Blue Button Mashup Challenge

Just by using Blue Button (VA.gov/bluebutton), more than 750,000 seniors, Veterans and other service members and their families can download their health and medical records and actively take part in their health care. The Consumer eHealth Program in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is hoping to bring the Blue Button to all Americans.

We recently announced a new Investing in Innovation (i2) competition that calls on developers to create an app that mashes up an individual’s Blue Button personal health data with open public health data that will result in better health care, better health, and lower costs.  ONC’s i2 program promotes the use of technology to find solutions that drive better outcomes, engage users in their health, and improve health care quality.

Blue Button was launched in 2010 by the Department of Veterans Affairs and it gives patients a highly visible, clickable button that enables them to download their medical records in digital form from a secure website offered by their doctors, insurers, pharmacies or other health-related service. It is now used by nearly a half million Veterans, a quarter million Medicare beneficiaries and nearly 75,000 Service Members and their families.  Blue Button appears on the patient portals of more than one third of America’s hospitals and nearly one third of practicing physicians, and has been or is being implemented by more than 200 major health plans including Aetna, United Health Care and Blue Cross. It is quickly expanding beyond the VA to have nationwide impact and working with the VA, ONC is looking to developers to help bring this tool to all Americans...