Data for Health co-chairs Dr. Ivor Horn and David Ross.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has begun an initiative to explore how health data can best serve not just individuals, but communities. The new initiative, called Data for Health, will be led by an advisory committee co-chaired by David Ross, director of the Public Health Informatics Institute, and Dr. Ivor Horn, medical director of the Center for Diversity and Health Equity at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“The sheer volume and velocity of data at our fingertips today is unprecedented,” RWJF President and CEO Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey said in a statement. “As we build a Culture of Health—a nation where everyone has the opportunity to live longer, healthier lives—it will be critical to ensure communities can effectively use and manage this information in ways that help people get healthy and stay healthy. The Data for Health initiative will be a starting point for identifying what infrastructure is needed to turn this information into an effective tool for improving health nationwide.” 

The first step in the initiative will be a five-city tour of "Learning What Works" events that will take members of the advisory committee to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Phoenix, Arizona; Des Moines, Iowa; San Francisco, California; and Charleston, South Carolina. At the events, they'll hear from local leaders, residents, and healthcare professionals as well as representatives from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Topics discussed will include ways to collect, share, and use health data to improve health on a community level. The committee will issue a report with recommendations at the conclusion of the tour, in early 2015.

"Community developers, doctors, school districts, public health departments, consumers, and local businesses all need data for building and sustaining healthy communities,” Ross, one of the co-chairs, said in statement. “Finding out what problems people want to solve and what health information they need to help solve these problems will help us better understand how to design the infrastructure for collecting, sharing, and protecting data in ways that work best for communities across the country.”

Horn spoke in 2013 at the Healthcare Experience Design conference in Boston about the need for developers to recognize the unique challenges of lower income communities when they design health interventions. She spoke to MobiHealthNews about the same topic in a follow-up interview in December.

"I think the applications that are out there right now, and the health monitoring devices, there’s a lot of great systems out there,” she said at the time. “I think probably they have the potential to help people of all socioeconomic, all cultural backgrounds. But it appears they have not been designed specifically with a lower income background involved. And in the research that’s been done there hasn’t been an explicit focus on what are the specific needs of these populations.”

The Data for Health initiative is a way for RWJF to come up with that explicit focus, and figure out how health data can help low-income populations as well as other kinds of communities. Check out the full list of committee members here.