New opportunities for innovations in the health industry are everywhere, thanks in part to more sophisticated smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices. In early March we highlighted a mobile health app contest being put on by Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. Winners were announced earlier this week, working to help welcome a new wave of apps to hospitals, patients and physicians.
The winning app, Meducation, created by Polyglot Systems, Inc., a health IT company with a focus on improving care and access for underserved patient populations. Meducation app will provide “multilingual, patient-friendly instructions for medications listed in a physician’s electronic medical record or the personally controlled health record of a patient.” The app is available in a dozen languages, and you can read an in-depth explanation — including more background on the need for such an app — here.
In addition to the winner, several other health apps were named Honorable Mentions:
- Clinical Research facilitates interoperability between an EMR system and a clinical electronic data capture system
- MyNote provides an intuitive, interactive timeline of patient history with disease-specific schemes, and allows patients to annotate the timeline
- Priority Contact enhances the work process of a clinician by managing contact with patients after they have left the clinic and new information relevant to their treatment plan has been obtained
- DxSocial matches patients with doctors based on their experience treating patients similar to them matches patients with doctors based on their experience treating patients similar to them
- Medications Risk Maps for SMArt helps identify and compare medication side effects and risk of adverse events across drugs
- rxInfo is a suite of SMART apps to help identify patients for clinical trials, provide drug interaction information, FDA Label information about marketed drugs, and a listing of nearby federally funded health centers
This $5,000 SMART App contest was put on alongside Children’s and Harvard’s launch of the equivalent of an iTunes App Store for health. That platform, dubbed SMArt (Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies), was developed by these researchers as part of a $15M grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health (ONC). The platform is a, “first-of-its kind platform architecture to support a flexible health information technology environment and promote innovation.” You can view a video explaining the platform below:
SMART Quick Overview from SMART Platforms on Vimeo.
The idea for this SMArt architecture was described first in a March 2009 New England Journal of Medicine Perspectives article, as an “iPhone-like health IT platform model” to facilitate the development of medical applications that are scalable, substitutable, and will drive improved health care through competition and innovation.
Submissions were be accepted through the end of March, which judges then reviewed (view all submissions here). Judges included Susanna Fox (Director of Health Research at the Pew Internet & American Life Project), Doug Solomon (CTO at design consultancy IDEO), as well as professors from HBS, Yale and the University of Maryland.
Congrats to the winners!
