We invite designers and developers to redesign the patient health record.

Winners announced (view all dates)

ONC & VA invite you to rethink how the medical record is presented. We believe designers can use their talents to make health information patient-centered and improve the patient experience.

Being able to access your health information on demand can be lifesaving in an emergency situation, can help prevent medication errors, and can improve care coordination so everyone who is caring for you is on the same page. However, too often health information is presented in an unwieldy and unintelligible way that makes it hard for patients, their caregivers, and their physicians to use. There is an opportunity for talented designers to reshape the way health records are presented to create a better patient experience.

Learn more at http://healthdesignchallenge.com

The purpose of this effort is to improve the design of the medical record so it is more usable by and meaningful to patients, their families, and others who take care of them. This is an opportunity to take the plain-text Blue Button file and enrich it with visuals and a better layout. Innovators will be invited to submit their best designs for a medical record that can be printed and viewed digitally.

This effort will focus on the content defined by a format called the Continuity of Care Document (CCD). A CCD is a common template used to describe a patient’s health history and can be output by electronic medical record (EMR) software. Submitted designs should use the sections and fields found in a CCD. See http://blue-button.github.com/challenge/files/health-design-challenge-fields.pdf for CCD sections and fields.

Entrants will submit a design that:

• Improves the visual layout and style of the information from the medical record
• Makes it easier for a patient to manage his/her health
• Enables a medical professional to digest information more efficiently
• Aids a caregiver such as a family member or friend in his/her duties and responsibilities with respect to the patient

Entrants should be conscious of how the wide variety of personas will affect their design. Our healthcare system takes care of the following types of individuals:

• An underserved inner-city parent with lower health literacy
• A senior citizen that has a hard time reading
• A young adult who is engaged with technology and mobile devices
• An adult whose first language is not English
• A patient with breast cancer receiving care from multiple providers
• A busy mom managing her kids' health and helping her aging parents

This is an opportunity for talented individuals to touch the lives of Americans across the country through design. The most innovative designs will be showcased in an online gallery and in a physical exhibit at the Annual ONC Meeting in Washington DC.

A panel of curators will select a final design (that may combine elements of numerous winning designs) that will be built and open-sourced on the code sharing community Github. Open sourcing the final product will enable EHR developers to improve on it by adding new functionality or creating new styles that serve different patient populations, and to integrate it into actual products.

The Department of Veterans Affairs enthusiastically supports the open-source development of the design because it could enable them to improve MyHealtheVet, the patient portal used by veterans and their families across the country.

Because of the collaborative and open source nature of this effort, all entries are required to be submitted under a Creative Commons license. This license allows the community to use and adapt the designs while ensuring that the designer receives attribution. More details on the license can be found at http://creativecommons.org.



In order for an entry to be eligible to win this Challenge, it must meet the following requirements:

• Deliverable: Must be an image or browser viewable file. The acceptable image formats: .PNG, .JPG, .GIF, .TIFF, .PSD, .AI, and .PDF. The acceptable browser viewable format is .HTML.
• Feasibility: This challenge requires only that the design of the medical record to be submitted. It is not the responsibility of the entrant to build or code a working version of the design. However, the design must be ultimately implementable using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Data: The design must be built off the data fields found in a Continuity of Care Document (CCD).