Developers and Designers Dive Into the Open Data Ocean

What would it take to get folks to show up at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning? Coffee, donuts, and the opportunity to plunge into a sea of open health datasets. On February 12, developers, designers, and researchers gathered to develop apps using public and private health care data-sets, over the course of one day, for the 2011 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Code-a-thon.

The primary focus of the day was active coding. Participants were divided into teams and had access to a number Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and twenty public and private health care data-sets. My team, consisted of a program manager from NACCHO  , two researchers, two analysts, and two coders.

We planned and developed a community health information query system that linked community-based health data with data from the Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW). The HIW is a data hub with standardized health outcome and health determinant indicators along with associated evidence-based interventions. What makes the HIW so awesome is that it provides a user-friendly interface to national, state, and community health indicators data.