Innovation Challenge winners selected

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has selected new tools that help patients better manage and access information in their EHRs as challenge winners. The winners were named during the Health 2.0 Sixth Annual Fall Conference in San Francisco, Oct. 12.

“Once patients and caregivers are able to download the tools designed by the EHR Accessibility Module and Blue Button Mash Up challenge winners and connect them to their own EHRs, they will have more tools to better manage their healthcare,’’ said Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScD, national coordinator for health IT. When fully realized, Blue Button will serve as a single tool that patients and others can use to create their own personal health record. The EHR accessibility module will make it easier for people with disabilities to access their EHRs.

The Blue Button Mash Up Challenge, launched on June 5, builds on a prior Blue Button challenge to make personal health information more usable and meaningful for the individual consumer or patient. Solvers were required to mash up Blue Button data--personal health data a patient can download using a health plan’s, doctor’s or hospital’s Blue Button function--with other open health data and information to achieve the goals of the three-part aim of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center.

The winner, iBlueButton, submitted by Humetrix of San Diego, is a dual-app system that provides an intuitive, patient-centered, secure two-way mobile solution where patients can connect to their Blue Button and other health records. iBlueButton includes features such as patient-optimized and physician-optimized displays and dashboards, medication look-up and new tools to download or print health information.

Humetrix was awarded $45,000. The second place team, Intelligent Decisions, received $20,000 while Get Real Consulting finished in third place and received $10,000.

The EHR Accessibility Module Challenge, launched on Jan. 30, asked solvers to create and test a module or application that makes it easy for people with disabilities to access and interact with the health data stored in their EHRs. Successful submissions would be able to download data from EHR systems, be simple to learn and use, and comply with standards for people with disabilities.

The winning team, Pinaxis, created Apollo, a fully accessible Internet portal that will allow patients to interact with any provider’s existing EHR system over the internet. The Pinaxis team was awarded $60,000, and the two runner-up teams, RegisterPatient and Remedy Systems, each received $5,000.