New York State – Health Data – Code-a-Thon
Hacking on Data, for the Greater Good:
The New York State Department of Health (DOH), in collaboration with health care organizations and industry leaders, health IT companies, as well as other government partners and stakeholders will support a first-of-its-kind:
New York State Health Data Code-a-thon
with the theme:
Healthy Connections == Healthy Communities
The event will take place December 19-20, 2013 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s state-of-the-art Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) and bring together program experts, data experts, public health providers, academia, and other public health stakeholders with tech gurus and app developers for a “technology brainstorming session,” using DOH open health data and other valuable data.
The purpose of the event is to generate ideas on how to use data to help New Yorkers prevent the development of
- Obesity and
- Diabetes.
Both conditions are chronic diseases that require lifelong management by the patient.
Chronic diseases are known to account for 75% of the health care cost (for close to 2 Trillion dollars a year).
When people can take charge of their food choices and adopt a more active lifestyle, they can reduce the risk for overweight/obesity, type 2 diabetes and other associated health risks. In fact, a full 95% of chronic disease care occurs outside the health care system.
New York State is a leader in the Nation on making Health Data publicly available in it site
Here is a quick example, of what open data makes possible:
Using the public data set:
Rate of Hospitalizations for Short-term Complications of Diabetes per 10,000 – Ages 18+ Map
The Socrata platform supports the generation of visualization such as: