“Necessity,” the old aphorism has it, “is the mother of invention.”

Or, to put it specifically in health IT terms, “The identification of a need leads to a challenge to invent.”

The latest example of this phenomenon came out of this week’s Care Innovations Summit -- co-hosted by ONC, CMS, the West Wireless Health Institute and Health Affairs – where the Janssen Connected Care Challenge was unveiled. According to Jansen Healthcare Innovation, the award’s sponsor, “This challenge is designed to spur innovation and drive action towards achieving better care and better health at lower cost through continuous improvement.”

According to a release issued at the time of the announcement, “One in three patients aged 21 and older, discharged from a hospital to the community, does not see a doctor within 30 days of discharge. These patients are at the highest risk of being readmitted to the hospital. While this is a problem for all payers, the estimate for Medicare is that readmissions cost $15 billion a year and $12 billion of these readmissions are considered preventable.”

Given that situation, the “Challenge is looking for approaches that will improve both patients' direct engagement with their care and recovery and physicians' connectivity to patients during the recovery process after hospital discharge. . . . Ideally, these approaches would be easy for patients to access and would take advantage of the tools and technology that patients and physicians have or can easily acquire.”

This is the second such challenge to be issued in recent months. The first health IT challenge, “Ensuring Safe Transitions from Hospital to Home,” called upon developers to create a web-based application that could empower patients and caregivers to better navigate and manage a transition from a hospital.

According to ONC director Dr. Farzad Mostashari, "This challenge is an enormous opportunity for software developers to develop solutions, and pursue models that can be adopted across a community. Scheduling post-discharge follow-up appointments is critical, but not easy for patients or providers and we're excited by the possibilities that will stem from this challenge."

More information on the Challenge can be found here.