If ever an industry were ready for disruption, it is the American health care industry. Americans spend about $7,600 a year per person on health care, one in two adults lives with a chronic disease and the average wait time to see a doctor in a metropolitan area is 20 days. Entrepreneurs have responded by starting health care technology companies that are changing the way we interact with the entire system.

They are also responding to an evolving model of health care, which will ultimately be focused more on outcomes than on services, and to the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Program, which, in an effort to improve the coordination of care, gives providers financial incentives to adopt electronic health records and report how they use them. “We are about to see a fundamental transformation in the way care is delivered and the way patients are engaged with that care,” said Frank Moss, head of the New Media Medicine Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Here is a sampling of the innovative companies pushing that transformation.

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The Obama administration is unveiling a $1 billion grant program today that gives priority to organizations that hire, train and deploy new health care workers.

The Health Care Innovation Challenge is designed to find "the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program," said an administration announcement.

"Both public and private community organizations around the country are finding innovative solutions to improve our health care system and the Health Care Innovation Challenge will help jump-start these efforts," said Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services.

The White House casts this program as part of the "We Can't Wait" campaign, which seeks to pressure congressional Republicans into backing the president's jobs program.

The program is part of the Obama 2010 health care law, now the subject of a Supreme Court case.

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