Web app contests like NYC BigApps continue fostering new ways to access public data — and these challenges are now making their way into the medical field. But before these medical apps get too far along, they need the proper platform and interface. That's where the Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies platform comes in. In April 2010, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded $15 million to researchers at the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School to design SMART. This platform was made public this month —in conjunction with the SMART Health App $5,000 Challenge, a Web app contest to encourage developers to design apps to benefit patients, physicians or public health. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra posted on the official White House blog that the app competition prize could speed up innovation in a variety of areas. Developers could potentially build a medication manager, health risk detector, laboratory visualization tool, or an app that integrates patient data with external data sources in real time.
