eLuminate Health president and CEO Tami Hutchison and director of operations Peter Yates accept Hackovate Health’s top prize from Tyler Prochnow, senior partner at Think Big Partners.

The second wave of blizzard conditions within a week—often referred to as Snowpocalypse Part II—may have put the international Hackovate Health Innovation Competition on ice for two days, but local finalist eLuminate Health received a warm reception Thursday at Union Station, walking away the overall winner.

The inaugural competition’s co-hosts, Think Big Partners and H&R Block, sought to find an innovative web or mobile product for the health care industry, specifically one that addressed the ramifications of the Affordable Care Act. eLuminate Health, a startup building a health care provider marketplace for businesses to offer employees and consumers, saw a fit in strategy and ran with it.

“We will have partners around the U.S. that have the opportunity to provide a storefront for consumers to go and get assistance,” president and CEO Tami Hutchison said Thursday after the competition. “We thought H&R Block could be one of those partners.”

The Leawood, Kan.-based company, which plans to launch its online marketplace in July, went home with the top prize of $15,000 and the opportunity to meet with H&R Block’s senior management. GetHealth, the “Foursquare of health” as described by CEO Liam Ryan, was first runner up, and health management provider inAssist was second runner up, with the two winning $5,000 and $2,500, respectively. SHHADE (Supplying Home Health Care Alternatives and Dedicated Education) took home the Google Fiber People’s Choice Award, voted on via text message by attendees at the event and those watching the live stream.

GetHealth CEO Liam Ryan (right) meets with SHHADE’s Karan Srivastava (second right) and his team at the Hackovate Health reception in Union Station.

Ten finalists—two as far away as Ireland and Pakistan—presented Thursday after submissions were narrowed down last month by preliminary judging. When all was said and done, the judges chose eLuminate Health because of its experienced team, disruption of a big market, a working prototype and strong consumer-value proposition, according to event judge Kushagra Saxena, H&R Block’s chief strategy officer.

“What stood out in comparison to other proposals was the disruptive nature of connecting people directly with providers in a new digital marketplace,” event judge David Edwards, an engineering fellow at Cerner Corporation, said Friday in an email. “It shifts purchasing power to consumers, forcing providers to compete on quality and cost of services.”

Herb Sih (right), managing partner at Think Big Partners, is excited about what the winners and potentially other competitors can work on with H&R Block in the future.

“This opportunity is less about the check and the prize and the plaque that you walk home with,” he said Thursday after the competition. “What H&R Block offers is strength, brand recognition, experience and expertise. And then you pair that with the entrepreneurs—small, agile, the ability to break the rules. (H&R Block is) very serious about trying to solve their innovation needs through something like this.”

Sih, whose company hosted the Gigabit Challenge competition last year, said Think Big Partners plans on more “innovation derbies” in the future to have big and small companies working together on products and services. “It’s extremely cost-prohibitive for large companies to be innovative with increased shareholder pressure, scrutiny and tight budgets,” Sih said.

As for eLuminate Health, the six-person company plans to put its prize money into developing its software and launching its services, Hutchison said. It closed a $1 million seed round last September, and just last month the Kansas Department of Commerce announced it expects the startup to create 201 jobs in Kansas over the next five years. Hutchison said her company aims to close its next round of funding in August.

Credits: Photos courtesy of Think Big Partners.