Thursday, March 22, 2012

HHS Launches Twitter Public Health App Contest

Mosquera, Mary. "HHS Launches Twitter Public Health App Contest." Government Health IT, March 20, 2012.

From the article: "The Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has launched a developer’s challenge to create a public health application that takes Twitter data for a specific geographic area and counts the frequency of common illness-related terms to come up with a list of top five trending illnesses for the past 24 hours.

The top-five list would be automatically delivered daily to public health practitioners at health departments via a Web-based widget.This information can then be used by the health departments to build a baseline of trend data, engage the public on trending health topics, serve as an indicator of potential health issues emerging in the population, or cross-reference other data sources." Read more