The next Knight News Challenge, which launches Aug. 19, will offer a share of more than $2 million for innovative ideas to answer this question: How might we harness data and information for the health of communities?

Through this competition, Knight hopes to elicit ideas such as ways to:

• Make large public health-related datasets useful.
• Inform healthcare consumers.
• Leverage personal behavioral data, social media data and/or public data to inform lifestyle choices.
• Inform local health policy

This Challenge will open with an "inspiration" phase on Newschallenge.org that starts Aug. 19. During this phase, anyone can identify community health-related needs, share success stories, post datasets, contribute ideas.

The Challenge will accept entries Sept. 3-17.

According to Knight, four major health-related organizations are collaborating on this competition: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California HealthCare Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Health Data Consortium. These organizations contributed expertise to help frame the challenge question and tap into current community needs in health. They will also assist with outreach, and with reviewing the entries once the challenge closes.