Town of Innisfil wins national municipal award for education with Future Ready Leadership Program

Students from the Mohawk College Applied Research Centre for eHealth captured the first and third prizes at the 2012 App Challenge at the national eHealth conference sponsored by COACH, Canada Health Infoway and The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI)  in Vancouver yesterday.

The theme for the smartphone healthcare application challenge was "Connected Care for Consumers and Clinicians".

Taking first prize of $3500 were Hamilton brothers Leo and Jerad Godreault for their submission entitled "SmartMed". SmartMed is an end to end prescription adherence tool, allowing for the electronic capture of a prescription regime and translates it into a medication schedule on a smartphone. The app then issues reminders and tracks the progress of the patient through the course of treatment. The tool also offers cloud-based reporting and analytics on an individual and group basis. The tool allows others concerned about the course of care to be included (clinicians and even family members if allowed by the patient) to remotely monitor progress and be alerted when thresholds of adherence are exceeded.

Taking the third prize of $1500 was Rahulbai Patel with his App entitled "MyPCS" -- a consumer-oriented "Product Safety Checker" that individuals can use at the point of purchase to make decisions about over the counter medications and remedies. The App uses a smartphone camera to scan the product barcode and issues a query to the patient's online personal health record as well as to online pharmaceutical databases provided by the Canadian Pharmacists Association. The App looks for potential side-effects that may affect the patient and using an evidence-based ruleset makes a recommendation to the patient about the product.

Six judges evaluated the entries, and ranged from Physicians to executives from organizations such as Microsoft and Canada Health Infoway. The prizes were presented by COACH Organization CEO Don Newsham at the concluding keynote session on May 30 2012.

The students were supported by the Mohawk College Applied Research Centre for eHealth in Hamilton, Ontario. The NSERC-sponsored Centre has been conducting applied research in the areas of eHealth and mHealth since 2007.