This is a guest post by Preethi Sundararaman, summer associate working with the Healthcare for All team at Ashoka.

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It is a known fact that childhood obesity is on the rise, affecting one third of American children today. Alarmingly, researchers are predicting that for the first time in U.S. history, children may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

On July 13^th, I attended the “Innovation, Information and Technology for Better Health Outcomes” conversation event held at World Bank. Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and co-founder of Athenahealth Inc., was one of three panelists at the event.

A key theme Park brought up was the impact technology and social media could have on healthcare for younger generations. “What if FarmVille were HealthVille?” Park asked. FarmVille, a real-time farm simulation game, has acquired 75 million Facebook users just within a year of being available. If games with the potential to reach this many were designed around health data, generations to come could grow up being more health conscious.

Park highlighted the 2010 Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, which is run by the company Health 2.0, and supported by HHS and its Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI), the new open government effort encouraging innovators to use health data made publicly available by HHS.  “Community Clash” is one of several new apps created to engage users in the health data available through CHDI.

“Community Clash” creatively incorporates HHS data in what Park calls “Healthcare Blackjack.” The online card game, launched by MeYouHealth, involves a comparison between your city and a “Rival City” on a number of health indicators from obesity rates to unemployment rates. Todd Park claimed he learned things he didn’t know by playing the game, adding “it’s incredibly addictive.” After trying the game myself, I would have to agree! I was surprised to learn that 68.1% of adults in Washington, DC eat on average less than the minimum daily recommendation of 5 servings of fruit and vegetables.

Charged by the excitement and new knowledge I had gained, I proceeded to search for initiatives on apps specifically for kids and found  that earlier this year, First Lady Michelle Obama had announced the Apps for Healthy Kids Challenge in conjunction with the USDA as part of the Let’s Move! campaign, asking innovators around the nation to develop video games and mobile applications to incite physical activity and promote healthy lifestyles.

One of the 95 final entries was developed by Alaka Sarangdhar, a Portland-based software engineer. Her application, called iNutri8, is an iPhone app designed to make nutritional information available at your finger-tips and show users how their daily eating compares to the food pyramid guidelines. This allows kids to be aware of the portions and food groups they are lacking or exceeding in, and how their eating habits can be improved. I was able to ask Mrs. Sarangdhar how she sees the tool affecting kids in the future, and she stated “I hope iNutri8 teaches the younger generation to be aware of what they are eating and its nutrition value. With this on-the-go tool, they can even try to evaluate their options before they eat to see what will give them an overall healthy diet…” You can vote online for iNutri8 and your other favorite entries in the Apps for Healthy Kids Challenge until August 14^th.

After browsing through the entries in the Apps for Healthy Kids Challenge, it became apparent that Todd Park was on to something. What if apps were created to engage kids in HHS health data? With something like “Community Clash” that is fun, appealing and adds a competitive element to useful information, kids could not only improve their own lives but be more aware of healthcare issues in the communities around them.

Enter: the “Why-Health?!?!” challenge. In this challenge – one of five on the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge platform – Whyville.net, a virtual gaming site with 6.3 million users aged 9 to 15, asks developers to design games and other interactive resources that cater to their young users and make health data “accessible, understandable and actionable.” You can submit your applications to the Whyville health challenge until September 15^th of this year.

Provided with the right tools to be more aware of health issues, today’s younger generations could build a better future for all of us.

*The quote used in the title is from the Talmud, and is displayed at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

Who:

* Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
* Eric Rasmussen, President and Chief Executive Officer, InSTEDD
* Randi Susan Syterman, Director Governance and Innovation, World Bank Institute

What:

• The power of analytics in shifting the landscape of global health
• Stimulating the development of new applications for improved access to health-care
• Using competitions and challenge grants to motivate the public and private sectors, NGOs and communities to road-test ideas and solutions
• Open data, open innovation, and PPP to improve global health outcomes
• Using data and innovation to improve performance and spark action locally and globally
• Increasing transparency and accountability and greater citizen participation through innovation

When: July 13th, 9:30-11am

Where: World Bank J Building – 701 18th Street NW (Washington DC)

How: External Participants should RSVP to Selina Khan skhan8@worldbank.org

Todd Park (CTO, HSS) – using information to shift the landscape; empowering communities, enabling global action, improving lives

Todd Y. Park has been Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since August 2009. Mr. Park Co-Founded Athenahealth Inc., in 1997 and served as its Chief Athenista from January 1, 2008 to August 31, 2008. Mr. Park served as Chief Development Officer and Executive Vice President of Athenahealth, Inc., since February 2004. He served as a Leading Management Consultant at Booz-Allen & Hamilton in New York. Mr. Park specialized in healthcare strategy, operations, and systems work at Booz-Allen, and served as a major thought leader on the evolving dynamics of the healthcare sector. Mr. Park’s accomplishments at Booz-Allen included: Development and implementation of “best practice” provider network, medical management, claims processing, operations, and systems infrastructure for multi-billion dollar clients; Design and rollout of innovative managed care products and services; Successful marketing and expansion planning efforts for high-growth healthcare networks and services; Development of groundbreaking strategic partnerships among major healthcare organizations. Before Booz-Allen, Mr. Park served as Director of Development for Summerbridge Cambridge, an Innovative Academic Enrichment Program serving gifted and underprivileged children. He served as Director of Athenahealth Inc. from January 1, 2008 to August 10, 2009. He focused on healthcare economics, business strategy and technological innovation at Harvard University. Mr. Park received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Harvard University.

Eric Rasmussen (CEO, InSTEDD) – SMS to avert outbreaks, mobile technology, GIS and innovation for emergency response

Dr. Eric Rasmussen arrived as President and Chief Executive Officer of InSTEDD in October 2007. Previously, Dr. Rasmussen was both Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington, and an advisor in humanitarian informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds academic positions at several institutions and has been a Principal Investigator for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and for the National Science Foundation. He sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences and the US Crisis Response Working Group. He has a number of publications and has been awarded several personal, unit, and theater military decorations, including a Presidential Legion of Merit.

Dr. Rasmussen spent seven years enlisted in nuclear submarines before leaving the Navy to receive his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduate work in molecular biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory and teaching in Haiti, he completed a Residency in Internal Medicine and re-entered the Navy as Chief Resident in Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Oakland, California. Subsequent Navy positions included three years as Fleet Surgeon for the US Navy’s Third Fleet. Dr. Rasmussen served on the Afghanistan humanitarian support planning staff within US Central Command Headquarters (CENTCOM) in 2002, and later as a physician to the Iraq Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) for the Iraq War in 2002-2003. As a member of the DART, he served as medical director within the International Humanitarian Operations Center in Kuwait and was later selected for the DARPA 2003 “Sustained Excellence in a Principal Investigator” award.

Further work as Director of the Strong Angel series of international humanitarian support demonstrations led to work in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2007, and in Indonesia as head of a Civil-Military Coordination Team for the tsunami response in Banda Aceh in early 2005. Later in 2005, he deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans, coordinating a small portion of the relief response after Hurricane Katrina. He was the medical lead for a UN mission to Tajikistan in 2009, and in 2010 he deployed to Haiti immediately after the earthquake for work within the UN’s Search and Rescue Dispatch Center on the Port au Prince airfield.

In addition to his responsibilities at InSTEDD, he currently serves as Permanent Advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Forum on Water Disasters, as a member of the US Congressional Task Force on Global Biosurveillance, and as a member of Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva.

Randi Susan Ryterman, Director, Governance and Innovation, World Bank Institute
Ms. Ryterman, an American national, joined the Bank in 1998 as Senior. Public Sector Management Specialist in the Europe and Central Asia Region.  She has since held various positions, her most recent assignment being Sector Manager, Public Sector Governance, in the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network (PREM). Ms. Ryterman studied at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, and received her PhD from University of Maryland.