Dive Brief:
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The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) announced that CedarBridge Group, EMR Direct, Foxhall Wythe, Live and Leave Well and Lush Group will progress to the third and final phase of the Move Health Data Forward Challenge.
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The finalists were selected from a group of 10 participants that had progressed from phase one based on their ability to demonstrate viable solutions to challenges related to the flow of health information.
- Participants in the final phase of the challenge will be tasked with creating mobile or web-based applications to implement the solutions they presented in phase two.
Dive Insight:
Over the past year or so, interoperability has emerged as a top priority for ONC. The Move Health Data Forward Challenge was launched to build upon work accomplished by the Health Relationship Trust Workgroup, which has collaborated on the development of privacy and security specifications that enable individuals to control access to their personal health information.
Each of the five participants moving to the final phase of the challenge developed products that support interoperability in one way or another. One participant offers a platform for electronically storing and sharing end-of-life plans and another offers a mobile app that allows patients to authorize provider access to electronic health information stored in EHRs.
This is not the first time that ONC has used challenges to encourage entrepreneurs and startups to come up with creative ways to address interoperability issues. Last July, it announced winners to the Consumer Health Data Aggregator Challenge and the Provider User Experience Challenge. PatientLink Enterprises won the consumer challenge with its MyLinks app and Heral Health won the provider challenge with an alert management tool.
Two phase three winners of the Move Health Data Forward Challenge will be announced on Feb. 23. Each of these will receive $50,000.