I got some fun news last week…

Practice Fusion has named Epicenter the winner of Analyze This! part of Health 2.0’s Spring Developer Challenge. Using Practice Fusion’s sample of 15,000 de-identified health records, available free through Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace, Epicenter developer and self-confessed “data nerd,” John Schrom, said his application could help identify and better control the spread of disease across America.

“Epicenter allows doctors to benchmark local patient data against a uniform dataset to identify anomalies in real-time,” said Schrom. “It would also allow doctors to quickly identify local disease outbreaks, the groups they’re occurring in, and then share those high-risk patient profiles with the wider medical community to drive proactive treatment initiatives, more targeted screening and faster warnings.“ A video demonstration of Schrom’s Epicenter application can be viewed here.

As part of the Health 2.0 and US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Developer Challenge, Analyze This! entrants were asked to use Practice Fusion’s dataset to answer pressing public health questions around obesity trends, drug efficacy, disease outbreaks and treatment outcomes.

The award caught my eye because John Schrom is from Minnesota. He graduated from South High School in Minneapolis, went to the U of Minnesota-Morris for a year before transferring to University of Minnesota-TC . He graduated from college when he was 20 and decided to move to Chicago to pursue a MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Illinois-Chicago.

John and I had an email conversation; he was kind enough to tell me how he felt that broadband and health care fit together. I am going to post his answer nearly verbatim because I think it’s an exciting glimpse of what a really smart and innovative person can do with emerging technologies and access to data – and how essential ubiquitous broadband is to making sure everyone has access to these tools and that when it comes time to making policy, everyone is represented.

There were a number of interesting discussions at the Health 2.0 conference that worked under the assumption of universal access to broadband. There’s a Minnesota company that’s working on producing over the counter test kits for common conditions (e.g., strep). There’s also a company called TeleThrive that’s working on improving telemedicine (they actually serve Minnesota with their consumer product, RingADoc). So, you could imagine an opportunity for someone in Rural Minnesota wanting to get tested for some STI, getting one of these products, testing positive, and then seeking a video/skype conversation with a provider related to their result. Of course, that only works if you have the bandwidth to support it.

Or, another example more related to Practice Fusion’s contest and Epicenter… I got an email this morning at work asking for help identifying patients at risk for measles. Minnesota is at the start of a measles epidemic, and so now there are efforts to quickly identify and vaccinate kids to help stop it. If there were a tool like Epicenter fully developed and implemented, this process would be incredible simple (or even automated — you could imagine MDH pushing a machine readable notice out to providers about measles, and an application automatically generating lists of patients that need action). However, this work requires bandwidth — not as much now, but many of the plans to improve the functionality of Epicenter will require a faster connection.

I could keep going (e.g., limited access to social support through websites like PatientsLikeMe), but I definitely think healthcare and broadband are both important and related. Certainly you can still get on the internet without broadband, but to really take advantage of a lot of ideas coming out of the Health 2.0 movement, you’re going to require something faster.

On a semi-related note, I just read an article in Wired about how “governments need to unlock their information vaults.” (Sorry, can’t find an online version of the article.) Their point was that it might create jobs – that with access to government data, developers can create information products. A prime Minnesota example is West Law (which has morphed several times and is now Thomson Reuters). West took court information and codified it, revolutionizing the way law was practiced and creating hundreds of jobs. The advent broadband, smartphones and access to information provides another perfect storm for developers to create new products – such as Epicenter, imagine the jobs that someone like John could create with his products.