The Challenge required contestants to create online tools allowing users to access at least one of the eight public use files (PUFs) covering eight types of 2008 Medicare claims data released last year: inpatient, durable medical equipment, hospice, carrier line, home health, Medicare Part D, outpatient and skilled nursing facility. Applications were judged on the potential to help address two key Medicare claims data issues -  usability, and the potential for integration with existing claims systems and other health technology platforms.

The first place winner was Zenithech, a Fairfax, Virginia-based developer of web and mobile applications. The company won $7,500 and two passes to the Health 2.0 Spring Fling Matchpoint Boston conference for developing MEDZ, a dashboard that displays and lets users conduct in-depth analysis of all eight PUFs for comparative research and in-depth analysis.

Avanade, a business technology solutions and managed services provider, captured second place with a business intelligence reporting tool called DataGnosis that enables researchers to perform canned and ad-hoc reporting on all eight PUFs. Users also can tie those claims with U.S. Census data, positioning them to identify trends and patterns across each state. Avanade was awarded $2,000.

Big Yellow Star, a Philadelphia company (and familiar Health 2.0 Challenge winner) focused on health informatics, public health and health literacy projects, was awarded third place. It received $500 for a dashboard that makes hospice and outpatient PUFs accessible to users.

“The ingenuity, innovation and creativity the participants demonstrated were exceptional,” said Indu Subaiya, Co-Chair and CEO of Health 2.0, “The tools they created will facilitate and foster exciting research that will drive new ideas and approaches to improve quality of care, lower costs and shape health policy. It was a tough competition, and we congratulate the winners.”

On March 10th, 2012, Health 2.0′s Co-Chairman, CEO and our fearless leader, Indu Subaiya participated in a SXSW panel, providing a great overview of Health 2.0′s challenge and code-a-thon process from the perspective of developers and companies new to health technology. The panel also hosted top industry and policy leaders including Aman Bhandari, Senior Adviser for Innovation at HHS, Cristin Dorgelo Asst. Director for Grand Challenges at the White House Office Of Science And Technology Policy, and Jeffrey Davis, Director Space Life Sciences at NASA.

The room was packed as panel members discussed the various ways they’ve applied challenges to their respective fields and how such competitions are being implemented in healthcare today. Cristin Dorgelo discussed the history and key characteristics of successful challenge models followed by Jeffrey Davis who spoke about his experience in designing challenges to further government research. Indu Subaiya then discussed Health 2.0′s Developer Challenge and how our competitions are playing a critical role by incentivising individuals in a  landscape crowded by organizations targeting large institutions.

The SXSW Interactive audience did not disappoint – asking informed questions highlighting the growing role challenges are playing in the Interactive space. Questions included:

• Are challenge sponsors just outsourcing the risk?
• How do we change institutional culture to promote innovation an get large organizations more comfortable with fast, frequent but soft failure?
• Can challenges or participants in challenges enact real change in a space as large and as regulated as healthcare?
• How do sponsors and teams manage intellectual property?

Please take a moment to check out the video above and, if you’d like to learn more, you can see Indu’s slides here.

• Todd Park U.S. Chief Technology Officer
• Eric Dishman Intel Fellow and Director of Health Innovation at Intel
• Dr. Paul Tang Chief Innovation and Technology Officer of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation

“More than anywhere else in the country, Silicon Valley is perfectly positioned to apply innovative thinking to the universal challenges of aging,” according to Paul Tang, M.D., chief innovation and technology officer for PAMF. “We live in the heart of technological innovation and have a proud history of excellent health care and supportive community organizations. We can be a national model for how the community supports aging and living well.As part of this event PAMF wants developers to think about significant signals relevant to a senior’s health that if detected and acted upon, could lead to significantly better health outcomes over the long term for that individual. The signals might be clinical (symptoms), social (neighbors notice they have started letting their house and garden go), or both (several missed medical appointments). This event and the related “Successful Aging Challenge” will focus on asking developers to 1) select signals they believe might be important and relevant 2) prototype creative systems in which those signals could be detected, analyzed and visualized to appropriate parties 3) show what actions would be taken as a result and 4) describe how that would influence the health of a senior.

In an event open to the public, both Park and Dishman will discuss the social and health challenges of aging and the tremendous opportunities to apply technology in disruptive, innovative ways to help seniors live vibrant and fulfilling lives – aging successfully. Dr. Tang will describe PAMF’s linkAges successful aging initiative and PAMF’s role as a community health partner.

Following the morning keynotes, developer teams from around the country will engage in ideation sessions, focusing on innovative solutions to address the challenges heard in the public symposium. Top ideas will be awarded monetary prizes.

The Developer Kick-Off Event will be focused primarily on brainstorming, storyboarding, and the creation of basic product wireframes. The workshop will then lead into a related 3-month developer challenge, where the top prize will include an opportunity to participate in an accelerator program with the PAMF Innovation Center. Participants in the developer kick-off event will benefit from additional education and feedback that may facilitate their successful participation in the developer challenge.

For many Americans, celebrity athletes like Lance Briggs represent a primary source of health and wellness information. Beyond some of the most well funded public health initiatives, celebrity athletes and their respective brands have the power to influence the healthy decisions of millions simply due to their existing media penetration. This is why Michelle Obama worked with Beyonce on the Let’s Move! Campaign and Harvard’s Berkman Center recently teamed up with Lady Gaga to launch the Born this Way Foundation.  Improving our nation’s health will depend on developers’ ability to leverage culture as much as it will depend on their ability to leveraging data.

The resulting apps reflected a strong mix of health data, NFL media tie-ins and the slick UI one might expect from the SXSWi community. Despite the many SXSW events competing for our developers’ attention, the Hackathon room was packed and a buzzing with energy as judging began. Built in just 24 hours, the winning teams included:

Team Full Fit Pet: Created a virtual pet to inspire people get out and exercise. Real step data would be used to effect the relative health of a cartoon dog. Depending on your activity, the digital puppy on your mobile phone could appear happy, sad, distracted or even dead. [Both the AWS 1st Place Winner and AT&T mHealth 1st Place Winner]

Team Moves.US: Built a twitter game using step-count data and establishing social connections around shared health goals. Players earned points by connecting their twitter accounts via mobile phones and QR codes and collecting steps with their phone’s accelerometer. Similar to IDEO’s Maker Fair project, the more steps and social connections made, the higher a player’s score. [AT&T mHealth 2nd Place Winner]

Team Boogie Up: Built a mobile app that would incentivise positive behavior change and build Lance’s brand beyond the market of football. The app helped fanatics design a healthy life “just like Lance” by gamifying small activities endorsed by the football star himself. Users could replicate Lance’s breakfast to bicep work out. The team used the AT&T mHealth API and has plans to integrate the fitbit as well as other Lance Briggs products [1st Place as the Lance Briggs Winner]

Briggs for Kids: Developed an app that allowed existing Briggs 4 Kidz community members (as well as Lance Briggs himself) to share and up-vote small acts of health and community involvement. [2nd Place Lance Briggs Winner]

Team Lance Briggs Recipes:  Leveraged Lance’s love of cooking and allowed him to share recipes with his fans via mobile devices. The app also allowed fans to share their own recipes and provide feedback for the community. [Both AWS 2st Place Winner and 3rd Place Lance Briggs Winner]

Team Real Heroes:  Developed an iPad app that allowed fans to capture inspiring stories that they could share with Lance Briggs and other Lance Briggs fans. Using the idea of the internet’s “infinite screen,” the app let fans build a collaborative comic-book-style collection of photos and videos of small heroic acts. [4st Place as the Lance Briggs Winner]

Team Everyday Heroes: Wanted to catalyze community involvement around emerging community events. The app allowed community members to vote on and geolocate upcoming events as well as awarded active community members with badges and points.

Team Guardian Trace: Built a personal security app that allowed users to automatically send a text message of their last known location if they fail to check-in after a set period of time. Similar to a house alarm or a dead-man’s pedal, the absence of user involvement generates an alarm to a select social network. The app was designed to empower users to get out and exercise in their local neighborhoods by helping them feel safe.

Team TheraBit: Used the profiling data from smartphone sensors to determine if a user was correctly performing an exercise. Interesting features included the ability for popular athletes or clinicians to upload exercise or rehabilitation techniques that could be remotely validated. The method used to validate motion did not require a user to hold the phone at a particular point on their body.

The presence of health technology has gained an incredible amount of attention at SXSW in a short period of time. Panel members briefly reminisced about the informal health tech meetings they used to host in the corner of a windowless room and celebrated how health is now on SXSW’s main stages.  Without a spare seat in the house, the popularity of the panel indicated the growing interest in health technology, challenges and the SXSW community’s desire to aid our nation’s healthcare system.

In the past year, prizes and challenges have come in to vogue in the health sector. Competitions have a long history of benefiting humanity and driving major breakthroughs in industries from space flight to oil clean up. But prizes are also effective at crowdsourcing innovation, accelerating progress, and attracting new talent. The panel discussed the various ways they’ve applied challenges to their respective fields and how such competitions are being implemented in healthcare today.

Panel member, Cristin Dorgelo Asst. Director for Grand Challenges at the White House Office Of Science And Technology Policy, discussed the history and key characteristics of successful challenge models. She was followed by Jeffrey Davis, Dir, Space Life Sciences at NASA, who spoke about his experience in designing challenges to further government research and the importance of rooting competitions in a larger development strategy. Indu Subaiya then discussed Health 2.0′s Developer Challenge and how our competitions are playing a critical role by incentivising individuals in a  landscape crowded by organizations targeting large institutions.

Indu’s presentation also gave a great overview of Health 2.0′s challenge and code-a-thon process from the perspective of developers and companies new to health technology. The individual developer might not know how to role-out an enterprise solution across Kaiser Permanente’s network. But various events by Health 2.0, along with a growing ecosystem of health incubators and government programs, are establishing a structure and process to help.  If you’d like to learn more, you can see her slides here.

The SXSW Interactive audience did not disappoint – asking informed questions highlighting the growing role challenges are playing in the Interactive space. Questions included:

• Are challenge sponsors just outsourcing the risk?
• How do we change institutional culture to promote innovation an get large organizations more comfortable with fast, frequent but soft failure?
• Can challenges or participants in challenges enact real change in a space as large and as regulated as healthcare?
• How do sponsors and teams manage intellectual property?

We recommend you watch the video for concise answers from the expert panel but, if you’d like to jump directly into SXSW’s fastest growing scene, be sure to register for the Health 2.0’s SXSW Code Blue Party on Monday March 12^th. There, you can mingle with these Health Tech’s thought leaders and get connected to the space.

Commuting is a fundamental aspect of working in the United States, comprising 20% of all trips taken. Among the 140 million workers in America, 86% commuted in a car, truck, or van in 2009. The average commute is 25 minutes, while 3.2 million workers traveled for more than 90 minutes. (“Commuting in the United States: 2009,” U.S. Census Bureau)

Commuting has been shown to correlate with a variety of health problems, as long commutes are associated with high cholesterol, recurring neck and back pain, and higher stress levels. However, these results have come primarily from population studies on general health impact rather than the analysis of granular data collected from individual commuters.

The rise of new technologies such as mobile computing and inexpensive data-collecting sensors should open up new frontiers in determining the effects of commuting on health. The “Health Innovations in Commuting Challenge” intends to put the pedal to the metal by inviting innovators to submit their best ideas and models for improving the health of American commuters through better collection, exchange, and analysis of health data. Entries will be evaluated on the novelty of the proposal in driving improvement in health outcomes, the understanding of the effects of commuting on outcomes, and the identification and utility of potential future partnerships.

Think you have the next great idea? Submissions are due by April 13, 2012. Complete details are available here.

For additional information about the Investing in Innovation (i2) program, visit Health 2.0′s ONC page.

The Mobile App Hackathon will kick off at 6 p.m. on March 9th with informative speakers and an idea pitch session. With the technical support of AT&T and the industry insight of Health 2.0, developers will then be given 24 intense hours to rapidly prototype health app concepts using AT&T’s healthcare APIs. This hacking competition will also provide participants with the opportunity to showcase their skills, make valuable industry connections, and get hands on experience in heath care’s booming mobile market.

Health 2.0 and AT&T will review all health submissions but the judging panel will also include special celebrity guest, Chicago Bears seven-time Pro-Bowl linebacker Lance Briggs. In addition, the event will feature over $45,000 in cash and prizes – including HTC Jetstream tablets and Sierra Wireless 4G Elevate devices. The winner with the best health care app will be also be showcased at Health 2.0 Spring Fling Matchpoint Boston and will automatically be entered as an AT&T funded startup as part of Startup Health’s Academy.

Simple IT-enabled processes and tools can help make transitions easier and safer for providers, patients and care givers by addressing the gaps in and burdens of coordination to effect and  better care, better health and lower cost. Scheduling follow-up appointments and post-discharge testing before leaving the hospital helps ensure safer and more effective transitions.  Unfortunately, most patients across the country continue to leave the hospital without confirmed appointments and many providers remain frustrated by a highly manual and unreliable system.

Nearly one in five patients from a hospital will be readmitted within 30 days. A large proportion of readmissions can be prevented by improving communications and coordinating care before and after discharge from the hospital. ONC is challenging software developers to create easy-to-use web-based tools that will make post-discharge follow-up appointment scheduling a more effective and shared process for care providers, patients and caregivers.  To support the goal of wide-spread adoption, the winner of the challenge will receive partnership consideration with a pilot test bed community candidate, and up to $5,000 to support a three-day site visit to the pilot community.

Have a great idea? Submissions are due April 30, 2012. Winners will receive $5,000 and a pilot opportunity. For more information about the Discharge Follow-Up Appointment Challenge, visit our challenge page here.

Sign up for registration updates

The Forum will allow for up to 1,000 people to attend and will feature keynote addresses, an Apps Expo, demonstrations of new, cutting-edge apps and thought-provoking panel discussions. It is a great opportunity work with innovative data applications designed to improve health and health care. This year’s event is one you do not want to miss. Go to www.hdiforum.org to sign up to receive updates and a notification when registration opens. A complete website with the program agenda and meeting details will be available in early March.

Participate in the Health Datapalooza! Call for Submissions

The submission link is now available for those interested in: ….

1. Presenting an app or product during the main session
2. Demonstrating an app or product in another session (apps demos or breakout sessions)
3. Having a table in the Apps Expo
4. Making an “action beat” announcement of important, breaking news about your organization’s use of health data

The online submission form can be found here. Once received, your organization will be provided with additional detail and dates regarding the ‘virtual audition’ process.

Important dates:

• · The deadline to submit your app is Friday, March 30 (Additional details will follow for those organizations selected to participate in the virtual audition)
• · Notification of placement in the Forum will be made by Monday, April 23

We are excited about the 2012 Health Data Initiative Forum: The Health Datapalooza – and hope you are too! Sign up for your update today!

Register

The webinar will feature presentations that outline the basics of the Direct Project and the Blue Button initiatives, as well as provide real life examples (use cases) of how each is making it easier for individuals to access their health information electronically.  In addition, they will provide updates on the ONC Consumer e-Health Program activities and available resources to help people to access their information and use it to be more engaged partners in their health.

Speakers: