Blue Button Mash Up Challenge Winners
On Monday this week the ONC announced the winners of two Blue Button Mash Up Challenges designed to improve patients’ access to their healthcare information. The Blue Button winners were announced at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The challenge was to design an application that combines an individual’s personal health information with other data empowering them to make better decisions about their care.
The Winners
First place prize of $45,000 went to Humetrix, a mobile technology provider. The company has developed the iBlueButton, which, according to HHS, “provides an intuitive, patient-centered, secure two-way mobile ‘consumer mediated exchange’ solution, where patients become the ‘mobile connectors’ to their Blue Button and other health records anytime and anywhere.”
The company’s description of the app is one “that enables patients and their caregivers to query public databases about drug information and side effects and generate warnings when they enter a prescribed medication or side effects. The patient may also securely transmit Blue Button information to a physician with the app’s push technology.” The iBlueButton app will be made available on iTunes in the near future.
Second place prize of $20,000 went to Intelligent Decisions for their iD BlueButton App. The App is described as a “revolutionary patient-centric approach health care App using Patent Pending technology. By downloading Blue Button formatted data from any Blue Button Provider, the app can mash up all data relevant to that patient. This data is then presented in a timeline organized fashion on an iPad, allowing easy analysis and manipulation with a simple touch interface. Once this lifetime of data is presented in this dynamic timeline, the health information takes on meaning and insight that can be used by both patient and health care provider to provide a better experience, better quality service and overall lower healthcare costs.”
Kinergy Health which offers MyKinergy, a web portal connecting all care providers (family members, doctors, care managers and others) into a personal care team, won the Patient Engagement challenge, winning the grand prize of $25,000. This prize was sponsored by The Advisory Board. “The Patient Engagement Blue Button Challenge was designed to create or identify a consumer application that would enable the greatest number of individuals to make Blue Button data available to hospitals and physicians” said Aneesh Chopra, former White House chief technology officer and now a senior advisor to the company.
The Blue Button challenges are helping to create momentum for the Blue Button. Last month the initiative saw its one millionth user. The Office of Personnel Management has also requested that federal employees’ health plans offer Blue Button. And a few private healthcare organizations, such as UnitedHealth and Aetna, are beginning to incorporate it. To continue the drive and involve the community at large in the Blue Button initiative the ONC announced a consumer video challenge earlier this month.