Today the Knight Foundation announced the seven winners of the Knight News Challenge: health. These projects, which harness the power of data and information for the health of communities, will collectively receive more than $2 million.

And the winners are:

• Camden Health Explorer from Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers: Creating an interactive dashboard with real-time health care enrollment, cost and outcomes metrics to make the local health care system more efficient.
• Crisis Text Line from DoSomething.org: providing youth with free crisis counseling via text messaging, including intervention and live referral services from trained counselors.
• Homebrew Sensing Project from Public Laboratory: providing low-cost chemical analysis tools that allow residents to track hazardous chemicals in the environment and their health impacts.
• Ohana API from Code for America: connecting the public with community resources through a centralized database that aggregates information on health, human and social services, so users can quickly access targeted information through search engines, smartphones or SMS.
• Open Humans Network from PersonalGenomes.org: developing an online portal to connect people who are willing to share their personal health information with researchers to advance medical breakthroughs.
• Positive Deviance Journalism from Solutions Journalism Network: collaborating with newsrooms and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to scan data sets for examples of positive health results that can lead to important stories.
• SafeUseNow from Principled Strategies: using data to identify incidents of prescription drug abuse by tracking combinations of prescribers, patients and pharmacies that may be contributing to the problem.

Launched in August, the challenge was a collaboration between Knight and four major players in health: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the California HealthCare Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Health Data Consortium.

More details in the Knight announcement.