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The Diabetes Care Challenge Presented by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana and Ochsner Health System

Create A Digital Tool That Supports Diabetic Health Maintenance

Diabetes is among the leading causes of death in Louisiana, which has the fifth-highest rate of diabetes in the nation. An estimated one in eight Louisiana adults has been diagnosed with diabetes, and the prevalence has steadily increased over time. In 2000, 6.6 percent of Louisiana adults had diabetes, which rose to 11.6 percent by 2013, according to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS, 2013).

People with diabetes must take several active steps to manage the condition, including consistent dietary, physical activity and blood glucose monitoring, taking daily medications, regular doctor visits and routine screenings. All of this can cause considerable stress. This frustration not only takes an emotional toll, but it can make people with diabetes less likely to stick to their self-care routine and cause higher risk for adverse side effects of uncontrolled diabetes. Uncontrolled diabetes requires more intense and more expensive treatment, making it desirable to offer interventions to minimize diabetes distress and maximize the opportunity to maintain disease control.

Our challenge is to develop a digital solution that will encourage patients with diabetes to stay on top of their health, decrease their stress and improve their diabetes control. In particular, the solution should facilitate convenient access to routine diabetes health maintenance activities, specifically eye exams and foot exams. These tests provide valuable information to patients and their treating physicians, who can then catch potential issues earlier, when they are easier to treat. Ideally, the solution would allow reliable at-home screening opportunities, through sensing technology that would seamlessly and discretely transmit data to a patient’s electronic medical record.

Providing a solution for these routine tests that can be done from the comfort of their own homes – perhaps via a patient’s smartphone, or kiosk, or other method – would likely encourage more patients to undergo screening. As a social component, the solution should be able to transmit the data from these screenings to the treating physician and clinical staff, family caregivers and/or insurer care coordination teams, which would allow them to intervene sooner, proactively address issues and encourage maintenance.

While the application program interface for this challenge should be created to address health maintenance specifically for people with diabetes, the solution should be scalable so that it could be adapted for other chronic conditions or health maintenance challenges.

Prize Package

Selected finalist(s) are eligible to receive a cash prize of up to $36,000, as well as the opportunity to receive in-kind prizes, such as free co-working space, a spot on a startup accelerator program, and more items, subject to availability. Selected finalist(s) may also be selected by one or more of the challenge supporters to participate in a pilot, co-development or other business relationship.

The Navigator Challenge Presented by Tulane Health System

Healthcare is an increasingly complex process. It can be overwhelming for patients simply to navigate appointments, procedures and post-acute care, much less understand discharge instructions or the insurance implications and responsibilities of their care. Hospitals have employed “navigators” in some service lines to assist patients, but these functions are costly and generally not reimbursed, despite their value to patients.

Our challenge is to use technology to replicate the function of a navigator to enhance patient-centered care, without adding FTEs (which are better used at the patient bedside.) This technology may enhance existing navigation services in complex service lines and/or serve as the primary navigation resource for less-complex service lines.

We are looking for digital solutions that accomplish one or more of the following:

• Connect a patient’s healthcare options with their specific insurance plans
  • Help patients make best decisions (for their care or the best insurance plans to meet their needs)
• Connect all of a patient’s caregivers (physicians, hospitals, post-acute care)
  • Improve continuity of care
  • Improve communication
• Connect hospital patients with relevant community resources
  • Help patients access appropriate follow-up care for a variety of enterprise-wide services or chronic condition management
  • Improve access to preventative care and health management services
  • Reduce readmissions and overall healthcare costs
• Suggest other, appropriate hospital services
  • Improve care with seamless transitions among services
• Connect patients with relevant research or clinical trial opportunities
  • Provide access to latest treatments
  • Simplify recruitment efforts

Prize Package

Winning team in The Navigator Challenge will have the opportunity to meet with HCA-Tulane’s senior executives in the business development and operations teams – as well as HCA’s Parallon partners in supply chain and information technology – and receive a facility tour, following the finale. Winning team may also be eligible to receive in-kind prizes, such as free co-working space, a spot on a startup accelerator program, startup business services and more items, subject to availability.

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The Inter-Operability Challenge Presented by Lafayette General Foundation

Lafayette General Health and the Lafayette General Foundation care deeply about our patients, clinicians, employees and community. Timely access to healthcare data is a point of consternation when patients and clinicians alike are not given the ability to readily retrieve essential information; this often hinders the healthcare process. Given the issues with healthcare system interoperability, most specifically sharing, storing, consuming and security of data, please explore a distributed, permissioned and secured solution that reduces errors, fraud, misinterpretation and increases interoperability via the implementation of technologies such as block-chain and others.

Prize Package

The Lafayette General Foundation (LGF) houses the Healthcare Innovation Fund. The Fund invests in companies that require seed capital investment. Should companies or individuals seeking to form companies respond to The Inter-Operability Challenge thereby creating solutions that LGF believes hold promise, the potential exists for the companies to receive investment from the Healthcare Innovation Fund. Selected finalist(s) may also be eligible to receive in-kind prizes, such as free co-working space, a spot on a startup accelerator program, startup business services and more items, subject to availability.

Apply Here

How does a Crowd Challenge Work?

In Phase I your project will be listed in an online Crowdfunding showcase where millions will be invited to review your ideas online. The teams that get the most interest and adoption from doctors, patients, partners, institution, investors, advisors and more will be reviewed by the panel of judges. Based upon the expert reviews and the crowd’s support for the projects, up to fifteen (15), but likely fewer teams, broken down into three different pitch contests by general area depending on grouping of applications, will be invited to take the stage during New Orleans Entrepreneur Week during the week of March 19^th, 2018 in front of an audience of healthcare leaders, partners, insurers, and investors from New Orleans and beyond. Selected finalist(s) will be eligible for partner prizes, pilot opportunities, and in-kind rewards. Winners of the NOLAHI Challenge will also be entered into the MedStartr Acceleration Program that provides over $250,000 in funding, services and support for healthcare startups. Read more about how crowd challenges work here.

Who Should Apply

If you have a great new idea in healthcare at an early or rapid growth stage and are either based in the New Orleans area or want to do business here, we are interested!  For a more detailed listing of some of the areas, please see the official rules.