On President Obama’s first day in office, he signed the Open Government Initiative, a memorandum directing all Federal agencies to improve transparency, participation and collaboration. The memo introduced sweeping new goals to use technology, information and public interaction to change relationship between citizens and government. This panel presentation will explore ways to foster these concepts and utilize technical tools to implement more effective health communication activities and improve credibility, knowledge-sharing, responsiveness and interaction to increase awareness of health messages, improve collaboration and empower audiences. Panelists will provide --an overview of the new HHS open government plan, --a summary of tools used in social collaboration and explain how these tools improve transparency, citizen engagement and collaboration, --explanations of how greater transparency, expanded citizen engagement, and improved collaboration are essential to deliver the HHS mission and specific health communications objectives, --best practices and lessons learned in leveraging new technologies to improve health communication activities, --an example of an innovative technical solution that can be used to improve access to information, foster collaborations and encourage further innovation, and an example of an integrated health campaign that utilizes open government tools and user-generated content to strategically engage a target audience.