Ever step out of your doctor’s office feeling overwhelmed and instantly forget all of your doctor’s instructions? Instinctively, you look down to your phone to check your texts and emails–wait, no. Instead, you look down to your phone and see that your doctor has asked you to get an X-ray and you need to pick up your Advair prescription. You can see your options for local imaging centers and pharmacies, and what they will cost you, based on your specific insurance plan and location, right on your phone before even getting home. Well, that’s new.
The days of being rushed out of your doctor’s office and forgetting your care plan are over, thanks to the Choosing Care Challenge sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The challenge, launched at Health 2.0’s Wintertech on January 11th, 2017, encouraged the development and advancement of technologies that help patients and providers identify and locate prescriptions, imaging labs, and specialists, all to fit an individual’s specific needs. Participants were equipped with resources such as APIs and data from PokitDok and Vericred. With over sixty initial Phase I applications, solutions ranged from chatbots, to web platforms and AI apps. The applications were reviewed by a panel of expert judges and narrowed down to five finalists, each awarded $5,000 to further develop their solutions.
For Phase II of the challenge, each of these five finalists were required to prove that their app or tool is more effective than the others. They displayed the app or tool and how it would be used in a short video, and provided the working solution itself for the judges to interact with in real time. The judges evaluated each submission based upon the following four criteria:
- How helpful is the solution to patients?
- How strong is the solution’s potential for scalability?
- How effective is the UI/UX design for user friendliness?
- How impactful is the solution for patient-specific needs?
The challenge prompted participants to “make it simple,” and that they certainly did. Phase II winners made health care decision-making especially simple.
Taking home first place, with a grand prize of $50,000, is (drumroll please) Stroll Health (@StrollHealth). Also a previous winner of Traction 2016, Stroll has built a seamless web platform that enables health providers to send patients directly to local imaging centers and specialists, and helps to manage prescriptions. Stroll’s easy-to-use platform provides automatic referrals, prior authorization and real-time scheduling. For the challenge, Stroll expanded their platform to include hundreds of thousands of specialists and more than five thousand prescriptions across the nation. Let Matt and Jordan walk you through the platform themselves in this video.
Coming in second place, with a prize of $15,000, is Moment (@momentdesign). Moment created “Orderly,” a web based platform which allows patients to receive up-to-date lists of preferred specialists, imaging labs and pharmacies. Patients can also use Orderly to view data such as cost, coverage and location, and even schedule next steps through provided contact information and online booking tools. “Orderly” builds on the relationship between patient and physician to understand, discover, and choose referral options together. See how it works here.
And finally, the third place prize of $10,000 goes to Project Helix (@kcdigitaldrive). The solution includes a chatbot within a mobile application to help patients navigate their prescription costs with convenience in mind. The solution is a low-tech interface with complex data-driven decisions on the backend. The chatbot connects with the patient each step of the way via text notifications and API data, tailoring results to the patient’s needs. Learn about how this chatbot makes it simple here.
So, next time you leave the doctor’s office scratching your head, just look down at your phone and relax because all of the information you need will be right there waiting for you with help from these challenge winners
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Chelsea Polaniecki is a Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0.
