Translation App Wins EHR Contest

A multilingual medication instruction application took first place in the "SMART" Platform Apps Challenge, a contest that promotes development of iPhone-like health IT apps.

The winner, Meducation, uses the SMART programming interface to retrieve medication lists from electronic medical records. (SMART stands for Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies.) The app links the records to a drug information database and generates simplified medication instructions in one of a dozen languages. Polyglot Systems Inc., of Morrisville, N.C, designed the winning application.

The design challenge, issued this spring by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, was financed by a federal Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Current-stage EMRs decide if, when, and how you will view the data trapped in their systems," Dr. Kenneth Mandi, of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School, said in a news release announcing the winning entry. "The SMART Platform Apps Challenge was designed to demonstrate what can happen when electronic health information becomes liberated and can be readily consumed by computer applications."

The following apps received honorable mentions:

• Clinical Research, which enables interoperability between an EMR system and a clinical electronic data capture system.
• DxSocial, which matches patients with doctors who have treated similar patients.
• Medication Risk Maps, which helps identify and compare side effects of medications and assess the risk of adverse events.
• MyNote, which provides an interactive patient history timeline with disease-specific schemes.
• Priority Contact, which manages contacts with patients after they leave a clinic.
• rxInfo, which helps identify patients for clinical trials and provide information on drug interactions and related data.