On Monday, November 9, 2015 The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT Collaborative) and its partners announced the “Advancing Health Equity through Precision Medicine Tools” Challenge (http://www.PMIChallenge.org) at the HIMSS Connected Health Conference.
At the event, NHIT Collaborative CEO Luis Belen and Dr. Julian Goldman of Partners Healthcare announced the first-of-its-kind initiative to inspire and fund entrepreneurs building digital health tools that:
- Address the Precision Medicine needs of people in underserved and medically underserved communities
- Facilitate participation of people from underserved and medically underserved communities to the Precision Medicine cohort
- Promote the use of open health platforms to expand the breadth, depth and interoperability of digital health tools and associated data to support the Precision Medicine Initiative
“Digital health tools hold great promise in improving the quality of health and healthcare for Americans. Ensuring that everyone, especially those in underserved communities, benefit from advances in precision medicine will accelerate progress toward health equity,” said Luis Belen, CEO of NHIT Collaborative.
“Our team has been working to revolutionize improvements in healthcare safety and quality through integration of devices into systems. We look forward to working with Challenge participants to share this insight and host them in our lab,” said Dr. Julian Goldman, Director of the Medical Device Plug and Play Lab at Partners Healthcare and Mass General Hospital.
Working on the challenge are HIMSS, Partners Healthcare, Intel Corporation, Howard University College of Medicine and TracFone- who will all provide experts to mentor, collaborate and provide technical assistance for the selected entrepreneurs in their journey from envisioning to deploying and potentially commercializing these solutions. The challenge is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
“Intel is committed to accelerating precision medicine by working with entrepreneurs to share our expertise spanning the entire computing continuum, from local high performance computing (HPC) clusters, big data analytics, cloud, open-source software initiatives, to mobile devices, smartphones, and sensors in the Internet of Things,” said Matthew Quinn, Managing Director, East Coast Healthcare & Life Sciences, Intel Corporation.
This challenge announcement builds on NHIT Collaborative’s 2nd Annual Conference “Advancing Health Equity through Precision Medicine & Innovation”, which brought together leaders from across the federal government, academia and industry to strategize on ways to leverage the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative to advance health equity and spur innovation.
“This challenge announcement turns our plans to action. We look forward to engaging with entrepreneurs and innovators in turning their great ideas into digital health tools that improve health and health equity,” said Luis Belen.
About NHIT Collaborative Since 2008, NHIT Collaborative has focused on the elimination of health disparities and attainment of optimal health for multicultural underserved communities. NHIT Collaborative works in partnership with organizations and individuals to assure that members of these communities benefit fully from HIT advances.
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