X Prize lays down a new gauntlet for the Drupal community

The latest X-Prize (http://www.xprize.org/future-x-prizes/healthcare-x-prize) relates to healthcare in the United States and the enormous challenges it faces.

Not the least of these is electronic medial records (EMR), which US healthcare companies are reluctant to deal with. In the world of Big Health, $20B to fix EMR is a drop in the bucket. In the open source community $1M would be beyond generous to fund an initiative. Something like 30% of every dollar spent on healthcare is devoted to the keeping of paper records.

The XPrize offers a $10M prize and ample publicity for a team able to solve these issues. I for one believe that Drupal is well up to the task of providing an open source framework to handle EMR.

Here's an excerpt from the XPrize site:

Healthy is what we're after

And solving America's health care challenges requires the kind of innovation that only comes from competition.

WellPoint, Inc. (NYSE: WLP), the nation’s largest health benefits company, and the WellPoint Foundation, one of the largest corporate foundations in the United States are collaborating with the X PRIZE Foundation to develop an X PRIZE designed to generate new ways to address the nation’s serious health care system challenges.

In addition, WellPoint has committed to testing the selected finalists’ entries in its state markets, in order to test their ability to result in viable, creative and achievable health care system changes.

Let's see if we can put some of our talent to help resolve an important issue.