Lawsuit Brought Against CHIME for their $1 Million Patient ID Challenge

Back in 2016, CHIME announced a $1 million Patient ID challenge.  CHIME teamed up with HeroX (which co-founded the XPRIZE) to run a year-long competition to develop a National Patient ID solution.  They planned to announce the $1 million winner in Feb 2017 at the CHIME-HIMSS CIO Forum.  Here’s the challenge description from the HeroX website:

Ensure 100% accuracy of every patient’s health info to reduce preventable medical errors and eliminate unnecessary hospital costs/resources.

For those of us that work in health IT, the challenge of patient identification and matching is a well known and complicated problem.  Plus, government regulations that don’t allow for a national patient ID or even any sort of research or discussion of a national patient identifier make it even more challenging.  Improving patient identification and matching is something we all want fixed.

After CHIME’s announcement of the Patient ID Challenge, they started with a Concept Blitz round that included 113 submissions and over 344 innovators registered for the challenge.  On June 1, 2016, 5 independent judges selected 23 proposals as semifinalists, 8 submissions were chosen as finalists, and two winners for the Concept Blitz Round: Michael Braithwaite and Mark Schroeder.