News Release

Winner of the Relevant Evidence to Advance Care and Health Challenge announced

Grant and Award Announcement

AcademyHealth

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- AcademyHealth today announced that an experimental application to track patients' care experiences in real time is the winner of the Relevant Evidence to Advance Care and Health (REACH) Developer Challenge. An international team of researchers including Deirdre McCaughey, Dominique LaRochelle, Aamer Ghaffer, Tejal Raichura, Shantanu Dholakia, Latoya Tatum, and Ashley Kimmel won first place with their project, Real-time Care Experience Feedback Using QR Codes.

The competition was part of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge program and included a cash prize in addition to opportunities to work directly with AcademyHealth to further develop, vet and disseminate the winning product.

AcademyHealth, a nonprofit health policy and research organization, launched the REACH Challenge to foster collaboration between the research and developer communities, and to produce innovative applications that provide access to evidence-based information to support more meaningful engagement and real-time decision-making.

"The powerful combination of technology, social media, and data enable whole new ways of conceiving and conducting research," said AcademyHealth President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Simpson. "We launched the REACH Challenge to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of health services research, to encourage interactions between researchers and nontraditional partners, and to get people thinking about the many ways this kind of work might improve health and health care."

Submitted projects ranged from applications to help patients engage more fully in their care, to platforms that helped support caregivers and clinicians. The winning submission, Real-time Care Experience Feedback Using QR Codes, looked at ways that patients could provide feedback using their mobile phones at the point of care. Runners up included the Child & Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative's Well Visit Planner Mobile App, mobile data application to help parents plan and navigate their child's well visits, and Aggregated Self-Experiments, a platform that helps patients develop user-generated self-experiments and online information.

All three teams will receive travel support to AcademyHealth's 2012 Annual Research Meeting (ARM) in Orlando, Florida to showcase their submissions. In addition, the winning team will be awarded $5,000 plus travel support to attend a private meeting where they will have an opportunity to workshop their application with health policy thought leaders in conjunction with the AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference (NHPC).

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More Information:

Winner: Real-time Care Experience Feedback Using QR Codes: http://mhealthcoach.com/RealTimeFeedbackLight.jpg; Deirdre McCaughey can be reached at dxm68@psu.edu

Runner Up: Well Visit Planner – A demo of the Well Visit Planner online tool is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQMtCoFcWlA. Please contact pcw@cahmi.org for more information.

Runner Up: Aggregated Personal Experiments, a C3N platform from MIT Media Lab, Lybba, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, that helps patients develop user-generated self-experiments: http://www.personalexperiments.org/

More information about AcademyHealth's resources, initiatives and projects can be found at http://www.academyhealth.org. You can learn more about the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge at http://www.health2challenge.org.

About the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge: The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge was launched on June 2, 2010, with support from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The goal of these challenges is to bring the Health 2.0 Community together for rapid application development, both online and in physical code-a-thons. For more see http://www.health2challenge.org.

About Health 2.0: Health 2.0 -- The conference. The media network. The Innovation community. The Health 2.0 Conference is the leading showcase of cutting-edge technologies in health care, including Online Communities, Search and lightweight Tools for consumers to manage their health and connect to providers online. The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge is a series of prize competitions promoting health technology innovation. Health 2.0 also has its own media channels, Health 2.0 News and Health 2.0 TV; its own market intelligence service, Health 2.0 Advisors; and also sponsors the Health 2.0 Accelerator industry consortium. Health 2.0 was founded by Indu Subaiya & Matthew Holt in 2007 and is now a community of hundreds of organizations and thousands of innovators. For more information, see http://www.health2con.com.

About AcademyHealth: AcademyHealth is a leading national organization serving the fields of health services and policy research and the professionals who produce and use this important work. Together with its members, AcademyHealth offers programs and services that support the development and use of rigorous, relevant, and timely evidence to increase the quality, accessibility, and value of health care, to reduce disparities, and to improve health. A trusted broker of information, AcademyHealth brings stakeholders together to address the current and future needs of an evolving health system, inform health policy, and translate evidence into action. Website: http://www.academyhealth.org; Twitter: @academyhealth and @NHPC


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