ONC Developer App Challenge

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Posted By: Roberta Mullin May 1, 2013

Apps4TotsHealth Challenge

In September 2009 President Obama outlined and initiated his Strategy for American Innovation. He called on agencies to “increase their ability to promote innovation by using tools such as prizes and challenges to solve tough problems.” The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) then issued the guidelines on challenges, contests, and prizes in March of 2010. The guidelines provide a policy and legal framework to guide agencies in using prizes to advance their missions through innovation. Challenge.gov was created as a platform for agencies to list, track, and promote their challenges.

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), and Healthdata.gov have joined together as the sponsor this developers challenge. They are asking developers, researchers, and innovators to create a new or evolve an existing platform. The platform will make use of the Healthdata.gov data API and integrate the TXT4Tots message library.

TXT4Tots is a library of short, evidence-based messages focused on nutrition and physical activity. The library is targeted to parents and caregivers of children, ages 1-5 years, and is available in English and Spanish. Content for the messages was derived from American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children and Adolescents, which uses a developmentally based approach to address children’s health needs in the context of family and community.

Healthdata.gov (www.healthdata.gov) is the Department’s open data catalog, housing metadata records on close to 400 HHS datasets. Recently, Healthdata.gov has enabled a publicly-accessible data application programming interface (API) that allows programmatic access to the TXT4Tots message library.

The Challenge

The intent of the challenge is to showcase the use of the new data API on Healthdata.gov and incorporate the TXT4Tots message library into a new or existing platform. For complete details on how to get involved with this challenge visit the challenge page.

Timeline

  • Submission period begins: April 10, 2012
  • Submission period ends: May 20, 2013
  • Winners notified: May 31, 2013
  • Winners announced: Health Datapalooza, June 3-4, 2013

Prizes

  • Total: $25,000 in prizes
  • First Place: $17,500
  • Second Place: $5,000
  • Third Place: $2,500
  • Honorable Mention (no monetary award) for best unfinished app

Review Criteria

The review panel will make selections based upon the following criteria:

  • Application usability and intuitive user interface – 25%
  • Application completeness – 25%
  • Creativity in solving specific health problem(s) – 25%
  • Innovative integration into a larger platform (new or existing) – 25%