Blue Button for All Americans Contest

VA's health plan was the first to give its patients a Blue Button®-enabled personal health record (PHR) where patients could download their own health data. Veterans told us early and often that they like Blue Button – a lot.

VA delivers care to about 6 million of America's 22 million Veterans. We wanted to find a way to make Blue Button downloads available to all Veterans, wherever they get their care. We thought the best way to make Blue Button available to Veterans across the country was to help doctors across the country offer a Blue Button to all their patients – including Veterans.

We also thought the best way to help doctors offer a Blue Button to their patients was to provide an incentive to include Blue Button features in new or existing physician office software systems. So we ran the Blue Button for All Americans Contest.

The rules were simple: develop a Blue Button-enabled PHR or add the Blue Button function to an existing PHR, then make it available to all patients (including Veterans) of at least 25,000 doctors across America. Do that, and you win the $50,000 prize.

Winning entry: McKesson Corporation and RelayHealth

McKesson Corporation's RelayHealth division provides software to more than 2,000 hospitals and 200,000 physicians and their staffs across America. One component of that software is a PHR where patients can store and retrieve their own health information and where their physicians can post data such as lab results, allergy information, and more. RelayHealth tells us that 17 million patients see physicians who use its systems.

RelayHealth's software already had provided patients a way to download data using a computer format called CCD which needs to be read by other computers.

RelayHealth added the simple Blue Button text format (sometimes called ASCII) to its download software, and now patients can click on the Blue Button logo to download their own data. Text downloads are an essential feature of the Blue Button because they can be read, stored, and printed on any computer anywhere without special software.

Since about 200,000 doctors across America use the RelayHealth PHR, it was easy for RelayHealth to demonstrate to us that its PHR was offered to the patients of at least 25,000 physicians.

Through this contest, we took a good idea that clearly benefited Veterans – the Blue Button – and engaged an innovative company to make that good idea happen across the country.

Exactly what a contest should do.