GenieMD has won a national competition focused on using Blue Button Direct to help consumers acquire, act on and store their own clinical information.

The Silicon Valley startup emerged as the winner of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT's Blue Button Co-Design Challenge. The announcement, timed to coincide with National Health IT Week, recognizes GenieMD's new app, which helps consumers diagnose their health concerns, locate nearby healthcare providers and learn more about healthy living, as well as helping them to manage care for a loved one through the GenieMD Health Profile.

[See also: ONC aims to put Blue Button on automatic.]

"We are very excited to be chosen as the winner of the ONC Blue Button Co-Design Challenge," said Tory Kelso, the company's vice president of market strategy and business development, in a news release. "The opportunity to work directly with patients to understand their pain points was invaluable. We believe that the combination of providing patient's access to data using Blue Button Direct and the GenieMD feature set creates a powerful patient engagement tool."

The ONC's contest was designed to compel developers to increase the number of patient-facing apps that can receive and move clinical data via Blue Button Direct, which takes that data and puts it in a machine-readable format for easier integration and use. 

"We launched the patient Co-Design Challenge by crowdsourcing the priority ways that patients and caregivers want to use their Blue Button health data," said Rebecca Mitchell Coelius, MD, the ONC's medical officer for innovation, in the release. "We heard loud and clear that it can be extremely challenging to keep track of – not to mention keep up with – your healthcare when you have a complex illness or many different conditions, but accessing and better understanding personal health data could help. The winning product wowed both our judging panel and the thousands of people who participated in crowd voting."

[See also: Health Tech Hatch to expand Blue Button.]

Through the Blue Button tool, GenieMD users can automatically combine clinical and self-reported data in their health records or those of a loved one. Company officials say the platform is especially useful in supporting people with chronic conditions, those using more than one medication and those with multiple healthcare providers, along with their caregivers.

This article is based on original reporting at mHealth News.