Walgreens Challenge Announced at HDI
This morning, at Health Data Initiative Forum in Washington, D.C., Walgreens announced their Health Guide Challenge. The competition aims to connect health information to everyday consumers at locations that are accessible to both their homes and work locations. Walgreens is hoping to transforming the role of the community pharmacy by developing a position they’re calling the “Health Guide.” This is a person who will act as a health concierge to provide hands-on support for customers in their stores.
The Health Guides will help patients obtain meaningful and actionable data pertinent to a given consumer’s health needs but they can’t do it alone. Walgreens is looking to Health 2.0′s Developer Network to help arm their team with useful applications. The challenge is to build apps and supported web service that will present aggregated HHS data to both consumers and Health Guides based upon a disease condition, topic, and location. The Health Guide and consumers could then use this tool to provide information and resources about a specific topic of interest or disease state at home or in the store.
For example, a consumer who has MS would come to the Health Guide for any and all information that might help with MS. With a quick search the Guide would pull up Clinical Trial info, Federal and State data that would be MS specific concerning specialists, hospitals and information from the local and national MS society. In this way, the consumer could instantly be plugged into all resources that would be helpful.
The first prize winners will win $25,000 plus an opportunity to spend an hour with the Walgreens Chief Information Officer and 2 free passes to the Health 2.0 Fall Conference. Second prize will be $5,000 and the third place winners will receive $3,000.
Check out the the Walgreens Developer Challenge Page to learn more or register.
Health 2.0 Developer Challenges