Friday, March 11, 2011

Cool Technology of the Week

I've written previously about the SHARP grants and the Harvard project to create modular healthcare applications that run on a platform, analogous to the Apple AppStore.

The government has just announced the Smart Apps challenge.  

You too could be the author of the next hot app for healthcare and be paid for your innovation.

Imagine all the energy we could harness if our most talented engineers wrote modular EHRs instead of "Angry Birds"

Here's the detail of the challenge.

May the coding begin!

6 comments:

Rob Tweed said...

Can I suggest that anyone interested in taking up this challenge takes a look at EWD Mobile: https://groups.google.com/group/enterprise-web-developer-community/browse_thread/thread/56d111653735b29d?hl=en

Suki Tsui said...

Google just launched an app at the right moment for the right cause in response to Japan earthquake:

http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=en

That's smart!

Medical Quack said...

I love the Angry Bird comment and agree, if we could just channel a portion of that energy that goes into coding for games we would be miles ahead and I have expressed the same types of thoughts here and there as well as a little more collaboration on similar or same projects.

Suki Tsui said...

According to a recent article on NYTimes, Angry Birds has close to 100 million downloads and is about to raise $42 million VC$.

I have a confession to make: i.e. I am one of the 100 million, downloaded the app just out of curiosity, but not "angry" enough to obsessively slingshot the evil pigs.

Tim Benjamin said...

In theory, this kind of competition is great. However, few developers come from a healthcare background. Which means they typically have little - if any - understanding of the problems that need solving. Perhaps the SMART Challenge would be more effective if it first gave the developer community access to the doctors/nurses/researchers/IT people/patients who's problems they're being asked to address.

Chris Tonozzi, MD said...

I appreciate Tim Benjamin's point, but I'm on the other side of the fence. I'm a clinician and have lots of EHR and database background, but no web coding experience. I've got lots of ideas for apps I'd love to see, but I don't have the technological background to code them. Get a hold of me, coders! We can share the $5000 :)