Institute For The Future

Rewarding ideas for the future of health care

The XPrize Foundation, which awards muliti-million dollar prizes for innovations in fields such as space technology and genomics, will announce on Tuesday details of the initial design for its latest competition, a proposed $10+ million Health Care X PRIZE.

From the press release:

 

This first-of-its-kind competition will focus on reinventing the health care system in a bold, measurable and scientific fashion to enable dramatic improvement in health care value in the United States. The PRIZE is focused on improving health care value through optimal health. The proposed design will align and improve care within communities and proactively assist individuals in optimizing their health in a way that reduces overall costs. By setting a higher bar for good health based on better outcomes and an individual's active participation, The X PRIZE Foundation, the WellPoint Foundation, and WellPoint, Inc. are striving to make health care dramatically more proactive, personalized and focused on engagement in health and vitality.

 

 

At a press conference during the 6th Annual World Health Care Congress, X PRIZE Foundation chairman/CEO Peter Diamandis, M.D., and Angela F. Braly, President/CEO, WellPoint Inc., will put forth a call for public comment on the initial competition design.  Wellpoint and the Wellpoint Foundation are sponsoring the prize.

X PRIZE is not the first incentivized competition to explore ways to improve health care in this country.  In 2008, ChangeNow4Health, a coalition sponsored by Humana, posted an ideation challenge on Innocentive, calling for ideas that could be implemented quickly and effectively to improve our health care system.  At least one winner has been identified, but not officially named.  He is Adam Dole, and one of these days I'll post something about his award-winning idea. Unfortunately for Adam, the award for ChangeNow4Health's Innovation xChange was not nearly on the same scale as the X PRIZE: its winner might receive up to $10,000 or have their ideas published in an e-book, Tomorrow’s Health Care.

 

(I should mention that IFTF's ongoing relationships with Humana and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wellpoint in no way influenced my decision to post this.  Rather, I've been following trends related to open innovation and crowdsourcing in health and health care even since our conference on Open Health, and am fascinated to see what will result from X PRIZE's decision to play in this space.)