The latest Knight News Challenge, which seeks to harness data and information to enhance the health of communities, kicks off today with its inspiration phase: a virtual and real-world brainstorming session in which anyone can participate.

In addition to the $2 million Knight will award through this challenge, Knight announced this contest will also offer $200,000 in special prizes from two of the Challenge collaborators:

• The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will award prizes of $50,000, $30,000 and $20,000 for the top three projects which "best combine public health data and healthcare data to improve the health of communities."
• The California HealthCare Foundation will award a total of $100,000 to one or more projects focused on helping county and city officials use health data for policymaking.

What happens during the inspiration phase? Knight is collecting, from anyone, ideas about "the difficulties, successes and opportunities you have experienced with health information." This should help people hone the projects they propose for funding through this Challenge. Submit your idea. Here are just a few that have been submitted today:

• Andrew Haeg suggested that there's a general need for a simple benchmarking system to help identify community needs, including health needs: a strategy commonly called a Net Promoter Score.
• Tom Hulme Likes the way his Jawbone UP wristband vibrates when he's been awake but physically inactive for more than 30 minutes. He says: "I hope that this Challenge will unearth some opportunities to create subtle nudges from the most complex data."
• John Kornak, director of telehealth at University of Maryland Medical Center, notes how crucial (indeed, life and death) is it to have medical care available at just the right time and place, He suggests "creating a statewide telemedicine network to provide better access to care for both rural and urban communities. This would provide increased access to specialty care, to keep patients in their community while transferring only necessary cases to a hospital."

Applications open Sept. 3 for the Knight News Challenge: Health, and will be accepted through Sept. 17.