Health 2.0 Developer Challenge: Teams are putting final touches on their applications

With only a few weeks left until the deadlines of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge more than 40 teams are putting the final touches on their applications for the 10 prizes. Winners will be announced by Todd Park, CTO of U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Aneesh Chopra, Federal CTO, at the Health 2.0 Conference on October 7-8, in San Francisco.  

Health 2.0 made three new related announcements:

• In the coming weeks there will be two physical code-a-thons in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first is Hacking for Health hosted by HealthTap on September 11. On October 2, the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge Live Code-a-thon will be held at Google. At these code-a-thons developers will use government and private-sector health data sets and build prototypes of new health applications.
• Health 2.0 is also looking to the future with a new challenge that will continue after October.  With support from HHS, Health 2.0 is announcing the Developer's Challenge for Consumer Apps to Visualize Health Care Quality Measures. The prize is for the best web or mobile application which represents at least one Medicare quality dataset.
• The Blue Button Challenge added a new celebrity, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, to a distinguished panel of judges. President Obama announced, on August 2, that veterans and seniors will be able to view their health data by clicking on a Blue Button that will be on VA.gov and medicare.gov. This challenge asks developers to demonstrate new ways to use that data.