ONC Contest: Make Patient-Exported EHI More Usable

The Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is reviving its technology competitions with a challenge around making patient-exported electronic health information (EHI) more usable. 

As ONC explains, since December 2023, health IT developers have been required to export EHI, but raw exports are often overwhelming and difficult for patients and clinicians to use in real-world workflows.

The EHIgnite Challenge is a $490,000 competition designed to incentivize the development of tools, platforms, and workflows that transform single-patient EHI exports into usable, readable, and actionable insights. The goal is to solve the problem of overwhelming, hard-to-integrate raw data and better support clinical care, patient engagement, and informed decision-making.

In Phase 1 of the EHIgnite Challenge, ONC is looking for submissions (Concept & Design) that address summarization and at least one scenario:
• Interactive patient tools (Q&A over an export): Enable patients to ask questions about their health data and receive understandable responses.
• Filtering by clinical domains: Build tools that allow customized queries and organization by relevant domains.
• Integration across settings: Allow and enhance integration of exports from multiple places of care.
• Streamlined payer workflows: Enhance easier and more streamlined sharing of information for insurance coverage.
• Participant-defined use case: Have a better idea? Propose it.

In Phase 1, up to 9 winners will receive $10,000 each and then be invited to participate in Phase 2, where winners will receive $250,000 / $100,000 / $50,000 (plus bonus recognition for multi-EHR interoperability). In Phase 2, there also is a bonus for Most Innovative Use of AI: $20,000.

Phase 1 closes May 13, 2026. Phase 2 will span Summer 2026 – Spring 2027.  Phase 1 winners will develop and test working prototypes of their solutions. The final prizes will be awarded in Spring 2027.

The last time ONC held a similar competition was in 2018 when it ran the Certified Health IT Product List (CHPL) Data Challenge — a call for developers, researchers, and innovators to develop a software application that makes use of the data in the CHPL application programming interfaces (API) or XML files in novel ways. The winning team that year, ResearchAE, a search engine for health and health IT datasets, produced an application mapping CHPL’s API with Meaningful Use attestation, the Medicare Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS), and National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) data. Users are able to perform cross-sectional searches allowing them to analyze who is using ONC-certified health IT and how it’s being used.