At the recent Health 2.0 Code-a-thon in Mountain View, CA, developers and healthcare futurists from across Silicon Valley gathered to conjure meaning from new oceans of data. Held on the Google campus, the San Francisco Bay Area Code-a-thon is only the first in a series of events aiming to mine resources freed as part of the White House’s Open Government Initiative. With mountains of new datasets from data.gov come new opportunities for new applications to bring information transparency to healthcare. And the need to extract meaning from these data is greater than ever. Again and again, the theme arose over the course of the Code-a-thon that better tools are needed for interpreting this healthcare data glut if information is to be relied upon by providers, policy makers and patients to make healthcare in America work. Read more