Design & Innovation Challenges

Why Host a Challenge?

Challenges serve as a tremendous vehicle to fuel open innovation efforts. Benefits include:

• A multitude of diverse ideas and opportunities to be explored
• Opportunity to own IP from challenge or partner with other organizations to c—create
• Another research avenue – uncovering new viewpoints
• Positioning brand in the innovation realm, fortifying the culture
• Attract passionate designers and innovators to hire

A Bill You Can Understand  

Patients and families often find themselves concerned about the confusing nature of medical bills. This common complaint about the healthcare system led Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to call for new approaches to medical billing in 2016. To help draw national attention to this issue and stimulate innovation in the space, Health and Human Services and Mad*Pow collaborated to create the A Bill You Can Understand Design & Innovation Challenge.

Challenge Highlights:

• In collaboration with the US Department of Health and Human Services and sponsored by AARP
• 5 Pilot Partners selected to move ideas forward
• Tweeted about by the Obama White House
• Patient and Stakeholder Interviews Completed, Survey Deployed, Baseline Journey Map, and Ecosystem Diagram to guide participant efforts
• 80 Teams submitted solutions in the challenge
• Winners and honorable mentions posted in a gallery
• Findings report published as a resource for the industry and is being used by many as a design guideline

View the challenge prompt, research artifacts, winners, and final findings report.

Benefit Selection for Financial Security

Commonwealth partnered with CHXD in 2018 to launch an innovation challenge to prompt the financial, healthcare, and design community to envision a solution that will help employees with incomes under $55,000 balance their health and financial needs at open enrollment. The purpose of this challenge was to deliver innovative solutions so that people are able to make decisions that work for their finances without jeopardizing their health.

Challenge Highlights:

• In collaboration with Commonwealth, a non-profit dedicated to financial security for low-income populations
• Participatory design workshop with the target audience to uncover perspectives and ideas
• Challenge launched at the Health Experience Design Conference and winners announced at the Financial Experience Design Conference
• Ten teams responded and winners were selected
• Challenge report shared with industry to educate benefit selection efforts and educate on consumer viewpoints

View the challenge prompt, research artifacts, winners, and final findings report.

Health x Design: Building Health into Everyday Life

The Center worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on a design and innovation challenge that invites the community to imagine how, in the near future, we might use technology to make health an integral part of our daily routines.

Challenge Highlights:

• Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• 25 Teams submitted solutions
• Explored an open innovation approach to systemic change. Looked at redesigning everyday life so that it yields health as opposed to sickness.

View the gallery of winners.