Georgia Tech team wins top three awards in NHIN-CONNECT Code-a-Thon Challenge

Medicity, Inc. - the standard for health information exchange (HIE) solutions that empower physicians, hospitals and communities to improve care coordination and collaboration - is proud to announce that a team of Georgia Tech students sponsored by Medicity took the top three awards in the recent NHIN-CONNECT Code-a-Thon Challenge in Miami.

“We are very pleased to have been able to sponsor these students' NHIN Code-a-Thon success in designing more usable CCDs for physicians.”

The Code-a-Thon Challenge asked teams to develop innovative approaches that improve the display of a patient's Continuity of Care Document (CCD) for a primary care physician taking calls from patients after office hours. The CCD visualization tools were required to interpret and display data error-free on multiple form factors (smart phones, netbooks and full-sized displays) while facilitating an effective patient-physician interaction and the most efficient use of the physician's time.

A team of Georgia Tech College of Computing graduate students competed in a field that included working healthcare information technology professionals. Calling themselves the Georgia Tech Flatliners, computer science Ph.D. student Klara Benda and master's students Adrian Courreges, Monosij Dutta-Roy and Hassan Khan presented the three winning entries:

Problem-Oriented Approach (first place), arranging clinical data by problem so the physician could hone in on the patient's presenting problem. Download Image

Multi-Context Approach (second place), a highly flexible visual display enabling the physician to arrange information according to his or her individual "mental model" for handling a particular problem. Download Image

Rapid Access Approach (third place), providing quick and easy direct navigation across all clinical areas with data in the CCD. Download Image

The solutions are scheduled to be made available for free download and use through Open Health Tools (OHT), an open source community for healthcare IT.

"Our focus as a company is to advance innovative technologies that benefit physicians and patients," said Alok Mathur, SVP of Technology from Medicity. "We are very pleased to have been able to sponsor these students' NHIN Code-a-Thon success in designing more usable CCDs for physicians."