More numbers from the poll here.

20,894: The total number of Challenge Grants applications received by the NIH.

At least $200 million of Recovery Act funds will support these new grants. These applications come on top of the 16,312 regular applications received for the current funding cycle. Some 18,000 reviewers will help read and score them all, a workload that has NIH Center for Scientific Review Director Antonio Scarpa worried about the time it will take for each reader and the inevitable low acceptance rate. The projects that are funded will generate jobs, grow the economy, and support the search for cures.

49,015: The total number of comments the NIH received on its draft Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research.

Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider reports that the Institutes’ policy chief estimates the amount is roughly equivalent to when the NIH issued draft guidelines on the same issue in 1999.

$5,000: The threshold for earnings that should trigger mandatory disclosure under financial conflict of interest rules for NIH-funded researchers, as recommended by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of American Universities.

The two major academic associations, which both represent significant proportions of the institutions where scientists conduct NIH-funded research, submitted their joint comments in a letter Wednesday. NIH grantees are currently obliged to report a financial interest if they earn more than $10,000 in income or own more than $10,000 in stock plus 5 percent interest in a company, but the AAMC and AAU believe the threshold is too low to ensure research integrity. The recommendations were in response to the NIH’s request for comments on promoting objectivity in research. Patti Tereskerz recently explained the complexity of managing the conflicts of interest that result from the necessary mix of public and private research funding in Science Progress—including those that arise from corporations funding research through foundations and nonprofit institutes.

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), who co-sponsors the “Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009″ with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), noted on the committee site that “Consumer confidence in the nation’s food supply is low.”

The legislation would further give the FDA greater power to prevent problems through heightened inspection regiments, as well as the authority to initiate mandatory recalls in the event of a contamination or outbreak.

Waxman notes as well on the committee site that the poor state of the food safety system is a threat not just to public health, but to food companies themselves. Hence, Layton reports that “the proposal would put greater responsibility on growers, manufacturers and food handlers by requiring them to identify contamination risks, document the steps they take to prevent them and provide those records to federal regulators.”

Such a system would also present an opportunity for the FDA to provide relevant portions of those records to the public in an accessible format—and the bill summary indicates that the registry would require unique identification numbers for food facilities and importers. This information could make a welcome future addition to Data.gov, so that third parties and citizen groups can keep up with the safety of what’s in the their shopping cart.

Image: AP/John Bazemore

Here’s a look at some of the numbers on how health IT can improve health care for all Americans by providing better quality and value.

Current spending on health is enormous:

16 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product currently goes toward health care spending.

20 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product will go toward health care spending in 2016, according to current predictions.

Health information technology can help prevent avoidable problems through better information coordination:

Every year, 100,000 people die in the United States as a result of preventable medical errors

There are 1.5 million annual preventable adverse drug events in the United States.

Without the widespread adoption of health IT systems, it will be impossible to implement value-based payment regimes for U.S. health care. Support from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s HITECH can help spur adoption and meaningful use:

Only 13 percent of physicians currently use even a basic electronic health record, or EHR.

A mere 4 percent of physicians use a “fully functional” EHR.

1.5 percent of hospitals responding to a recent survey published in the New England of Medicine have a comprehensive electronic-records system.

8 to 12 percent of hospitals responding to the same survey have a basic electronic records system.

How the HITECH program can help:

$19 billion: the federal investment in the health IT authorized for the program.

74 percent: the proportion of hospitals responding to recent survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine citing inadequate capital as a primary barrier to adoption of health IT systems.

$44,000 to $64,000: amount of bonuses available under the program for health care providers who can demonstrate “meaningful use of certified EHRs.”

$11 million: bonuses paid through the system to hospitals  who can demonstrate “meaningful use of certified EHRs.”

Health IT can dramatically improve chronic care, which consumes massive portions of health-related spending in this country:

75 percent: proportion of all health spending that goes to treat chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, pulmonary conditions, and mental disorders.

56 percent: proportion of chronic care in the United States that appropriately involves evidence-based management.

125 million: the number of people in the United States suffering from at least one chronic care condition, as of the year 2000.

Read the full report, “A Historic Opportunity: Wedding Health Information Technology to Care Delivery Innovation and Provider Payment Reform” at the main CAP website.

Image: AP/John Raoux

Open data is going to change the way people interact with government online, and the Obama administration’s launch of Recovery.gov could become a test bed for this. George Thomas, the chief architect at the General Services Administration who led the Recovery.gov build using open-source software, has a vision that is making the tech community smile. George and his team are looking into ways to open up the data for stimulus projects in just the way I’ve described. (Technical readers can check out his slide presentation from a public event last weekend that illustrates his plans.)

Projects like Recovery.gov will help this cause if done right, but for a while still, the bottleneck with my “blue sky” dream for improving government transparency won’t be the technology – it will be the data. It has to be available and structured using standard conventions, which just means formatting data in a way that machines can interpret it regardless of software platform.

To give you an idea of just how quickly these open source frameworks can be turned into powerful transparency tools, take a look at the Apps for Democracy contest in Washington, DC last year. In November, the city sponsored a sort of “Iron Chef” competition for web developers to see what they could do with all the data it was releasing to the public. The city had just finished a significant project to make much of the city’s data available for public use and wanted to know what types of information were really in demand so they could help prioritize where the city should invest in opening up. The contest format was a great way to do this because it brought dozens of developers together with no up-front cost to the city, and allowed them to award a financial prize just to those projects deemed “winners.”

Forty-seven awesome submissions later, Apps for Democracy was a huge success. Teams built all sorts of applications, from tools that can help you find a carpool or help you find a parking meter, to apps that send information about the crime level in your neighborhood to your iPhone. By the organizers’ estimate, the project may have generated upwards of a 4000 percent return on investment. As a participant in the process with our team at Development Seed, my company, I was able to personally experience how much power open source provided once the right data was open. From concept to completion in less than 72 hours, we built a site called D.C. Bikes which aggregates data from the city data other online sources to provide a resource to bike commuters and enthusiasts.

The city’s GIS shape files provide the map layer for bike lanes; bike theft data came from city police reports; bike shop locations are included from Google; and tweets about biking in D.C. are piped in from Twitter; finally, the site also shows bikes for sale in D.C. on Craig’s List. All our team had to do was think about the users we wanted to serve and put the pieces together. With a little original content sprinkled in, we were able to offer the cycling community a helpful new resource. Open source tools lowered the barrier to entry for building a site like this because they required no financial investment for proprietary software, and because so much innovation is being done on open source tools to get them ready to facilitate open data projects.

For sure, the site (and others like it) could have been even more useful if more data was available. For instance, if the police department made bike-related traffic accidents visible, we could have mapped them quickly to visualize problem areas along bike routes, and the community could figure out ways to press the city government to investigate and take action to improve public safety. Increasing the volume of available data will have a snowball effect. By opening up the city’s data and encouraging citizens to use it creatively for the public, the government is making DC safer, more accessible, and just plain cooler for its citizens.

To be clear, the point here is the power of data, and not applications. The White House and government agencies will never be able to devote the time or energy to building all the applications that citizens might want – nor should they try. There’s been a lot of talk about the president’s technology ambitions, but the biggest possible online technology win that the Obama administration could achieve would be opening up as much information and data as possible to empower the community to build anything it wants. The potential benefits of this was best put into words by Personal Democracy founder Andrew Raisej at TransparencyCamp this past weekend in DC: “One government can’t solve problems for 300 million people, but 300 million people can solve problems for one government.”

If data and information are open, available, and well-structured, the power of crowds that we’ve seen transform the news industry with the advent of blogging could extend into just about every corner of the web. The work ahead is to just get the data ready.

Ian Cairns is project manager and an online strategist for Development Seed, an online communications strategy shop based in Washington, D.C. For the past six years, Development Seed has specialized in working with large NGO’s, and they have been leaders in the Drupal open source project.

Documented instances of employer discrimination based on DNA are at the moment rare (details on two cases below), but access to affordable direct-to-consumer genetic testing services not only increases the amount and availability of genetic information, but it increases the possibility that third parties could see it and use it to make discriminatory decisions. GeneTests, a group that provides information on genetic testing, charts the rise in labs offering an expanded array of tests for more and more diseases:

(Source: www.genetests.org, © University of Washington, Seattle)

In their report, “Genetic Non-Discrimination,” Michael Rugnetta, Jonathan Russell, and Jonathan Moreno outline the details of two lawsuits filed on behalf of workers who were discriminated against based on their DNA:

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1999)

• Accused of conducting pre-employment screening for sensitive medical information, testing for genetic traits such as sickle cell trait, and for non-genetic factors such as syphilis and pregnancy
• Charges filed under: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and right to privacy as guaranteed by the U.S. and California Constitutions (also the Americans with Disabilities Act, but this was not affirmed by the courts)
• Company argument: sought to have case dismissed in summary judgment without a trial, claiming that the statute of limitations had run out
• Ruling: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with the workers

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Corporation (2002)

• Employees charged that those who had filed for workers compensation for carpel tunnel syndrome—a painful hand and wrist condition caused by repetitive motion—were tested for a genetic marker
  – Tests performed without their knowledge
  – Marker dubiously associated with carpel tunnel syndrome
• Charges filed under: Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• Company argument: testing necessary to determine cause of injury for 36 employees who claimed to have job-related carpel tunnel syndrome
  – 20 employees were tested before program voluntarily suspended
• Settlement: Company agreed to halt testing and pay $2.2 million

As Weiss points out, this EEOC rule will implement a historic piece of civil rights legislation, but the rules for protections from insurance discrimination, handled under a separate GINA Title, are another complex matter that the relevant agencies have yet to sort through. They should not delay. The amount of personal genetic information available will continue increasing. It should help improve health care and not prevent people from getting access to it.