Winners Announced in “Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control” Innovation Challenge

At the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS) yesterday, Wednesday January 5, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced the winners of the “Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control: From Innovation to Impact” Challenge.  Congratulations to the winning teams, Ask Dory! and My Cancer Genome.

The public challenge launched in July 2011 in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute and under the auspices of the ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) program.  The Challenge asked developers to create solutions that addressed various gaps in foci across the cancer control continuum. In addition to building applications that bridge these gaps, participants were instructed to design solutions in ways that promoted and made possible healthy decision-making, early detection and adherence to treatment plans.

The Challenge was conducted in two phases.  In the first, applications were evaluated on their use of cancer-related data, impact on the continuum of care, integration with EHR and PHR, innovation and usability.  Four winners were selected to proceed to the second phase and evaluated based on their progress from the first round.

The winning teams, Ask Dory! and My Cancer Genome, will receive $20,000 in prizes for their success. The Ask Dory! application helps patients locate nearby clinical trials, integrate data from www.ClinicalTrials.gov and uses an entropy-based decision tree algorithm.  If you’re curious, you can access a functional application demo at http://Dory.trialx.com. The My Cancer Genome application offers therapeutic options based on a patient’s gene mutations by using the NCI’s physician data query clinical trial registry data set and clinical trial gene information.  For access to a functional application and demo, you can visit www.MyCancerGenome.com.

If you’d like to learn more about this and other Challenges, please check out the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Page and, again, congratulations to the winners and many thanks to the participating teams for their hard work and effort.