West Wireless Health Institute Awards $10K Incentive Prize

San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute has awarded a $10,000 incentive prize to a Rhode Island software developer who answered a challenge the institute issued six months ago in conjunction with the Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2). The institute’s challenge called for development of a cost-effective wireless device or mobile app that enables VA patients and their healthcare providers to share pertinent patient care data.

The institute issued its award to Steven Palmer, a Vietnam Veteran and melanoma survivor, for an iPhone app he developed for use in a monthly self-examination for signs of the deadly skin cancer. The app enables users to collect precise color images of skin irregularities, lesions, and moles. Users can compare images of specific irregularities with images from previous exams, making it easier to see any changes, such as the size, shape, border regularity, or coloration of a lesion.

Palmer’s app, the Veterans Melanoma Early Warning System, also enables users to transmit images to a dermatology clinic for expert review, and even to schedule an appointment.

In a statement issued yesterday, institute CEO Don Casey says, “When we launched the developers challenge with VAi2, we wanted to spur exactly this type of breakthrough thinking to enable great outcomes at a much lower human and financial cost.”

Palmer, who received the Purple Heart in Vietnam, was treated for melanoma at the Providence, RI, Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He has been writing workflow software for the financial industry since 1974, when he received his Doctor of Science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.