[Sol2Sol]

There are lot of technology issues to be solved in healthcare separate and apart from medical device technology. As one example Heritage Provider Network has been running a competition that will award $3 million dollars to anyone who can develop an algorithm to identify patients who will be admitted to hospital in the next year using historical claims data. Generally predictive analytics is a significant opportunity in healthcare. And as I noted in the OP, HHS has been opening up its huge data set to entrepreneurs and developers. Aetna also has an initiative in play to open up de-identified claims data to the developer community. A lot can be done in the area of developing tools around analytics & reporting and gaining not so obvious insights from claims data at both the individual and aggregate level. The bureaucracy is falling to the wayside but of course in order to accomplish anything developers need to have some understanding about the data they are working with. I have been itching to do something in the area myself but working on the analytics business side of the equation I need technical support.