ONC challenges developers to mash up Blue Button, big data

Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health IT coordinator, announced a Blue Button Mash-Up challenge that will have a “different flavor” by bringing big data together for the individual. The winning application will be designed to help individuals combine their health information with other data to better understand their own health status and make more informed decisions about their care. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT wants to educate consumers and offer tools that help them access and use their own health information.

“We’re saying bring the Blue Button data that you download from your healthcare provider and mash it up with community data, administrative data to help manage my healthcare finances, and mash it up with my device data from home,” Mostashari said at the June 5 Health Datapalooza conference.

The challenge builds on the Blue Button feature, developed by the Veterans Affairs Department, which enables patients to download their health information in a simple ASCII text format to their computers or personal health records to share with providers, families or caregivers. To date, more than 900,000 veterans, members of the military and seniors on Medicare have downloaded their health information using the Blue Button feature. The Office of Personnel Management has requested that federal employees’ health plans also offer Blue Button. A few private healthcare organizations, such as UnitedHealth and Aetna, are beginning to incorporate it...