White House Hacks Suicide Prevention at Events Around the Nation
Innovation around open data could hold the key to saving thousands of lives lost to suicide every year, the Obama administration hopes.
The White House is staging a series of data hackathons Saturday to advance suicide-prevention efforts in America. The events, hosted in five major metropolitan areas across the nation, invite the public to join offices and agencies from different levels of government as well as nonprofits, to build technology to help prevent the more than 41,000 suicides in the U.S. each year.
“By working together with open minds, data, medical treatment, and innovations, we can promote mental health and save lives,” DJ Patil, White House chief data scientist, and Kristen Honey, a policy adviser in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a White House blog post on the events.
Each of the hackathons will have a distinct focus on different types of tools the participants will be asked to build. From the blog post:
◦Boston, MA: The Department of Veterans’ Affairs Healthcare System in Jamaica Plain will host a data sprint (a set of activities working on a defined set of data) focused on identifying Veterans at risk for suicides using Federal and academic open data sets. This event is intended to connect mental-health professionals, Veterans, designers, engineers, technologists, and data scientists to co-design interventions using open data sets to proactively reach Veterans at risk for suicide.
Full article by Billy Mitchell, FedScoop
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