Contest Produces Consumer Friendly Health Records

Competition focused on improving look of downloaded health records, and Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT hopes EHR vendors will participate in followup project.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has announced the winners of a contest to improve the graphic design of patient health records (PHRs). They were selected from a field of over 230 entries submitted during the past three months.

The purpose of the competition was to improve the appearance and usability of "Blue Button" downloads, which are plain text files containing personal health data from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense and Medicare, as well as private payers such as Aetna, United Healthcare and Kaiser Permanente. In addition, ONC said it hopes that electronic health record vendors will integrate the final design into their own products to facilitate Blue Button downloads of clinical data.

The best overall design came from a Chicago firm called gravitytank. Their Nightingale entry displayed medications and medical history in a way "that made it easier for a senior citizen to understand," said ONC's HealthIT Buzz Blog. The second place winner, Studio TACK from Brooklyn, N.Y., focused on displaying medical problems and histories. In third place was Blue Button by Design. Created by a San Francisco group called Method, it was designed specifically for use on mobile devices...