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HIT Me With Your Best Shot — Challenge Dares Students to Fire Away at Innovation
By Annie Macios

Some would say that for the healthcare system to improve, it could benefit from a few radical ideas or innovations. That is exactly what the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland had in mind when its Center for Health Information and Decision Systems established the Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge, a contest that is encouraging university students to create an HIT innovation that will improve patient-provider communications and ultimately patient outcomes.

The challenge is founded on the belief that health outcomes can be improved if patients are more fully engaged with their healthcare providers and self-managing their health. It recognizes that patient engagement and enhanced patient-provider communication is critical to improving healthcare quality while simultaneously reducing cost.

P. Kenyon Crowley, MBA, MS, CPHIMS, director of health innovation at the University of Maryland Center of Excellence in Health IT Research in Washington, DC, has noticed an increase in the trend toward “open innovation” over the last few years, with some of the newest and best ideas coming from people outside the healthcare industry who bring a fresh perspective.

Crowley believes the Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge is unique compared with other contests or challenges regarding innovation. “It is the first I’m aware of that combines process innovation, the leveraging of technology, and asks the question ‘What is that sustainable market strategy to radically improve healthcare?’ Here at the University of Maryland, where the contest is located, I’ve found that we have a lot of forward-thinking students. I do think students are more interested in HIT, but there is still some work to be done to communicate that healthcare is more than just direct patient care, that there are a lot of opportunities in this field,” Crowley says.

Marketing, project management, and product innovation are examples of opportunities in HIT. “We are getting a ‘pull effect’ because firms are investing in HIT, so the school is also getting many more job requests for students with that experience,” Crowley says, adding that students’ understanding of HIT opportunities comes at a slower pace than other markets because of the traditional way they think of healthcare.

Finding the Solution
Teams of university students with up to five members will develop solutions they believe will radically improve healthcare outcomes by using IT to improve patient engagement with healthcare providers. The team deemed most successful will earn a first prize of $20,000, with two runners-up each winning $5,000 prizes.

Among the participants are teams from universities all over the country as well as a few from overseas, which Crowley believes fosters a higher level of idea sharing. Many of the participating teams are multidisciplinary, approaching the contest from many angles, including medical, pharmacy, technological, and marketing.

The submitted solutions must include a set of tools, processes, and technologies coupled with a business strategy that can benefit patients via a strengthened connection with the healthcare provider that delivers demonstrable improvements in patient metrics, the primary metric being patient health outcomes.

Teams are expected to create a specific innovative solution that targets at least one of the following broadly defined categories:

• engagement enabling the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, cancer, and mental health disorders;

• engagement structured around an acute event such as surgery; and

• engagement due to a major life stage such as pregnancy and aging.

Each solution must speak directly to the health outcomes it purports to address.

Tools and technologies incorporated into the proposed solution may include avenues such as the Web/personal destination, smartphone/tablet/app, short message/multimedia messaging service, social media, and remote monitoring and automated decision support.

Upon evaluating all the submissions from the first round, up to eight teams with the highest scores will be invited to participate in the final round of the challenge, which will culminate April 20 with final round of presentations at the Smith School’s Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center campus in Washington D.C.

All submissions will be evaluated by an anonymous panel of expert judges in regard to how well they address the theme of the contest. Teams will be scored on their ability to drive patient-provider engagement for improved health outcomes (40 points), a demonstrated market potential with a sustainable model (20 points), innovation and originality (20 points), alignment to the J & J businesses (10 points), and the quality of the presentation (10 points).

Once a winner is decided, the organizers anticipate that the participants from the winning project team will continue with the development of the project.

Crowley says organizers firmly believe students will think creatively about process, technology, and strategy and come up with ways to improve provider communication and ultimately have an impact on patient outcomes.

“Without improvements in the way we coordinate care and use tools to improve outcomes, healthcare will remain at the status quo, which in this day and age isn’t acceptable,” says Crowley.

— Annie Macios is a freelance writer based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.