Today, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the National Cancer Institute announced Medable as the winner of the Crowds For Care Cancer Challenge with their submission Together, that helps survivors coordinate cancer care.
Together, an app developed for the iPhone offers patient a secure platform for collaborative cancer care where patients can invite multiple providers to chat about their care, get questions answered and hopefully engage in a patient-centered dialogue. The app aims to serve as a “care conversation” tool that help cancer survivors transition between specialists and primary care providers.
Understanding the growth of the quantified self movement in healthcare, Together has the ability to easily integrate with commercial wearable sensor data – like that from home blood pressure monitors or wearable devices like Fitbit. Medable claims Together is the first application that enables a patient to share commercial wearable sensor directly with their provider.
The team lead by Stanford resident physician, Dr. Michelle Longmire was chosen as one of three finalists along with the other two finalists Patients with Power and Journey Forward during Health DataPalooza IV from a pool of 30 submitted cancer tools to the first phase of the Crowds Care for Cancer Challenge.
The 3 finalists launched a 30-day crowdfunding campaign on MedStartr, where they attained additional seed funding as well as product validation for further iterations of their tools. The teams turned in their final submissions on July 12 for judging by the review panel.
Medable was awarded the $25,000 grand prize and will exhibit their app at the 2013 Rock Health Innovation Summit this week.
Background
With the support of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, ONC launched the “Crowds Care for Cancer: Supporting Survivors” challenge in April as part of ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) program. The i2 program, managed by Health 2.0, utilizes prizes and challenges to facilitate innovation and obtain solutions to intractable health IT problems. The review panel will make selections based upon the following criteria:
- The submission is an innovative information management tool or application deployable on any personal computing platform widely available to consumers;
- The tool or application addresses the needs of cancer survivors managing their transition from specialty to primary care;
- Usability and design;
- Evidence of co-design with, and support from users of proposed tool or application (e.g., patients, families, primary/specialty caregivers, insurers, and/or hospital systems);
- Innovation and differentiation from existing technologies and products;
- Functionality, accuracy, integration with electronic care platforms, and use of Blue Button+ standards (bluebuttonplus.org) and other sources of health-related information; and,
- Customizability and ability to adapt to evolving survivorship care needs including primary/specialist care interactions.