ONC Health IT Announces Ocular Imaging and SMART-Indivo App Challenge Winners

Developer Challenge
January 17, 2013 - By Hemali Thakkar and Mel Meder

Technological solutions continue to create higher levels of efficacy and patient engagement in healthcare, as winning technologies from two recent innovation challenges demonstrate. Winners of the following challenges, which were sponsored by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) in partnership with Health 2.0, have developed technologies to advance ophthalmologists’ imaging capabilities as well as expanded patient understanding of health data. ONC’s challenge program has covered topics ranging from care transitions to Blue Button, from cancer trial discovery to patient safety, resulting in the creation of new tools that benefit consumers and providers.

The Ocular Imaging Challenge asked applicants to create an application that would store and integrate imaging data from ophthalmology exams into existing electronic health record software systems. Such a system would resolve existing compatibility issues between different types of software in ophthalmology practices.

The winner, TSGiView from TSG Innovations Inc., has created a solution for eye care clinics that standardizes imaging data to DICOM specifications to ensure that databases can be accessed by applications such as electronic health records and billing systems. The Global Retinal Imager (GRI) suite by Estenda Solutions placed second and the EyeDoc Imaging application by Penn Medical Informatics Systems Inc. placed third.

The SMART-Indivo App Challenge tasked developers to build an Indivo application that provides value to patients using data distributed through the SMART API and its Indivo-specific extensions. Indivo is the original personal health platform, enabling an individual to own and manage a complete, secure, digital copy of her health and wellness information. Developers could, for example, build a medication manager, a health risk detector, a patient-friendly laboratory visualization tool, or an app that integrated external data sources (see http://www.healthdata.gov/) with patient records in real time.

The winner, WebNotes, created by Applied Informatics Inc., is a cross-browser bookmarklet web app that allows patients to store and categorize health-related web page snippets in their Indivo health record. The My Health Plus application by Composite Apps placed second and the rxInfo suite by EXIM Services of North America, Inc placed third.

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  • apgolota

    Congratulations to TSG Innovations (TSGiView) on you successful implementation of Legacy Ophthalmic Instrument Integration using the well known standard of DICOM. Now true interoperability will exist between proprietary instrument data silos and the patient record using DICOM & HL7 messaging. Any legacy digital Imaging instrument such as OCT, Fundus, Visual Fields, etc., can send images/data to any EMR that is capable of accepting HL7 messaging. This saves the clinic vast amounts of money since they no longer have to purchase ‘new’ digital instrumentation just to communicate to the EMR/EHR. Distributed by Ophthalmic Tools.