Past AHRQ Challenge Competitions
AHRQ wants to inspire innovative thinking and novel methods for improving healthcare in the United States. The Agency has conducted several previous challenge competitions to foster solutions to specific issues, such as creating an app to track patient-reported outcomes, developing a tool to better interpret community health needs based on social determinants of health, applying predictive analytics to public datasets, developing interoperable technology that helps connect patients who have multiple chronic conditions with appropriate care and resources, and improving postpartum mental health care for rural families.
Summaries of these challenge competitions on the following pages serve as a way of capturing the structure and highlights of each challenge for those interested in the results, as well as the variety of avenues for inviting innovative ways to address complex issues.
In the AHRQ Step Up App Challenge: Advancing Care Through Patient Assessments, AHRQ is looking for teams to design, develop, and pilot a user-friendly application that simplifies the process of collecting, interpreting, aggregating, and sharing patient-reported outcomes data related to physical function outcomes in the ambulatory care setting.
AHRQ's Bringing Predictive Analytics to Healthcare Challenge encourages health services and social science researchers to submit applications either independently or join with health IT developers, healthcare providers, and others with appropriate expertise to apply predictive analytics and related methods using AHRQ's current data infrastructure, as well as other publicly available data.
AHRQ's Visualization Resources of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge invites participants to develop new online tools to present and encourage use of free, publicly available social determinants of health data to better understand and predict communities' unmet healthcare needs.
The AHRQ Cross-Sectional Innovation to Improve Rural Postpartum Mental Health Challenge aims to improve postpartum mental health care for rural American families. AHRQ seeks narratives and proposals regarding cross-cutting solutions that encompass digital healthcare and non-traditional partners to ensure that rural families can receive treatment and support for postpartum mental health problems.
In AHRQ's Digital Solutions to Support Care Transitions Challenge competition, AHRQ is seeking applications proposing personalized, high-tech ways to ease administrative and information management burdens, and support patient activation and engagement, especially among Americans diagnosed with multiple chronic conditions and those that may have low health literacy or limited English language proficiency.
