Everhealthier Women: Penn Nursing prof wins $85K federal mobile app challenge

Make cancer prevention as simple as following a checklist on a mobile app.

That was the idea behind Everhealthier Women, an app built by a team led by a Penn Nursing School professor that won the $85,000 first prize in a women’s cancer prevention app challenge.

Download the app here.

A challenge hosted by two offices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Office of Minority Health), the Reducing Cancer Among Women of Color Challenge asked teams to develop a mobile tool that would empower women to improve cancer prevention in minority communities.

See all the winners here.

Everhealthier Women, the winning app, offers a cancer prevention task checklist based on the user’s personal profile. These tasks can be shared with the user’s loved ones, so they can help encourage those behaviors.

Penn Nursing professor Anne Teitelman led the team that built the app specifically for this challenge. She worked with Damien Leri, a Masters of Public Health candidate at Penn who founded health IT company Big Yellow Star, Marilyn Stringer, a former Penn Nursing professor and Ben Koditschek, a Chicago-based developer.

You’ve seen the idea of using mobile technology to offer a checklist of caregiving best practices before — think of the forthcoming Autism-aimed GuideMeCoach.

The Penn Nursing team intends to use some of the money to continue developing the app, Teitelman said.

Penn’s School of Nursing has been on the forefront of innovation, opening a technology lab last fall to incubate student health IT ideas and the school’s 2012 “Games for Healthcare” university-wide challenge.