mHealthCoach winner of Walgreens' Health Guide Challenge
SAN FRANCISCO — Health 2.0 and Walgreens on Monday announced Chicago-based Team mHealthCoach as the winner of the Walgreens Health Guide Challenge. The winners receive a cash award of $25,000, plus an opportunity to spend an hour with Walgreens chief information officer Timothy Theriault.
mHealthCoach will demonstrate its winning entry at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference taking place Sept. 26 and 27 in San Francisco.
The Walgreens Health Guide Challenge launched in June at the Health Data Initiative Forum meeting in Washington as part of the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge program. Teams were tasked with developing an innovative application and a supported Web service that would aggregate three or more Health and Human Services databases by disease condition, topic and location.
The mHealthCoach team developed a sophisticated tablet-based application that incorporates data feeds from multiple health and social media sources in an easy-to-navigate interface. The mHealthCoach application potentially will enable Walgreens' healthcare staff to quickly and easily provide pharmacy customers with useful and relevant health information.
“We were impressed by the application developed by the mHealthCoach team, and we believe the tool they created could be easily incorporated into the pharmacy of the future,” stated Colin Watts, chief innovation officer at Walgreens. “The innovative approach used by the mHealthCoach team is absolutely aligned with Walgreens' broader innovation initiatives.”
“Health 2.0 is very excited to see the development of innovative technology solutions under the umbrella of the Developer Challenge program,” stated Indu Subaiya, CEO of Health 2.0. “We believe that prize competitions can be a very effective tool to drive innovation at corporations, and we look forward to more successful challenges like this one.”
Walgreens also awarded a second-place prize to Florida-based Team Tuxemo and a third-place prize to Connecticut-based Acsys Interactive. The winners will receive $5,000 and $3,000, respectively.
You can learn more details about the Walgreens Health Guide Challenge at the competition website.