The Investing in Innovation program has seen numerous successes and have generated applications and tools that are available to people right now to help them address and take charge of their health.

The Health Design Challenge  tasked designers to recreate the patient health record, with the winners all available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. The entries beautifully reimagined different aspects of the patient record, with three overall winners and special awards for the best medication, problem/medical history, and lab summaries sections.

The Million Hearts Risk Check Challenge awarded a first-place prize to Marshfield Clinic for its iOS  and web-based  apps that allow users to check their cardiovascular risk based on a set of simple questions. The apps analyze user-entered data including height, weight, age, and sex to provide a risk score. Accuracy increases if users provide their blood pressure and cholesterol readings, and a mapping function will them the nearest location where they can be assessed if they do not have that information.

The Using Public Data for Cancer Prevention and Control Challenge awarded two first-place prizes, to TrialX and MyCancerGenome. The challenge, run in conjunction with the National Cancer Institute, asked developers to create innovative software tools that use public data to address problems faced by consumers, clinicians, or researchers on the cancer control continuum. Current tools available on the web for discovering and enrolling in cancer trials are cluttered, do not present information in usable ways, and are not patient-friendly. TrialX’s AskDory platform  provides cancer patients with an intuitive, easy-to-use tool to allow them to find and connect them to local cancer trials. My Cancer Genome , managed by the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, supplements its clinical trial connectivity with detailed information about cancer mutations and available therapies.

The Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home Challenge focused on the transition for patients between care settings. During the transition from one setting to the next, patients frequently do not have all the information they need about their condition, medications, medical equipment, or other important details, leading to readmissions that could have been avoided. One of the winners, Humetrix ​, created the iBlueButton app , which allows users to make sure they have all the information they need as they make their transition and also provides them with the ability to download and review their personal health records from Blue Button-compliant portals. Users can also send data to and receive data from their provider’s iPad running the companion iBlue Button Pro app . In addition, military veterans can use the version of the iBlueButton Veterans app that links to the My HealtheVet patient portal .

Circle of 6  was one of two winners of the Apps Against Abuse Challenge. Nineteen percent of women report experiencing sexual assault while in college. Many of these assaults occur when the offender, often an acquaintance, has targeted and isolated a young woman in vulnerable circumstances. This challenge was designed to empower young people to look out for their friends in order to proactively prevent sexual abuse and violence from occurring. The Circle of 6 app  allows the user to designate six friends to receive pre-written text messages indicating that the user is in an uncomfortable situation and wants to be picked up or called on the phone. It has been downloaded over 30,000 times and been featured in a number of outlets, including The New York Times, MTV, Wired, and Cosmopolitan.

These are just a few of the innovations that have been created using through the Investing in Innovation program. See videos and descriptions of all the winners .