in improving overall wellness. Zeo was there showing off their sleeping monitoring device as well, and our friends at Withings were there debuting their new baby monitoring system – as well as their wireless scale that can connect to your facebook or Twitter account to track your progress.

• Burritos = Inspiration? United Healthcare introduced their iPhone app that will help you find a doctor in your area using certain specification and parameters, see ratings and reviews, and schedule appointments. They compared the simplified process to using the Chipotle iPhone app to order your favorite burrito and pick it up at the closest location.

• Celebrity sightings galore! CES brought in 50 Cent (wireless headphones), Lady Gaga (Polaroid products), Common (Blackberry), LeVar Burton, Oliva Wilde (Blackberry), Piers Morgan and more to come in and talk about their developments and addictions to cell phones, cameras, head phones and more. But where were the celebrities talking about their health, their wellness, their exercise routines? I’m looking at you, Jillian Michaels.

Video will be made available from the Digital Health Summit sometime in the next month.

A huge part of what we do here at Health 2.0 is introduce the community to new and innovative technologies to improve and track their health and wellness. Whether that be through mobile and web apps or a device, we love to see Health 2.0 technology integrated into the daily lives of users.

With the start of the new year and the inevitable resolutions that come along with it, the Health 2.0 team thought this would be the perfect opportunity to “walk the walk” and use Health 2.0 tools to keep our resolutions. A few of our team members have selected a Health 2.0 tool that corresponds with their goal and will be using it to track their progress.

Indu Subaiya, Co-Founder – I’ve been really coy about this, but at some point it’s going to be obvious (especially at the Health 2.0 Spring Fling): I’m pregnant! I know that I’ll need to exercise more, so I’m creating a pact on IMoveYou with some of the Health 2.0 team to take a walk everyday.

Matthew Holt, Co-Founder – With our own baby on the way, I’m going to need more energy – so I’m using a combination of Google Health, various trackers (including TheCarrot.com and TweetWhatYouEat), stickK and the Withings Scale.

Lizzie Dunklee, Executive Producer – I love sleep. I really do. But I get the feeling that I’m not getting the best sleep that I could. So I’m going to use a FitBit to monitor my patterns and make changes and better decisions.

Emily Ebert, Production Associate – I have a love/hate relationship with running. I’d like it to be more love, less hate. I think the features on RunKeeper, such as run mapping and access to personal fitness reports will help me stay motivated.

Hillary McCowen, Manager, Customer Experience – Nike Training Club will help me stay fit by creating custom workouts.

Bianca Grogan, Marketing Assistant – I’ll be using MeYouHealth’s Daily Challenge to help adopt healthier behavior in 2011

Over the next few months, our team will be using their selected tools and reporting their progress here on the blog. We hope (fear?) that you will keep us accountable and we’d like to do the same for you! We encourage you all to pick a Health 2.0 tool to help keep you on track with your resolutions, and let us know!

Don’t miss 2011′s first installment of the Health 2.0 Show, focused on the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge!

We’ll chat with previous challengers about the process of hosting a challenge and we’ll introduce the new challenges as well! And as an inspiration, we’ll take a look at some previous winning applications.

Got any questions about getting involved? We’ll give you the details for issuing a challenge, becoming a team, and submitting a solution! And we’ll be taking any other questions you might have as well.

Speakers include:

• Abdul R. Shaikh, Behavioral Scientist, Program Director, National Cancer Institute
• Kristi Miller Durazo, Senior Strategy Advisor, American Heart Association
• Linda M. Harris, PhD, Lead, Health Communication and ehealth Team, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, HHS
• Charlene A. Caburnay, Research Assistant Professor, George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis
• … and more announced soon!

For more information on sponsoring The Health 2.0 Show, contact Hillary McCowen.