This is one in a series of blog posts to coincide with National Health IT Week. To follow the conversation on Twitter, look for the #NHITweek hashtag.

The winner of ONC’s Blue Button Co-Design Challenge, the third challenge this year, is GenieMD !

What was the focus of this Blue Button Challenge?

This Challenge tasked developers with creating apps that implement and use Blue Button + functionality to address one of several patient problems.

Using Blue Button +, the winning app was GenieMD

The GenieMD app (whose development was led by founder and CEO Soheil Saadat) provides users with a variety of patient services including symptom checking, finding providers and pharmacies, and alerts for drug interactions through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.

The app also combines data from multiple providers through Blue Button +, including:

• patient-entered data
• data from smart devices, and
• content provided by Harvard Health Publications.

GenieMD also provides social networking tools for secure blogging and sharing. The app is available to download now for iOS  and Android  devices.

The second place winner is Humetrix

The second-place winner, Humetrix , leveraged its expertise creating the iBlueButton app to develop ICEBlueButton (video ), which brings together patient data downloaded using Blue Button + and self-entered data using an easy form.

The app combines medical condition, medication, and allergy information to create an ICE (In Case of Emergency) record and a QR code that can be used by emergency personnel. The app will be available October 14 for iOS devices.

The third place winner is CareTracker

Hint Health finished in third place with CareTracker, which has as its centerpiece a journal that chronologically integrates care tasks including medications, appointments, and therapy.

The app is built for both patients and caretakers; patients can add multiple caretakers to their care team, while caretakers can manage multiple clients. The prototype for CareTracker  (video), optimized for mobile devices, is available to be tested now.

More about Blue Button +

Blue Button +  is a technology specification that allows patients to use third-party apps to download their health data from providers who have implemented the specification. Widespread adoption of Blue Button + by app developers and providers will make patient data much more accessible on their most frequently used devices while maintaining strict privacy and security of that data.

More about the Blue Button Challenges

The Blue Button Co-Design Challenge was built around public feedback.

• The National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari announced this unique challenge at Health Datapalooza in June, then
• The public had two weeks to submit their ideas  for app use cases and vote for their favorites.
• 2,914 votes were cast for 80 different ideas, with the winning idea coming from patient advocate Hugo Campos, also a board member for the Society for Participatory Medicine.
• Finally, a round of public voting  was tallied and represents one-third of the calculation used to determine the winner.

You can view the app submissions at Health Tech Hatch , a crowd funding and co-design site, and see the feedback that a group of passionate patient testers left with their ideas about implementation.

For more information about the Blue Button Co-Design Challenge, please visit http://challenge.gov/ONC/557-blue-button-co-design-challenge.