As we celebrate National Women's Health Week, we reaffirm our commitment to women's health - and look ahead to new innovations, new platforms, and new opportunities in our efforts to empower women and advance health equity for women in all communities.

In August 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color Challenge. The challenge called on software developers and entrepreneurs to create an application for mobile devices that would help women in underserved and minority communities access information about cancer screening and preventive services, link to electronic health records, and connect with providers and community health workers. This was the first-of-its-kind, effort to engage and empower women of color in the fight against cancer - and put technology to the test in addressing deep-rooted health disparities.

Each year, more than 68,000 women in the United States die from breast, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancers. Given gaps in education, prevention, early treatment, quality of care, and access to networks of support, a disproportionate burden of these diseases falls upon women of color.

In the face of these disparities, the developer community stepped up to the challenge. As submissions came in from all across the country, a panel of judges comprised of federal and private experts in health care and health information technology set to work assessing the entries. Selection criteria included: capacity to provide users with general, easy-to-access information about screenings; securely communicate with patient health records or provider-sponsored patient portals; provide user-specific reminders about preventive services; accommodate multiple languages; encourage patient and family engagement with providers; and connect patients to community health workers who can provide support in adhering to complex care plans.

Based on these criteria, first place, second place, third place, and honorable mention distinctions were awarded. On behalf of the HHS Office of Minority Health and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, I am excited to announce the winners:

• 1st Place: Everhealthier Women (Designer: Big Yellow Star) – a bilingual (English and Spanish) mobile web app that helps women track cancer prevention tasks through mobile web and SMS text messaging.
  
  
• 2nd Place: Nonmaskable (Designer: Broadstone Technologies) – a bilingual (English and Spanish) mobile web app, designed for smartphones and feature phones, that raises awareness around cancer prevention among women of color by empowering them with the information and tools needed to actively manage their health and wellbeing.
  
  
• 3rd Place tie: Cancerguard (Designer: Appbrahma) – an iPhone app that aims to help reduce the risk of cancer among minority women by providing tools and services such as links to cancer information guides and publications, workshops and health promotion events, counseling services, support groups and electronic medical records.
  
  
• 3rd Place tie: Cancer Awareness (Designer: HW-Technology) – a smartphone app that aims to provide women of color with information about breast and gynecologic cancer in their native languages. The app assists minority women in the use of preventative measures and encourages them to share their experiences with cancer survivors and other members of their community.
  
  
• Honorable Mention: Support Health (Designer: Netzealous) – an Android-based mobile app designed for patients, physicians, and advocates in an effort to empower women in minority and underserved communities to prevent cancer. The app's features including multilingual support, a symptoms tracker, health alerts, and shared medical record capacity.

We are excited to provide new tools to help minority women and those in underserved communities take control of their health by receiving a list of screening and preventive services and details on how to better coordinate their information and care.

The Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color Challenge is a partnership between the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the HHS Office of Minority Health. To learn more about the app challenge, the winners, and information on how to download the winning apps please visit: http://challenge.gov/ONC/402-reducing-cancer-among-women-of-color and http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/reducing-cancer-among-women-color-challenge/.

Cross-posted from the healthcare.gov blog.

This year we have achieved important milestones in our commitments to reduce racial and ethnic health disparities, including the release of Healthy People 2020 and the National Prevention Strategy, as well as the launch of the HHS Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

Today, we are achieving yet another milestone, by implementing an important provision of the Affordable Care Act that will improve the collection of data on HHS-sponsored surveys. With this advance, we as a nation can better understand and target health disparities and ultimately move toward eliminating them.

After reviewing the more than 400 public comments we received on draft standards proposed last June, we are now publishing final standards for data collection and reporting on race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status. Previously, identifying and reducing disparities has been limited by a lack of uniformity, specificity, and quality in data collection and reporting. Now, consistent methods for collecting and reporting health data will help us to better characterize and compare the nature of health problems in targeted populations. These new data standards, required by the Affordable Care Act, represent a powerful new set of tools to move us closer to our vision of a nation free of disparities in health and health care.

With respect to race and ethnicity, we can now collect more data on key groups. For example, by adding Mexican American and Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Other Hispanic Latino/a or Spanish origin as explicit categories on all HHS-sponsored health surveys, we can better capture, understand and act upon the specific challenges presented by each ethnic group -- challenges that would otherwise be lost under broader terms, like "Hispanic" or "Latino." Such detail could possibly shed light on health problems such as initial studies that suggest the diabetes-related mortality rate for Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans may be twice as high as that seen for Cuban Americans.

With respect to disability and primary language, this announcement also breaks new ground. These first- ever uniform disability standards will ultimately improve researchers' abilities to monitor and track health disparities in this critical public health area. And, for the first time, we can collect in a standardized way, information of the primary language spoken by a person or in a household.

Separately, we are continuing to implement efforts that will ultimately allow integration of questions on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) health into national HHS data collection efforts. Expanding data collection to include information on the health of the LGBT population is important to understanding and tackling disparities.

The Department's data collection efforts under these new standards will continue to ensure privacy protection and apply all appropriate information security safeguards in the collection, analysis, and sharing of data.

All these advances collectively strengthen the critical information by which we, as a nation, identify and address disparities in the future. For more on the final data standards on race, ethnicity, sex, primary language and disability status, please visit www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/section4302.

Join me in congratulating our Deputy Director, Mirtha Beadle, on her appointment to Deputy Administrator for Operations for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Mirtha's expertise will undoubtedly be a welcomed addition to the SAMHSA core leadership team, where she will work alongside SAMHSA Administrator, Pamela Hyde, and Principal Deputy Administrator, Kana Enomoto.

Since joining the Office of Minority Health (OMH) in 2004, Ms. Beadle has served as a driving force behind the advancement of our national leadership role in disparities reduction. While Mirtha has been passionate about all health disparity policy issues, she has been particularly engaged in OMH's efforts to reduce infant mortality, elevate hepatitis B disparities as a national issue, reduce meth use/abuse, address food insecurity, and create a new cadre of young leaders through OMH's internship and fellowship programs. Among her most notable accomplishments are the establishments of our State Partnership and American Indian/Alaska Native grant programs, as well as her leadership in the development of the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities (NPA).

I know just how honored Mirtha has been to work with OMH Central and Regional Office staff; Federal colleagues; and our national, state, tribal, and community partners to develop the National Stakeholder Strategy for Achieving Health Equity, and establish the Regional Health Equity Councils that will provide the structure for multi-sectoral engagement to eliminate health disparities throughout the United States. I applaud Mirtha for her tireless efforts to date; and I look forward to the opportunity for continued synergy across the agencies, as I am confident that the advancement of the NPA is a priority that Mirtha will carry on with her as she transitions into her new role.

Dr. Rochelle Rollins, Division Director for the OMH Division of Policy and Data, will assume leadership of the management of the NPA. Rochelle has played an integral role in initiative thus far, and will continue to work with OMH staff and the Federal Health Equity Interagency Team members to move this important work forward.