HHS InnovationX forms coalitions and collaborations to tackle "wicked problems" with diverse stakeholders while leveraging resources from all sectors to accelerate innovation and scale solutions for real-world impact.
Our Methods
Data-Driven Innovation
- Open Data: Open data is information that may be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share alike.
- Open Science: Open Science involves the free distribution of scientific research and facilitating access to science — often using distributed networks, new digital technologies, and collaborative tools.
- Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is the practice of turning to a body of people to obtain needed knowledge, data, or information.
- Sprints: Structured, fast-paced, agile cycles of collaboration that accelerate the pace of digital innovation and technology development.
Human-Centered Innovation
- Customer Interviews and Ethnography: Interviews with customers allow policymakers, program managers, and public health decision makers to get a glimpse into how “customers,” or people with lived experience with a health problem, interact with this issue, ultimately to drive new solutions and innovations.
- Personas: Personas are tools developed as a reference model that each represent a specific type of user, or behavioral archetype without expressing a defined personality or socio-demographic.
- Journey Maps: Journey maps are a synthesized step-by-step representation that describes how a user interacts with a health problem.
Collaborative Innovation & Partnerships
- Public-Private Partnerships: Public-private partnerships involve collaboration between a government agency and a private-sector company that can be used to finance, build, and operate projects, or most commonly prize competitions.
- Competitions, Prizes and Challenges: HHS follows the America COMPETES Act authority and is able to carry out a program to award prizes competitively to stimulate innovation that has the potential to advance the health and human services of the country.
- Accelerators: Accelerators provide intensive and time-limited government, advisory and support for cohorts of startups, aiming to prepare them to advance towards solving necessary public health problems through innovative and disruptive solutions.
- Citizen Science: Citizen science is when the public participates voluntarily in the scientific process, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications, and solving complex problems.
- Strategies & Collaboratives: Collaborative innovation is a process by which multiple players contribute towards creating solutions, programs, policies, strategic directives and more with relevant and diverse stakeholders.
COVID-19 Data-Driven Innovation
Tools to drive innovation by making COVID-19 data more accessible.
Human-Centered Design
A program dedicated to unlocking new insights into health and health care challenges.
KidneyX
Lyme Innovation
An initiative that harnesses the power of collaboration, open innovation, data-driven innovation, and emerging technologies for Lyme and tick-borne diseases.
PandemicX
An innovation accelerator using digital tools and public data to eliminate disparities exacerbated by COVID-19.
Vector-Borne Disease National Strategy
In response to the Kay Hagan Tick Act of 2019, the federal government has identified a plan to address vector-borne diseases.
