Tech Sprint Results in Digital Health Tools

Published: January 24, 2019

HHSHealth IT

Last week the HHS Office of the CTO and the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) concluded a first of its kind, 14-week tech sprint entitled, The Opportunity Project (TOP) Health sprint.

The sprint aimed at using emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and federal data to solve or improve complex health issues such as cancer and tick-borne illnesses. HHS’ CTO, Ed Simcox, stated “the TOP Health sprint is a valuable step in leveraging skills from industry with public resources to promote better health outcomes.”

The program brought together industry, IT experts, community leaders, government and subject matter experts to use data and technology for two challenges:

  1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) for approaches for facilitating an experimental therapy ecosystem.
  2. Harness the power of collaboration, citizen science, and data for Lyme disease.

The TOP Health sprint resulted in 11 teams delivering digital tools to address one of the two challenge areas.  The worldwide teams unveiled their results on January 16th.  Following are the digital tools they produced and will continue maintain:

CHALLENGE #1 AI TEAMS:

  • Trial Explorer by Philips Research in the Netherlands - To find the most suitable trials for each patient, the tool derives computable representations of trial criteria and matches it to harmonized patient data.
  • Healthcare Bot by Microsoft Healthcare in Israel - The team built technology that aims to democratize clinical trials matching by helping patients and doctors find suitable trials quickly and easily, through conversational AI, advanced machine reading on clinical trials eligibility criteria, natural language processing and smart qualification.
  • ORNL SmartClinicalTrials by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Department of Energy) in Oak Ridge, TN - The team is building a large knowledge graph representation for cancer clinical trials to enable discovery of new concepts from unstructured text.
  • Oracle TOP Health Team by Oracle Public Sector and Oracle Healthcare in Washington, DC - The team built a patient-centric solution for clinical trial matching. The solution matches patients battling cancer with clinical trial programs leveraging modern technologies like artificial intelligence to provide a more simplified and personalized experience for determining treatment.
  • iConnect by TrialX in New York, NY - The team developed a patient recruitment platform that enables patients and clinical researchers to find and connect with each other. It includes advanced semantic and decision engine based AI techniques to match patient health record information to clinical trials eligibility criteria.
  • Flatiron Trials by Flatiron Health in New York, NY - The team built a framework that improves patient trial matching and gives oncology practices and their patients’ access to cutting-edge treatments.
  • A.CCESS.io by AheadIntoFun Inc. (spun out of Rush Medical) in Chicago, IL - The team built a tool aimed at making finding clinical trials just as easy as finding a home or booking a vacation online.

CHALLENGE #2 LYME AND TICK-BORNE DISEASE TEAMS:

  • Lyme Tracker App by TrialX and Global Lyme Alliance in New York, NY - The Lyme Tracker App will enable patients to easily track symptoms/physical activity so as to provide on-going data to further advance clinical research in this space.
  • TickTracker by the LivLyme Foundation in Denver, CO and Columbus, OH - TickTracker is a free global app created by a 14 year-old who started a non-profit, LivLyme Foundation, that lets you track and report ticks in real-time using geolocation so that people in the United States and around the world can stay safe.
  • TickTockBOOM! Game by the LivLyme Foundation in Denver, CO and Columbus, OH - TickTockBOOM! is a free mobile app created by twin 11 year-olds that is an edutainment-based game targeted towards teaching our nation’s youth about tick awareness and ultimately prevention.
  • Clyme Health by the California Center for Functional Medicine in Kensington, CA - The Clyme Health app optimizes data gathering and visualization for patients with complex, chronic conditions so that care providers and researchers can better measure the efficacy of treatments and, together, identify data-driven solutions with personalized medicine.

Demo day showcases will be scheduled following the end of the government shutdown.