07 Dec CDC Names Onlife Health As a Phase I Finalist for Health Behavior Data Challenge
Brentwood, Tenn., December 7, 2017—The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that Onlife Health has been selected as a finalist for its Healthy Behavior Data Challenge (HBDC), an initiative designed to support the development of novel methodologies and innovative data sources (wearable devices, mobile applications, social media) to enhance traditional healthy behaviors surveillance systems.
Onlife’s proposal, entitled “Closing the Loop: Augmenting Mobile Data Sources for Public Health Surveillance,” was one of only five American finalists selected by the CDC. More information about Onlife’s proposal is available at http://healthdatachallenge.com/resource/onlife-health/.
Traditional methods of data collection for health-related behaviors have been resource-intensive, relying primarily on phone or face-to-face interviews, a process that suffers from several limitations, such as recall error and self-reported bias. “Our proposed solution improves the quality of health behavior data collection by aggregating data from personal wearable devices and mobile health apps, augmented with mobile location data and just-in-time survey questions,” said Catherine Bass, Ph.D., Director of Informatics at Onlife Health. “It will benefit public health surveillance by lowering costs, improving recall bias, reducing under/over reporting and increasing response rates.”
For Phase I of the Healthy Behavior Data Challenge, participants were asked to develop a concept proposal for obtaining data collected from wearable devices, mobile devices and/or social media in the areas of nutrition, physical activity, sedentary behaviors, and/or sleep, with the finalists each receiving $5,000.
For Phase II, Onlife Health and the other finalists are currently building a prototype that will be tested in an ongoing public health surveillance project, with the top three teams receiving $70,000 in awards, including $40,000 for the overall winner.
“We’re making a significant internal investment in this project in order to help the CDC improve public health surveillance in our country,” said Bass. “To build the prototype and meet the January 15, 2018 deadline, we’ve assembled a senior team of developers, data architects and UI/UX designers. Our objective is to build an app that will leverage objectively collected data from mobile apps and wearable devices that individuals are already using. The app will consume the objective data and will push additional questions and validation grids to the individual in order to both confirm and add context to the objectively collected data. The final result will be a validated data set that will make analysis and identification of health behaviors more accurate and insightful.”
About Onlife Health
Onlife Health is a data-driven health solutions company. Our engagement platform empowers over 11 million people to take an active and ongoing role in their own health by leveraging sophisticated data analytics to understand a population and engage each of its members in meaningful programs. Whether it’s a wellness offering for an employer group or a Gaps Closure program to drive Medicare Star ratings, Onlife solutions support multiple populations to help individuals better their health and improve their sponsor’s bottom line. Our platform recognizes each individual’s distinct needs and supports them on their own unique healthcare journey via a personalized, seamless user experience that leverages their support ecosystem. For more information, visit onlifehealth.com.