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A recent coding competition in the Boston area brought together ITprofessionals, medical workers and others with an interest inhealth IT to show how data analytics can improve health care. The Health 2.0 Boston Code-a-thon, held May 11 and 12, featuredapproximately 85 participants who formed groups to create, inapproximately one day, an application that turns large amounts ofhealth care data into useful information for patients and careproviders. The winning team created the No Sleep Kills website, where people can access information on how poor sleepingpatterns can lead to drowsy drivers and auto accidents. The websiteaims to draw attention to the link between sleep apnea, a conditionin which people temporarily stop breathing during sleep, andvehicular crashes. Given the content's time constraints, Joel Sutherland and Guy Shechter, two members of the winning four-person team, noted that the siteis still under development. They, along with team members DavidDinatale and Amber Zimmermann, hope to incorporate additionalinformation sources, allowing the site to offer deeper analysis. Shechter wants to incorporate anonymized patient data from AthenaHealth, an event partner that offers health-care providerselectronic medical record software. "The whole goal of getting more health data digital is so you canstart doing meaningful things with data," Shechter said. "If we canget access to Athena Health data on actual patients we can extractsome of the risk factors we are looking at." For now, people who visit the site can enter personal information,including age, weight and number of poor sleep nights, to determineif they are sleep deprived. For medical professionals, the portaloffers information on determining whether their patients have poorsleep patterns. The team would like the site to eventually include Medicare costdata to show that sleep apnea testing may help lower health carecosts. Data analysis highlights how a common health issue has consequencesthat can greatly impact lives, explained Sutherland, who works forMitre, which manages U.S. government research centers, but whoentered the contest as an individual. "We need action items that say this is a problem," he said. "Herewe can show that paying attention to sleep apnea improves fatalcrash rates. If you can show that, then policy makers can say thiswork actually saves lives more than just treating sleep apnea." The portal culled information from several sources, includingpublicly available data from U.S. government offices such as theCenters for Disease Control and the National Highway Traffic SafetyAdministration. The group selected the issue of sleep deprivation after lookingover the website healthypeople.gov , which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services set up in2010 as part of a program aimed at improving health in the countryover the next decade. "We saw that sleep health was a new topic and we basically saw therelationship of sleep to driving related accidents and a desire toreduce that number," said Shechter, who along with Zimmermann andDinatale works for Philips Healthcare. The group participated inthe competition as individuals, not employees. The foursome shared the IT duties. Sutherland, who didn't know histeammates until the contest, served as the lead developer. "On the server side I used Sinatra, which was like a reallysimplified version of Ruby on Rails," he said. Zimmermann and Shechter did data visualization and Dinatalemanipulated the data and handled filtering, Sutherland added. Theteam turned to the cloud for data processing by utilizing AmazonElastic MapReduce, and used Tableau software for data analysis. Zimmermann also added clinical experience from her job as a nurseinformaticist. The squad took the first place prize of US$4,000 because they stuckto the contest's theme of using big data by incorporating several data sources, said Deb Linton, the eventcoordinator who also served as a judge. The team also presented their project at Spring Fling 2012:Matchpoint Boston, an event held on May 14 that provided theopportunity for health IT entrepreneurs to present their ideasbefore an audience that included health care providers Aetna andKaiser Permanente. These kinds of meetings prove important for health IT , since technology can only reach patients and care givers if thetech community works with the established health care system,explained Matthew Holt, co-chairman of the Health 2.0 organization,which also put on the Matchpoint event. "Health care is not a consumer focused business," Holt noted. "Youcan't do Instagram and get 30 million people to pick up the app,"he said, referring to the popular smartphone photo application thatFacebook recently acquired. 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