By Pat Salber

June 3rd was the kick-off for an amazing Challenge – the Blue Button Patient CoDesign Challenge.  Developers everywhere are being invited by the Office of the National Coordinator to develop apps and other tools to use patient data, acquired via the Blue Button. You might be thinking: why is that so amazing?  Because the entire Challenge has been designed to actively involve the ultimate users of the tool – patients. Imagine that!

Here are the details:

http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/blue-button-co-design-challenge/

From now until June 11th, patients (which includes almost all of us) are invited to go to Health Tech Hatch to post their ideas about how they want to see their data used to create tools that they can use themselves or with their doctors. There are already over 50 ideas already posted, which include:

• Please help my wife manage our children’s immunizations
• A tool that simplifies the management of chronic multiple conditions,
• Make my prescription management stink less (my favorite)

Three of the ideas will be chosen as the ones developers should design tools for. But they won’t build them alone. Patients are being invited to participate in a CoDesign process where they can iterate with the developers and help shape the tools over time.

Patients can email info@healthtechhatch.com to take part as testers and will even be paid for their time!

Details for the developer side of the challenge will be run by our partners at Health 2.0 at the main challenge site.

At the completion of the CoDesign phase, patients will be invited to vote for the winners.

Patient centered health care is the wave of the future…at last.

Kudos to ONC and the leaders of this wonderful Challenge:  Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology; Rebecca Mitchell Coelius, Medical Officer for Innovation, ONC Office of Science and Technology; and Adam Wong, Management and Program Analyst. ONC.

Pat Salber is CEO of Health Tech Hatch and blogs at The Doctor Weighs In.