We built an app to connect patients and researchers on collaborative research projects. We won the Grand Prize of $100K in the 2014 PCORI App Challenge. Despite it being a six-month-long team competition, we discovered it only three days from the submission deadline. We built our submission solo in two back-to-back days of nearly nonstop coding, and submitted in the final minute.
In 2014, PCORI (The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute) put out a competitive challenge to app developers to create mobile apps to “increase access for patients, researchers, and other stakeholders to partner with each other to conduct patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR).” The winner prizes offered were $100k, $35k, and $10k.
PCORI described the brief: “The ultimate objective of the winning app is to facilitate the creation of partnerships between patients, researchers, and other stakeholders.” It was fairly abstract, leaving lots of room for creativity.
We used Ruby on Rails, Postgres, and Bootstrap. We hired an engineer overseas to wrap the web app in an Android app for submission. This is why it looks only marginally passable for good UI on the web: it’s a web app designed to be viewed on small viewports through the Android wrapper. And there wasn’t a minute to spare for cleaning up the UI.
We hired a graphic artist to draw cartoon archetypes of the three user types: patient, researcher, and stakeholder. New users select which of these “characters” they are, then tag their profile with various conditions (for patients, these tags represent the conditions they have; for researchers, these tags represent the conditions they research). Patients and researchers can propose questions. Each can also vouch support for these questions. Each user is surfaced a feed of the questions sorted by most supported among the conditions to which they’ve chosen as tags.
Before submission, we solicited some empowered patients in our network to seed the app with uploaded selfie videos of them each speaking a proposal for a patient-led research project. This brought the app to life and helped demonstrate it in action.
To our great surprise, we won the $100k grand prize against dozens of competing teams consisting of multiple researchers, physicians, patients, and other stakeholders. We chalk this up to this challenge being right in a sweet spot of our passion and experience — and a healthy serving of luck.