Community Clash was born out of a White House-led challenge called the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI). CHDI was a collaboration that encouraged innovators to use community health data to create applications that raise awareness around how communities are performing in the realm of health and inspire actions to help improve health.

MeYou Health was asked to participate by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and our solution was to develop a health data game – one that was free of dense statistics and made it easy to explore the health metrics that characterize communities. We began by integrating multiple sources of data – the Healthways Well-Being Assessment (WBA), the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (WBI), traditional community metrics promoted by the CHDI, and Twitter conversations about health.

From there, we created a card game that allowed users to compare health metrics for different cities. Players were dealt five cards and could exchange up to two of them in an effort to win the “clash” with another U.S. city. The remaining cards would be flipped, the two scores compared, and the winner of the game declared. In playing the game, users would learn what makes a healthy city, what the community health of their city looked like, and how it stacked up against other cities. It also provided motivation for users to reflect on their own health and the health of the community in which they live.

MeYou Health presented Community Clash at the 2010 Community Health Data Initiative Forum in Washington, D.C. It received tremendous support from Todd Parks, then the chief technology officer at HHS.

The app also represented many firsts for us: It was the first integration of Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index data with other sets, and we hosted the WBI data for other Hackathons on behalf of Healthways and Gallup. To capture the data we needed, we built a tweet scanner that processed 2 million tweets per day. Finally, the card game mechanic developed for Community Clash became the basis for the mechanic used in Hot Sauce and then Walkadoo, the social walking app.

Community Clash is no longer available, but you can join the Daily Challenge community for a fun way to connect with others and improve your well-being.