FDA Plans Design Competition for Drug Overdose Mobile App

The plea is out for you to put your creativity to work for the greater good. The FDA wants your help.

I know there are a lot of techies out there. Now's the time to put your brain and cleverness to work in the war on drugs.

The Food and Drug Administration issued a press release recently inviting people to design an app to connect opioid abusers to places they can get a drug to reverse an overdose.

To that end, the FDA launched the Naloxone App Competition this week to fight the opioid abuse epidemic.  FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, M.D. had this to say in the press release:

With a dramatic increase in the number of opioid overdose deaths in the U.S., there’s a vital need to harness the power of new technologies to quickly and effectively link individuals experiencing an overdose – or a bystander such as a friend or family member – with someone who carries and can administer the life-saving medication. Through this competition, we are tapping public health-focused innovators to help bring technological solutions to a real-world problem that is costing the U.S. thousands of lives each year.

The 2016 Naloxone App Competition runs through November  7, and all submissions are welcome.

If in sharing this, it finds even just one individual, or team, that could potentially develop an app of this nature, then it's so worthwhile.