Smart Health Hero by LyfeChannel 
of San Carlos, California was announced the winner of the second annual Code-a-Palooza challenge during the 2014 Health Datapalooza. The team develped a new electronic tool designed to help patients and their families use Medicare claims data to make health care choices. Fifty-six developers submitted proposals to Code-a-Palooza for new visualization tools that help consumers use the 2012 Medicare Provider Payment data released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in April. Ten finalists were tapped to present their projects before challenge judges at Datapalooza on Monday. In addition to LyfeChannel, which organizes cost and other information to support patient health decisions, second and third place winners are Accordion Health of Austin, Texas and karmadata of Hingham, Massachusetts.
In addition, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is announcing the winner of the Digital Privacy Notice Challenge; PatientPrivilege of Portland Oregon. This tool will help consumers integrate notices of privacy practices from their health-care providers and health plans directly into their personal health records or into their providers’ portals. ONC and the Office of Civil Rights collaborated on the Digital Privacy Notice Challenge.
“The challenge winners and finalists demonstrate how innovation can bring the value of data and information to help patients make smarter choices about their health and care,” said Dr. DeSalvo.
The three winning submissions for the notice of privacy practices challenge took language developed in the paper-based model notice and optimized it for online consumption. These notices inform patients about the privacy practices of their health care providers or health plans as guaranteed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. PatientPrivilege developed a site that is easy to implement and customize, mobile-responsive, and is also available in Spanish; the open source implementation code can be downloaded at GitHub. The second and third place winners were The Raj , led by Raj Arangarasan, Ph.D. and the EXIT’s Health Privacy Notice Generator .
In addition to the challenge winners, ONC announced the next steps in a national effort to expand the use of Blue Button (http://healthit.gov/bluebutton) to help patients access their health information, including 23 new federal and private partners that have pledged to work with ONC to increase consumer awareness of the increasing availability of electronic access to their health information.
