New Smartphone Application Makes County Health Information Available to Home Buyers on the GoThe mobile application that Acsys Interactive conceived and developed to help extend the reach of County Health Ranking data earned top marks at the recent Health 2.0 Developer’s Challenge, winning first place for The Health Factor – Using the County Health Rankings to Make Smart Decisions.
The County Health Rankings, released in February 2010 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, rank the overall health of nearly every county in all 50 states in an attempt to motivate communities to become healthier places for people to live, learn, work and play. Acsys’s mobile application takes this data and puts it in the hands of users on the go – when it’s most meaningful.
“We felt that the perfect use for County Health Rankings would be to aid home buyers as they explore neighborhoods, since one of the main buying factors is the quality of the county,” says Stan Valencis Acsys’s founder and president. “It’s all about bringing health information forward through technology – which has always been our mantra. That’s why we’re so appreciative of what CHDI, the HHS and Health 2.0 have done for healthcare by launching this developer’s challenge.”“We received many outstanding applications for the Health 2.0 Developer’s Challenge,” says Abbey Cofsky, Program Officer for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “but Acsys’s mobile application best achieved the spirit of this challenge. We were impressed with the thoughtfulness of their design, the integration of the health data as well as the actual execution.”
The application, available at http://bit.ly/healthrankings is ready for download for Android users, and there are plans in the works for extending the application to additional smartphone platforms. The mobile application makes general real estate information (provided by zillow.com) and corresponding County Health Rankings readily available for users by leveraging their phone’s GPS. However, all site visitors can experience the application via their web browser using the zip code look-up functionality.
Blog