HHS Innovation Day is back!

We, at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, home of the HHS IDEA Lab, are proud to announce HHS Innovation Day, Innovation with Impact, on December 13 in the Hubert Humphrey Headquarters Building from 9 AM- 4 PM.

Why Should You Participate?

HHS Innovation Day is an opportunity for HHS staff and the public to learn about innovation activities and new ideas across HHS, the federal government and the health innovation community that will generate change. HHS Innovation Day will showcase innovation programs like HHS' Ignite Accelerator, highlight innovation and emerging technology approaches at the White House, and stimulate new ideas from outside experts. This is your opportunity to get immersed in entrepreneurial approaches and innovative strategies across HHS and other sectors.

The day will feature speakers from across the innovation spectrum including;

• Matt Lira, Special Assistant to the President, Office of American Innovation, The White House
• Michael Kratsios, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, The White House
• Rasu Shrestha, Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)
• Joshua Marcuse, Executive Director for The Defense Innovation Board at the U.S. Department of Defense
• Dean Chang, Vice President for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland (UMD).

Attend the event in person or participate via livestream.

We are particularly proud to enable employee-led project teams through HHS Ignite. These teams validate demand for their new or novel solution by asking two key questions before launching their projects - if I build it will they come, and if I build it will it have impact? Simply, they discover the problem that their solving and build a hypothesis for a solution through the machinery of customer discovery, customer segmentation, value proposition design, and iterative lean startup methods.

Moreover, these teams perform customer discovery, in which they empathize with the needs of their customers, create prototypes for their notional solutions, and then create a working prototype to test if their solution is usable. This process allows for nimble and agile project development that builds an ideal solution for customers.

In addition to hearing about the HHS Ignite Projects, attendees will learn about the broad array of services that the HHS IDEA Lab provides, including open innovation and the Entrepreneurs in Residence program during a panel discussion with HHS employees that have worked with the HHS IDEA Lab and used the methods that are practiced during the HHS Ignite program.

Jessie Buerlin, Public Health Analyst at the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) will share how HRSA used open innovation to launch its Word Gap Challenge. By age three, children from low-income families heave heard 30 million fewer words than those from higher-income families, leading to delayed language skills and decreased school performance. The HRSA Word Gap challenge accelerates innovative approaches to see how technology, like wearables and location based apps , can be used to improve early childhood learning.

Additionally, Bruce Sundstrom, Ph.D., Scientific Review Officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will showcase how he prototyped and then scaled an innovative approach to scientific grant reviews at the NIH. .

You can attend the event in person or participate via livestream.