Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [to 28 March 2015]
http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/newsroom/news-releases.html

County Health Rankings Show Declines in Premature Death Rates
Wed Mar 25
The 2015 County Health Rankings show that premature deaths are dropping, with 60 percent of the nation’s counties seeing declines. This marks the highest drop in the country for counties with populations of 65,000 or more.

Partners HealthCare to Boost and Sustain Personal Health Tracker Use
Tue Mar 24
RWJF grant will help consumers select personal health trackers that will help them develop and stick to physical activity plans.

‘Open Humans’ Project: Sharing Personal Health Information to Accelerate Medical Breakthroughs
Project describes how to donate your body to science—without having to die.
Tue Mar 24 2015 Boston, Mass.—A group of top university scientists just launched a project to build a community of researchers and participants who want to benefit medical progress—by using technology to open up health data.

The “Open Humans Network,” created by researchers from Harvard, New York University and the University of California San Diego, is backed by a $1 million investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, each of which contributed $500,000 in separate grants.

The project aims to break down barriers that make it difficult for willing individuals to access and share their data with researchers. To this end, the Open Humans Network creates an online system that helps match people who want to share their health data with researchers who would benefit from access to more information.

“Think of it as open-sourcing your body,” says the project’s director, Jason Bobe who also runs the project’s parent organization, PersonalGenomes.org. “There is tremendous potential for accelerating medical discoveries by helping individuals take their health and personal data out of data silos and making the data more broadly used.”

The Open Humans Network hopes to accelerate scientific discoveries by making far more data available. The premise is that more individuals will join scientific studies if they are empowered with the choice to share their data. And the greater availability of shared data will allow scientists to conduct more studies, and produce more robust and meaningful results…