Nuance issues another mHealth challenge

The Internet has flattened the world in many ways; people are able to collaborate from around the globe and work to solve problems 24/7.  Many industries, including healthcare, have taken advantage of this seemingly endless talent pool and various organizations have challenged developers to demonstrate their skills through online app challenges. These challenges are not only used to solve problems, but also to push the limits of what we think is technologically possible. Incentivizing innovation though competition is not new, but over the past decade there has been exponential growth in both the number of competitions conducted and participation in those competitions.

Part of this exponential growth maps back to an understanding of the power of crowdsourcing.  Crowdsourcing brings to life the idea that much good can come out of harnessing the collective brainpower of large groups of people, particularly those outside of one's immediate circle. The open innovation that crowdsourcing provides has already proven its value in healthcare. Companies like Innocentive are helping make crowdsourcing a reality for healthcare provider organizations, specifically the Cleveland Clinic.  Together, they're leveraging the power of the crowd to spur innovation in medical care and biomedical research. Additionally, PatientsLikeMe has been praised as a story of crowdsourcing success. The "health-date sharing platform" provides a forum for patients to engage with other individuals who are dealing with similar illnesses in order to share information aimed at improving patient care and driving future research efforts.

Government agencies, independent organizations and private technology companies are also taking advantage of crowdsourcing through public developer challenges. Many of these challenges are aimed at solving a specific problem through the use of technology. A few recent and/or currently running government and private healthcare challenges include:

•  Health 2.0
•  HHS Million Hearts(TM) Risk Check Challenge 
•  Aligning Forces for Quality App Challenge
•  National Institute for Health Research Technology Competition

I had the opportunity to experience the benefits that these friendly competitions offer firsthand when Nuance Healthcare challenged developers to give mobile clinicians a "voice" in the 2012 Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge earlier this year. This app competition asked developers to demonstrate how they would help clinicians better document on the go by speech-enabling their mobile applications. For a look at the winner of the Mobile Clinician Voice Challenge, please check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUJ3rojx7HU

I'm excited to participate again on the judging panel of a new challenge from Nuance, the 2012 Understanding Healthcare Challenge, which builds off of the success of the previous competition. This time around, instead of asking developers to voice-enable their mobile or web-based healthcare applications, Nuance wants developers to explain how they would improve healthcare by leveraging Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technology as part of their application.