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| HHS Secretary Picks OMNITEC-Led Project for 2011 Innovation Award |
( September 30, 2011) -
OMNITEC Solutions Inc. joins with U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in applauding the innovative team responsible for the success of the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR). The NDAR portal is managed by an OMNITEC team led by Dan Hall
We are honored to be a part of this groundbreaking project and believe the work being done by this joint team from HHS and OMNITEC deserves high praise," said Morris L. Brown, President of OMNITEC Solutions. "The success of NDAR will be measured both in helping advance autism research that this portal is facilitating, and serving as a model for scientific collaboration within other government programs."
In announcing NDAR (http://ndar.nih.gov) as an innovation winner, HHS Secretary Sebelius said the HHSinnovates program is part of an HHS-wide initiative "to build a constant thrust of innovation into the everyday operations of our health and human services agencies."Participating in the awards ceremony with Secretary Sebelius was the Director of the Office of Personnel Management John Berry who said that "High-performance government means giving our employees the opportunity to create and invent and serve the American people."
Complementing the OMNITEC team, NDAR program manager Hall said "The success of the NDAR is due to the tireless efforts of all of the OMNITEC employees devoted to this project. This was a team effort. Each member of the OMNITEC team deserves high praise and shares in this Innovation Award." The OMNITEC NDAR team includes Eric Stanton, Tim Wolfe, Sveta Novikova, Brian Koser, Stephen Varga. Michael Martin, Gretchen Navidi and Chelsea Shugars,
The HHSinnovates program was launched in 2010 to "semiannually recognize outstanding innovation efforts throughout the agencies of the department. After an initial review process, the best candidates were submitted through an open web-based process and then put up for a vote using a secure intranet site." The voting process is open to all HHS employees. Winners are chosen based on both innovativeness and applicability for use by programs within HHS and throughout the federal government.
NDAR serves the dual purpose as a data repository of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) studies and as a portal encouraging collaboration among ASD researchers by providing open access these studies conducted through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and external resources. The mission of NDAR is to provide a comprehensive resource for sharing data in support of advancing scientific discovery.
In the HHS news release on the innovation award http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2011pres/09/20110926a.html, NDAR was highlighted for its innovativeness in creating an environment that "could transform the very way that ASD research is conducted: it allows researchers to ask new types of questions and quickly combine information in novel ways to develop answers. NDAR is a versatile platform that is highly extensible to other domains beyond ASD research with the potential to save millions of dollars that would otherwise be spent funding data acquisition or developing a similar platform."
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