The New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), in partnership Health 2.0, invites designers and developers to participate in the Patient Portal for New Yorkers Design Challenge with $25,000 in prizes. Starting today, designers and developers can submit prototypes for a statewide patient portal for New Yorkers —a website for patients to access their medical records online. The top portal interface designs will be chosen and voted upon by New Yorkers after the April 11th deadline.
Designers and developers who sign up for the challenge will be given a simulated patient data set to build their portals with and will not have access to actual patient data during the competition. Once all of the submissions are received on April 11th, the New York public will be invited to vote on their favorite designs from April 11-21. The designs with the strongest responses will be invited to present their project at two different demo days—one in New York City in April and another at a location upstate in early May. A winner will be announced shortly thereafter.
The winner of the challenge will then be invited to work with the state of New York to build out their portfolio and run it on the state’s network of exchanges.
The patient portal also compliments the information available through the Blue Button, a knowledge tool being coordinated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that helps users download their personal health information. Blue Button is an initiative supported by HHS to essentially create an electronic medical record standard in terms of what information patients and doctors can expect to be encapsulated in a given medical record. HHS is working with networks like the New York eHealth Collaborative to sign onto using Blue Button.
“This is a chance for developers and designers to advance healthcare for all 20 million New Yorkers. A portal of this size and scope has never before existed,” said David Whitlinger, Executive Director of NYeC. “We look forward to seeing all submissions, and eventually building this portal so patients throughout the state have full access to their health records.”
As CivSource has reported, NYeC is active in sponsoring other challenges and silicon valley style venture capital support initiatives for small companies in the health care industry. Beyond challenges and funding NYeC is working with state stakeholders to build out an electronic health information exchange network throughout New York and the surrounding area.
