Innovation Competition Challenged Developers to Leverage the popHealth Open-Source Framework to Improve Patient Care and Provide Enhanced Insight Into Patient Populations; $100,000 in Prize Money Awarded to Winners
Innovation Competition Challenged Developers to Leverage the popHealth Open-Source Framework to Improve Patient Care and Provide Enhanced Insight Into Patient Populations; $100,000 in Prize Money Awarded to Winners
SAN FRANCISO, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 23, 2012) - At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference today, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Health 2.0 announced the three winners of the popHealth Tool Development Challenge: Team popEYE, Team Agent and Team greatOne.
"We are very excited about the winning applications," says Wil Yu, Special Assistant for Innovations at ONC. He continues, "The popHealth tool is a cutting-edge technology that was able to support a highly technical competition. The winning teams displayed impressive levels of understanding in the areas of meaningful use and provider-patient interaction, which resulted in unique and useful solutions. We look forward to seeing advancements to the teams' solutions in the future."
The popHealth Tool Development Challenge launched on October 3, 2011 as part of ONC's Investing in Innovation (i2) initiative (http://www.health2challenge.org/onc-i2-challenges) and run through the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge program (http://www.health2challenge.org). The challenge asked multi-disciplinary teams to create applications that leverage the popHealth open-source framework, existing functionalities, standards and sample datasets to improve patient care and provide greater insight into patient populations.
First place team popEYE will be awarded $75,000, second place team Agent will be awarded $20,000 and third place team greatOne will be awarded $5,000. The following are brief summaries of the winning applications:
popEYE -- the popHealth app to Engage Your patiEnts (popEYE) -- submitted by Chintan Patel, Sharib Khan and Aamir Hussain -- decreases the burden by which providers engage their patients. The application allows providers to create patient-engagement reminders for the popHealth measures -- it automatically calls the patient cohort using the cloud-based phone service Twilio and delivers the reminder message set by the provider, effectively discontinuing the need for manual calls and letters and subsequently delivering call outcomes and patient responses to the providers.
Agent -- the Agent solution -- submitted by Chris Han and Calvin Han -- builds upon the popHealth framework by using key enhancements including demographic statistics and graphs, population and patient medication and conditions lists, exportable patient reports, standardized UI elements and multi-lingual translation capabilities. These functions are designed to help providers track conditions over time, increase sharing of reports to compare populations and provide patients with access to their reports. The software uses a lightweight version of Twitter bootstrap and the RxNorm API.
greatOne -- QualiMax -- submitted by Mauricio Alarcon and Frances Morrison of Team greatOne -- is a system that helps providers to better use quality measures and identify disparities by aggregating data from multiple sites and providing a simple user interface. The application compares a provider's quality measure calculation with other subscribed providers and provides aggregated data access for public health and scientific research.
To learn more about the details of the popHealth Tool Development Challenge, visit the competition website (http://www.health2challenge.org/pophealth-tool-development-challenge/).
About ONC
ONC is the principal Federal entity charged with coordination of nationwide efforts to implement and use the most advanced health information technology and the electronic exchange of health information. The position of National Coordinator was created in 2004, through an Executive Order and legislatively mandated in the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) of 2009. For more information, see http://healthit.hhs.gov/.
About the Investing in Innovation (i2) Initiative
The Investing in Innovation (i2) program utilizes prizes and challenges to facilitate innovation and obtain solutions to intractable health IT problems. Aligned with the Administration's innovation agenda, i2 is the first federal program to operate under the authority of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011. For details see http://www.health2challenge.org/onc-i2-challenges/.
About Health 2.0
The conference. The media network. The innovation community. The Health 2.0 Conference is the leading showcase of cutting-edge innovation transforming the health care system. Since its beginning in 2007, Health 2.0 has served as a community resource for search and online tools to help consumers manage their health and connect to providers. Now that the industry has caught up, Health 2.0 covers the entire cloud, web, mobile and unplatforms technology revolution that is shaking up every sector of health care. For more, visit http://www.health2con.com.
