Spent Monday and Tuesday at Healthdatapalooza in DC. Key objective there was to see how the Code-a-palooza shaped up, as well as what things folks were most talking about.  Recap here is a recap of what I sent to my healthcare-focused team at work, but

Here’s the winner’s list:

1) LyfeChannel’s Smart Hero app, which gives consumers information that they can use to discuss/negotiate with their physician what they’re charging you… (LyfeChannel also won a healthfinder.gov mobile app challenge last year, so is someone interesting to pay attention to… I was also interested in their approach of going to a local IHOP to find seniors and talk with them about what the data set contained, and how they’d like to make use of it… resonates pretty strongly with how my company looks at user-centered design)
2) AccordionHealth:  had an interesting model of tracking likely side effects to help determine an overall cost. These guys combined the CMS data set with a deep data set they had from Texas, so their app only really helps folks in Texas at the moment. Very small company, two PhD students, I believe.
3) Karmadata and its myhealth.io – find a physician for your surgical procedure. For a zipcode, find a procedure, get counts of patients, procedures, and physicians. Their company provides access to healthcare data, as well as an app gallery of apps built on top of their items.

In the demos on Monday, I also heard Fred Trotter talk about the data in light of DocGraph and its new Omni solution. Fred’s blog over at DocGraph also talked about some of the other competitors who’d entered the contest.  In Fred’s presentation on Monday, he pointed out that the data had some real gaps in usefulness. I don’t think the judges appreciated the poke, though I think I agree with Fred’s statement.

Takeaway on my part: we had an interesting angle for our own Code-a-palooza entry.  Via a system processing glitch, ours didn’t get considered for the competition, but we got good feedback from someone kind enough to give us a first-level look.  I’m looking across the Code-a-palooza competitor set (winners and others) to see where we might complement their offerings.  Our solution was much more ‘help me keep up with my own record’ focused than anything I saw in the competition pool.  Think ‘Mint for Medicaid’ with a smidge of Consumer Reports as a first-cut elevator pitch..

Things folks were talking about that I thought were interesting: OpenFDA (FDA data + APIs released giving access to more than 3 million adverse drug event reports), BlueButton (common means of sharing data across systems – intended to give you access to your personal health record), Open mHealth (another means of sharing data across systems, including things like FitBits), and even a bit of SMART platform came up. SMART is interesting to me because of it’s at least on-the-surface analogies to OWF – it appears to have had a resurgence of activity of late. Also tracking something called PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute). All leading to – wow, a lot of things to explore and decide whether they’re worthy to track further.

Take a look at this NPR article for more news of HealthDataPalooza. The Kojo Nnamdi Show was also broadcasting from the conference on Tuesday the 3rd – you can listen in or read the transcripts from its site. Looks like the live chat held online has good info too…

One more healthcare world announcement of note that got mentioned at HealthDataPalooza as an aside: iOS X includes HealthKit platform, which is a means to bring together your quantified self fitness / other health data. Interestingly, they’re partnered with Epic. Uh, though this Forbes article points out that others have done that before (Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault)..