As part of the initiative through the ONC to help support and assist cancer survivors with post treatment, the ONC is lunching a challenge that will encourage innovation around mobile apps that can help facilitate activities, appointments, and supporting cancer survivors those patients during their follow up care.
The challenge as outlined by the ONC will have two separate phases. In the first stage, all the applicants will be required to do is to submit the wireframes and documentation that will contain the overall use cases of the product and the goals being addresses. Once the submissions have been reviewed, up to three winners will receive a sum of $5,000, each which will then allow them to go into the second stage of the challenge. This phase the previous finalizes will be able to post additional details about their proposed mHealth App and receive support from crowdfunding portals, which will help further develop their concept. Once the apps have reached a functioning stage, then they will be submitted to judges to review them and become eligible for a grand prize of $25,000.00.
The criteria by which these submissions will be reviewed do provide strong requirements that will ensure that the App will have the following capabilities:
- Appropriate integration capabilities with health data sources
- The ability to be interoperable
- The ability to connect with existing networks
- Alerting and other tracking capabilities (medication, symptoms, and other needs)
- The ability to maintain appointments and other care follow up functions
- The Capability to connect with electronic care platforms
There are several successful online resources for cancer survivors; the market place does not have a sufficient number of comprehensive solutions for the mobile platforms. Some of the existing products are not all able to address the complex requirements that a patient would need to have the ability to track and get assistance with most care. By encouraging further innovation and functionality cancer patients post treatment will be able to get assistance with their care and help increase survival rates.
