Announcing the $55,000 Canvas FHIR® API Prize

For most of us, interacting with the American healthcare system is a fragmented and frustrating experience: delayed appointments, repetitive questionnaires, slow communications. One major contributor to dysfunction is the stilted adoption of standard formats for data associated with all our healthcare interactions. Another major rate limiter is the lack of reusable, well-maintained open source implementations of software in healthcare. We must do better as an industry.

To that end, we are thrilled to launch the $55,000 Canvas FHIR® API Prize. For a period of three months between 10/9/23 and 1/9/24, developers from across the world will compete for $55,000 in prize money to develop the best mobile app for patients, allowing them to sign up for care, self-schedule appointments in a way that works for clinicians, start video visits, chat with their care team, look up test results and medical history, pay bills, and more. 

Developers competing for the API Prize will use Canvas FHIR APIs for persistent data storage and retrieval. Canvas will evaluate submissions based on the criteria outlined below, and we will then contribute the source code for the winning application to the community under an Open Source Initiative-approved license. Between the open source license and use of standardized FHIR APIs, the broader community will be able to adapt and integrate the winning application with any FHIR-based service — including other EMRs.

Canvas has been an implementer of the FHIR standard since 2015, and we have contributed a number of open source code bases to the community, including the popular FHIRStarter framework for FHIR servers. In running the API Prize, we're doubling down on our commitments to informatics, interoperability, and the broader healthtech community. If those are commitments you can get behind...

‍Sign up for the FHIR API Prize now!