ONC PRIZE CHALLENGES
In September 2009, President Obama released his Strategy for American Innovation, calling for agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation by using policy tools such as awards and competitions. The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act, passed in December 2010, permits any agency head to “carry out a program to award prizes competitively to stimulate innovation.” ONC began running challenges in 2011 under this authority, and has executed over 30 challenges since then.
Prize challenges allow the public to solve problems presented by ONC and receive awards for the best solutions. At the most basic level, challenges contain three steps: 1) ONC announces a problem to the public; 2) participants create and submit solutions to the problem; and 3) ONC evaluates those solutions and awards prizes to the best ones. Awards can be monetary, non-monetary, or both.
ONC uses challenges for purposes beyond generating solutions to problems, including:
- Signaling interest in areas that markets should be doing more to serve
- Reaching wide communities of experts
- Generating interest in new services, data, and technologies
- Developing public buy-in for agency initiatives
- Bringing people previously unaware of ONC activities into the fold
ACTIVE CHALLENGES
ONC often has multiple challenges running simultaneously. The following challenges are currently active:
Announced or accepting submissions
Oh, the Places Data Goes: Health Data Provenance Challenge: Identify the current capabilities and methods used by industry to convey the provenance of health data as it is used to support clinical care.
Patient Matching Algorithm Challenge: Bring about greater transparency and data on the performance of existing patient matching algorithms, spur the adoption of performance metrics for patient data matching algorithm vendors, and positively impact other aspects of patient matching such as deduplication and linking to clinical data.
Underway but no longer accepting submissions
Move Health Data Forward Challenge: Create an API solution that allows people to authorize the movement of their health data.
Privacy Policy Snapshot Challenge: Create a tool that generates customizable Model Privacy Notices that app developers can use to illustrate their user data privacy practices.