Codeathon promotes Blue Button-enabled solutions

In its continuing bid to endorse Blue Button as a means to empower patients to download their health information, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is partnering with industry players to sponsor codeathons that promote Blue Button-enabled health apps.

The latest event, the Power of the Patient Codeathon at Health 2.0’s annual conference in San Francisco, entailed a partnership between ONC and Optum, an information and technology-enabled health services business, and Validic, an organization of developers and healthcare professionals that promotes an mHealth application program interface. At the codeathon, teams of designers, medical professionals and entrepreneurs had 36 hours or less to develop their solution.

Its winners were announced in a blog post by Maya Uppaluru, public health analyst, Division of Science and Innovation at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Codeathon recognized two categories of winners: developers who utilized patient-generated data from consumer devices to provide better care for patients outside of the clinic and applications that redesigned the Explanation of Benefits (EOB) statement to make it more user friendly.

Developer winners included:

• Edge Interns, which developed a solution that provides a safe and user-friendly environment for mental health patients that includes health evaluations, allowing doctors to schedule appointments, create medication reminders and monitor patient health remotely.
• Light Hearts, which created a congestive heart failure workflow for patients after they are discharged from the hospital, with the goals of promoting patient engagement through mobile and connected devices.
• Patient Watch, which gathers patient data from wearable devices to track physiological changes, such as blood pressure or heart rate, and alerts the patient’s doctor through the EHR if any complications arise.

Explanation of benefits winners included:

• WTF! Denied?, which extracts data from the patient’s EOB and presents it to patients in a redesigned, user-friendly layout, and allows patients to interact with each other in an online forum.
• MintMD, which consolidates, manages and verifies patients’ healthcare cost information from multiple sources.
• Archimedes, which helps patients make informed purchasing decisions on California’s Health Insurance Exchange by combining patient health data with advanced analytics to deliver personalized, ranked insurance plans.

“These creative tech solutions demonstrate what can happen when health innovators have the tools they need to make their ideas a reality, and help us envision a future where all patients have control over their own data,” Uppaluru wrote in her blog.