RWJF Announces $120,000 Challenge

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) just launched a competition among technology developers to improve consumer understanding by using of data to compare hospital prices. Winners of the “RWJF Hospital Price Transparency Challenge” will share $120,000 in prize money. Winners of the visualization component of the challenge will be announced at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference in October 2013. The deadline for submissions is August 25, 2013.

Last month, CMS published prices charged by more than 3,000 hospitals for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. The information showed extreme variation in pricing among U.S. hospitals. This was evident even in hospitals operating in the same communities. The RWJF Challenge will further disseminate the use for the CMS hospital data.

The competition consists of two components. One component will create visualizations of the data. The visualization challenge will require entrants to create visual representations to help consumers and others better understand, explore, and interpret the information. Applicants are encouraged to incorporate other data which can be used in combination with the hospital pricing data.

The competition’s other component will develop consumer applications and tools. The apps and tools developed should help improve understanding of hospital pricing information and promote further transparency about prices.

The app and tools component will take place in two phases. The first phase will select five semi-finalists, who will be announced at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference. The deadline for this phase is August 4, 2013. The second phase will select winning entries from among the semi-finalists. Winners will be announced on December 9, 2013 at the mHealth Summit.

The deadline for submissions is August 25, 2013. Go to www.health2con.com/devchallenge/rwif-hospital-price-transparency-challenge, visit www.rwjf.org, go www.rwjf.org/twitter, or at www.rwif.org/facebook  for more information.