The American Public Health Association recently launched a competition that gives health departments the opportunity to improve their capacity around health inequality policies. What’s up for grabs? Certainly nothing to yawn at (especially in this economic climate):

According to the APHA site announcing the policy innovation contest:

Between five and eight health departments will receive awards ranging from $25,000 to $40,000 to develop, implement, and/or evaluate an innovative policy approach to a critical public health problem, with a focus on reducing health inequities and building policy capacity.

I’m happy to see that the CDC is involved in providing funding for the initiative – in some upcoming posts, this will become clearer on where I’m thinking the role of organizations like the CDC will be most helpful to move innovation in public health.

Today celebrates the first annual national Food Day. I caught up with Lilia Smelkova, Campaign Manager with Food Day,  to get the full scoop…

What is Food Day?

Food Day is a national grassroots campaign for healthy, affordable food produced in humane, sustainable and just way.  Food Day is modeled after Earth Day, and will take place anually on October 24 with people across the country celebrating by organizing or attending events, big and small–on college campuses, at schools, in public parks, at farmers markets. Major themes include health, sustainable agriculture, cutting subsidies to agribusiness, and eradicating food deserts. Food Day aims to educate the general public, influence local and state food policies, and give a platform for diverse to dialogue and work together. But more important, Food Day aims to inspire Americans to change their diets for the better and start cooking for families again.

After months of organizing by countless people, there will be more than 2,000 events from coast to coast in 50 states on and around October 24.  Local governments are seizing the opportunity to announce new food policy initiatives. The National Archives will be hosting a Food Day Open House, and there will be an “Eat In” in Times Square in New York, with guests Morgan Spurlock, Marion Nestle, and 50 other food leaders and community activists. You can learn more about Food Day priorities and look for events around the country here: www.foodday.org.

What is the significance of October 24th?

We wanted to select a date that would give some time for schools and campuses to organize activities, not too close to Earth Day, to give a possibility for organizers to participate and leave time to plan, and also be close to the World Food Day, one of our partners, celebrating with actions on world hunger issues and addressing domestic food access.

Dozens of school districts and hundreds of campuses are celebrating countrywide. Portland Public Schools will serve a special meal of locally-raised, grass-fed beef and unlimited fruits and vegetables  for kids from 30,000 families. Every school in Denver will have a special Food Day menu. Schools in Boston, Boulder County, Los Angeles, and Detroit will celebrate as well. The Real Food Challenge has involved more than 200 college campuses in dinning hall events, teach-ins, conferences, picnics and more.

How did the Food Day folks settle on the 6 Food Day principles?

Food Day’s goal is nothing less than to transform the American diet—to inspire a broad movement involving people from every walk of life. In other words, we want America to eat real. The 6 Food Day principles were selected to give a broad umbrella, a platform for groups working on all aspects of food system to collaborate together, public health advocates, environmental activists and farm workers justice movement. We have based the selection on a survey made earlier this year when we asked thousands of respondents, including our advisory board members, what were the priorities that wanted to see addressed by Food Day.

Food Day’s 6 principles are:

What can our readers do today to participate in Food Day?

First of all, attend a Food Day event. If you haven’t found a Food Day event near you, visit FoodDay.org to search by our map or by typing in your zip code. (Be patient as events take time to load in the map—a lot of people are visiting right now!). Besides events in public places, Food Day events will take place at homes.  For inspiration, we are offering a free Food Day recipe booklet featuring recipes from Mario Batali, Rick Bayless, Emeril Lagasse, Nina Simonds, and other renown chefs.

If you want to create your own Food Day event at home with family or friends, there is still time. We have a great dinner party kit collection of totally delicious recipes from celebrity chefs to get you started. If you want to raise money for a local food-related charity, you can enter a contest led by Epicurious.com—winning entries will get their donations matched up to $1,000! We even have tips for Halloween, and Food Day pumpkin carving stencils. We encourage everyone to sign the Food Day petition asking Congress for better food policies.

And of course you can keep up with Food Day by liking it on Facebook, following CSPI on Twitter, or by using the #FoodDay hashtag.

What can we expect from Food Day in the coming years?

Food Day will be October 24—this year and in years to come. Food Day aims to become for the Food Movement what Earth Day has been for the Environmental Movement, bringing food education into school curriculum, helping to improve diets, and giving the much needed support to sustainable agriculture.  Food Day will inspire hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans to change their diets for the better, and to push for improved food policies. Although with Food Day, actively making change – even for one day – can have a tremendous impact, we also see efforts on improving policies. Rhode Island and Montgomery County, Maryland are announcing the formation of the food policy councils on Food Day. In California, dozens of nonprofit organizations have come together to promote a petition campaign to generate support for a smarter Farm Bill.

–

Bridgette Collado (aka, @bcollado)

Lilia Smelkova worked for Slow Food International in Italy for 10 years and initiated the Slow Food network in Eastern and Central Europe and Canada. She supervised international communications and directed the launch of an international education program that birthed the first European network of sustainable school cafeterias. She also worked on the core team that planned the first Terra Madre, a meeting of food communities from 150 countries. Lilia holds a BA from Minsk Linguistics University in Belarus (she is fluent in Italian, Russian, English, French, and Spanish), a Master’s in languages from Turin University in Italy, and a certificate in environmental management from UC Berkeley, where she co-authored a nutrition education study. She recently guided an expedition of Italian scientists along the Silk Road to research food preferences and genetics. She believes that food is among the best ways to experience the world, especially Uzbek pilaf, Pamir mountain mulberries, and Transylvanian jams.

The following is a guest post from Douglas Naegele, President at Infield Health – a mobile health company based in Washington, DC.  Doug recounts his experience as an invited attendee at the very first Twitter inspired Let’s Move event. You can follow Doug on Twitter as @textandshout

I recently had the pleasure of attending the first Tweetup surrounding Michele Obama’s Let’s Move initiative.  The White House hosted the event, and tied it to a harvest of the White House garden by two DC elementary schools.

Before the harvest, 15 followers of @LetsMove gathered on the South Lawn to meet one another and hear from Let’s Move Executive Director Dr. Judith Palfrey.  She outlined the vision for Let’s Move in 2012:  Making exercise and play a regular part of each child’s day…every day.  In addition, she outlined efforts surrounding food labeling and partnering with food manufacturers to provide healthy alternatives to families.  In the end, all agreed that real decision-making happens at the parent-child level, and it was everyone’s responsibility to support healthy options.

White House Chef Sam Kass gave a tour of the garden, pointing out produce consumed by the First Family.  In addition, much of the crop is donated to local school lunch programs and local shelters.  White House Beekeeper Charlie Brandt explained how his nearby beehive provides honey for the kitchen and pollination for the garden.

The Let’s Move Tweetup is part of the White House’s larger initiative on reaching out to, and bringing in, Twitter followers.  Previous WH Tweetups centered around “Ask the Press Secretary” and “Ask the President” at a Maryland Town Hall.  On October 13, it hosted a Tweetup surrounding the state visit of President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea.

See photos and tweets from the event here:  http://bit.ly/qj0X9k

This month, Harvard took a bold stand, declaring the USDA‘s food guide icons inadequate and out-of-date:

For nearly two decades, the U.S. government distilled its nutrition advice into pyramids. These efforts didn’t accurately show people what makes up a healthy diet. Why? Their recommendations were based on out-of-date science and influenced by people with business interests in the messages the icons sent. This year, the U.S. government scrapped its MyPyramid icon in favor of the fruit-and-vegetable rich MyPlate—an improvement, yet one that still doesn’t go far enough to show people how to make the healthiest choices.

Researchers in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, in conjunction with Harvard Health Publications, are now offering alternative icons to MyPyramid and MyPlate.

Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate adds emphasis on healthy fats and water, mentioning that diary should be limited to 1-2 servings per day. Physical activity is also a part of each of Harvard’s graphics. Read a comprehensive comparison of the icons here.

While the Healthy Eating Plate addresses some of the shortcomings of the USDA’s MyPlate, it’s been criticized as being too “nutritionally annoying“.  Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate may be too text heavy for some, and unrealistic for others, putting in place barriers to behavior change.

Neither are perfect. Nutrition is complex. Without greater education and support from nutrition professionals in our schools, health care system, and communities, simple guides to healthy eating alone won’t cut it in our struggle to realize a healthier nation.

At the expo today at the Games for Health conference, I caught Bill Sabram talking about his very cool (very big!) Monumental poster. After fighting the crowd waiting to talk with him, I caught this short video clip about the game. Take a look…

Want more from the Games for Health conference? Follow me at @bcollado and search for the hashtag #G4H11.

-Bridgette

Have you noticed images like the one to the right sprouting up at every turn? I have. That, my dear readers, is a QR code, and it’s one trendy, useful piece of technology.

These 2-dimensional codes were developed by Denso Wave, a manufacturer of automatic data capture technology, and released to the market in 1994. QR stands for “quick response” and these symbols can serve up a large amount of data with a swift scan. They stand up to more dirt and damage than traditional codes with error-correction encoding. They are omni-directional (i.e. they can be read from any angle). One QR code can store 16 individual codes. And, they are able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well, perhaps not that last one. If you’re interested in a few stats on this subject, head over to Social Wayne’s blog and check out his post on the subject, complete with infographic.

To read a QR code, a scanner must be installed on your mobile phone (your phone must also have a camera). A number of scanners are available free for download. Examples of types of data that can be stored in a QR code are:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Contact information in the form of a virtual business card
• Event details
• URL
• Geo location
• Simple text
• SMS (pre-populates the number and message)
• MMS
• WiFi configuration

This list is by no means exhaustive and clever programmers are expanding the utility of QR codes rapidly. After reading this list, are you also contemplating the ways we can leverage this technology in the public health realm? Curious about how this channel is being used, if at all, by healthcare and public health professionals, I scoured the internet for examples, and when few turned up, I put out a call via Twitter with some success.

Condensing member information on health insurance forms: Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Blue Cross Blue Shield Excellus is now incorporating a QR Code that directs people to learn more or obtain more of their information via QR Code. Because a QR Code can take half of the information that previous required multiple print pages and consolidate it to a singe sheet or two they are realizing a savings on their printing costs.

Driving traffic to a mobile Website:  Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals points readers of a Uloric (gout medication) advertisement to a mobile Website.

Opt-in for reminders:  American Cancer Society.

The American Cancer Society leveraged QR code technology to drive users to a highly targeted mobile Website allowing users to sign-up for reminders about their breast cancer walk, send alerts to friends and donate to their cause.

Driving traffic to a mobile app:  Curatio CME Institute.

Curatio used the bar code to the left to drive clinicians to a mobile application of their Clinical Educator pocket tool. They used an other code on the front panel of a hematology symposium program book so participating physicians could access the Power Point slides on their mobile device.

QR Codes as an Assistive Technology

Digit-Eyes is an iPhone 3G app for the blind and visually impaired community. It makes text or audio QR Code labels you can read with your iPhone.

My hope is to see more and varied uses of QR code technology in the public health space in the near future. If you know of other examples, please tell me about them in the comments! Would also love your thoughts on how you can imagine how these lovely little codes could be leveraged for improvement of public health.

Leading creative/advertising blog, Osocio, is conducting it’s annual awards event for top socially conscious campaigns of 2010 that were featured on the site. Many of you may remember Pulse + Signal guest author – Marc van Gurp, who posted content for Spread the Word Sundays last year.

Here’s an excerpt on why it’s happening:

Because we want to put the most creative and innovative social ads in the spotlight, so that non-profit organizations can learn and benefit from these best practices.

We don’t intend to compete with big advertising festivals. Our aim is to award grassroots initiatives and advertising campaigns that try to solve real-life problems. Let’s not forget that Osocio is the place where advertising and activism collide.

This is one of my favorites looking at car safety and the importance of wearing your seatbelt:

Make sure and check out the rest of the campaigns!

Well folks, I am coming up on my third year of writing here on Pulse + Signal. Since my first post I have not only learned alot about how innovation intersects with population focused health, I have also learned about the importance of creating/maintaining great relationships. The social media world can sometimes be daunting with the information overload but it can also be a great place to interact with very smart and like-minded individuals. I can truly say I’ve experienced the latter in a very real way.

2009 was spectacular for me as I mentioned earlier this month, I am planning on 2010 begin even more awesome. While keeping in mind my three words to live by this year (Educate, Collaborate, Ignite) and going through some tough personal issues – I’ve had clarity of mind surrounding a decision that has been marinating for quite some time. Many people still are figuring out what they are passionate about (Public Health 2.0, innovation, relationships) and even what their talents are  (connecting people to resources, creative ideas, people person) – I believe I’m at a point where I have a better sense of what those are for myself and how  I can help change the world we live in.

I’m going out on my own – entering the consulting world.

A big leap? You bet. Necessary for me at this time? I really think so.

So now I will begin the journey of working with people and on projects that for the most part will involve a public health angle and will have opportunity to incorporate new media, new ideas and the building of effective partnerships to collaborate for a healthier world. The new venture will be named after this blog since I believe it embodies what I aim to accomplish. As I begin to work on some fantastic projects, you will see various changes to the site as it takes on a fresher look. I can’t wait to share those changes with you!

Feel free to contact me in the meantime with any questions or comments. Thanks again for reading Pulse + Signal and I look forward to highlighting and discussing more innovations in the public health space.

So last week I had the honor and opportunity to be on Jonny Goldstein’s Partay – along with two wonderful friends of mine, Qui Diaz and Alex Rampy. We were there to talk about the benefits, innovations and overall understanding of social marketing. Much of the evening was spent highlighting our respective passions within the “marketing for good” landscape – Qui with Nonprofits, Alex with a deep knowledge of social marketing practices and myself with a focus on health and social media.

Earlier in the day as I was getting ready for the Partay, my body felt like it was time to not feel well. Of course, this wasn’t the ideal situation to not feel at my peak but with the help of my most excellent co-speakers, I readied myself for the evening. As the Partay started, I became aware that many of my friends (much of whom met through social media interaction) were logging in to watch! Needless to say, as I began talking about my passions and getting in the zone of the chat, I began to feel better. Just the fact that there was friendly support from people I knew online, along with the friendly environment of the conversation, added up to a better evening for me.

Despite the inherent needle in a haystack feeling that one may feel when navigating through the Web, I feel as though there is strong potential in building relationships that reinforce positive mental health. So next time someone tells you that the Internet has no soul (yes, I’ve heard that before), let them know there is a whole world out there waiting to inspire and encourage you!

So here we have the latest definition of Health 2.0, I’m pretty satisfied about this latest iteration from Dr. Ted Eytan:

Health 2.0 is participatory healthcare. Enabled by information, software, and community that we collect or create, we the patients can be effective partners in our own healthcare, and we the people can participate in reshaping the health system itself.

I weighed in on the definition in the comments section mentioning that the three words that i was happy to see in this definition were: participation, information and community.

I’m sure it will change as we explore this field more but I just wanted to share the latest

Do you have anything you would add to the definition of Health 2.0?