NewWave Wins “Innovation in Healthcare” and “Impacter” Award at 2019 ACT-IAC Conference

On May 23, 2018, NewWave received two awards at this year’s American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) Conference for the development of the Blue Button 2.0 API, a technology that gives Medicare beneficiaries access to and control over their health data.

We won both the “Innovation in Healthcare” and the “Impacter” Award

ACT-IAC is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization established to improve government through the effective and innovative application of technology. ACT-IAC is the premiere public-private partnership in the government technology community and has been called “an example of how government and industry can work together.” The former U.S. Chief Technology Officer called ACT-IAC the “Switzerland of the government IT community.”

“This truly was a collective effort by the whole NewWave Team,” said Mark Scrimshire, NewWave’s Entrepreneur-In-Residence and CMS Blue Button Innovator. “We are honored to be recognized for what we feel is a game-changing technology.”

Developed in collaboration with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Blue Button 2.0 is an API that contains four years of Medicare Part A, B and D data for 53 million Medicare beneficiaries. This data reveals a variety of information about a beneficiary’s health, including type of Medicare coverage, drug prescriptions, primary care treatment and cost. Beneficiaries also have full control over how their data can be used and by whom, with identity and authorization controlled by MyMedicare.gov. Blue Button 2.0 uses the HL7 FHIR standard for beneficiary data and the OAuth 2.0 standard for beneficiary authorization.

ACT-IAC established the “Innovation in Healthcare” Award in 2019 in “recognition of the importance of healthcare innovation to the country, the large number of healthcare-related nominations received, and ACT-IAC’s strategic focus on the healthcare sector.” The “Impacter Award” recognizes the “innovation with the greatest magnitude of results and benefits.”

“From the outset,” says Scrimshire, “the vision was to build a developer-friendly, standards-based API that put beneficiaries in control of with whom they shared their claims information. In a healthcare world where so much data flows about us, without us, Blue Button 2.0 is about putting the patient at the center and letting them choose. This then makes trust and transparency job one for developers, services and researchers wanting to use the API. No data flows without the explicit authorization of the consumer.”

“Blue Button 2.0 represents best practice for innovation that is possible in a public-private partnership,” said Patrick Munis, NewWave’s CEO. “These awards recognize both an amazing innovative technology and model of supporting the federal government better serve America.”