Wireless Health Summit Showcases Incentive Prizes as Tool for Change

respective technologies for improving patient care in the gray area that exists between different healthcare providers. The winner will get an additional $100,000.

McCray says he hopes J&J’s challenge also will help to prod change, as a provision of the Affordable Care Act requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reduce reimbursement payments for certain patients who are readmitted to hospitals within 30 days of a prior hospitalization. In addition to providing cash awards for entrepreneurs, McCray says the challenge is “trying to create reasons for competitors to collaborate.”

On Thursday morning, the WLSA has arranged for Peter Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, to announce plans for its next competition. Diamandis also is on the schedule later Thursday for a panel discussion about the use of prizes to spur innovation that includes Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs and McCray of the WLSA.

The WLSA says it also received a record 160 applications for its own prize competition, the fourth annual iAwards for Wireless Health, which is intended to recognize new wireless technologies in healthcare that are both innovative and have had a recognized impact. The field has been winnowed to 12 finalists in three categories—best consumer experience, clinical application, and operational effectiveness—and a winner will be announced at the summit Thursday.

Although winners of the WLSA competition receive no cash, McCray says, “one of the companies we’ve showcased before [as a 2011 iAward winner] is announcing a significant new venture capital investment.” McCray didn’t say which 2011 iAward winner is making the announcement, but Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia, which makes a wearable sensing device for assessing metabolic activity for weight monitoring, raised $2.7 million of a planned $10 million investment round, according to a regulatory filing in March.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.