SMArt Prize for Patients, Physicians, and Researchers

This week a research team at Children’s Hospital of Boston and Harvard Medical School launched a prize to encourage innovative app developers to build new products and services that benefit patients and providers.

The prize was created with funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT within the Department of Health and Human Services, and constitutes just the latest in a growing number of examples of the Federal government fostering R&D collaboration through open innovation.

The SMArt Prize competition could speed innovation in any number of areas. Developers might build a medication manager, a health risk detector, a laboratory visualization tool, or an app that integrates, in real time, patient data with external data sources—such as publication data in PubMed, CDC statistics, environmental data, financial data available at http://www.data.gov/health. In doing so, SMArt promises to help patients, doctors, and others realize the full potential of information technology to help transform how we manage health and healthcare.

The best app developed for the SMArt API by May 31 will win a $5,000 prize, as determined by an all-star panel of judges.