Healthcare Innovation’s Editors Announce the Innovator Awards Winning Teams
If any one thing is clear in today’s healthcare, it is this: that the purchasers and payers of healthcare in the United States, whether public or private, have put a giant collective foot down, and are demanding change. Their demands for transparency, accountability, improved clinical outcomes, greater cost-effectiveness, and enhanced patient and community satisfaction, are rocking the healthcare provider world, at a time of clinician staffing shortages, soaring operational costs, and shifting contractual relationships. What’s more, the U.S. healthcare cost cliff is looming ever larger now, as, in the wake of two years of pandemic, the overall cost to care for American’s healthcare is exploding. If ever there were a time in which new solutions to the challenges of delivering healthcare were needed, now would be that time.
The good news? Innovation is exploding everywhere, as the leaders of hospitals, medical groups, health systems, health plans, health information exchanges, public health, and other entities work forward to improve care outcomes, enhance the health of communities, and attack the cost monster.
And once again, it is our privilege and pleasure as the editors of Healthcare Innovation, to announce the winners in both the provider and vendor/solutions provider divisions of our annual Innovator Awards. Each of the provider winning teams has shown remarkable vision, ingenuity, and perseverance, in creating team-based innovations of various types. Below are the four winning teams, and the four semi-finalist teams; and finally, the winning company in the vendor/solutions provider division. Congratulations to all the winning teams and organizations!
—the Editors of Healthcare Innovation
First-Place Winning Team: Huntsman at Home
The Huntsman at Home program of the University of Utah Health System’s Huntsman Cancer Institute is a breakthrough oncology-specific hospital-at-home program, and, with over 1,000 patients having participated in the program, achieved 55 percent fewer hospitalizations, 45 percent fewer ED visits, and shorter hospital stays.
Second-Place Winning Team: Gundersen Health
A team of clinicians and staff at Gundersen Health in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, has successfully leveraged artificial intelligence to built an analytics infrastructure that is helping them to define and analyze the populations at risk for poor outcomes. The project began by helping them to identify families moving in and out of their service area.
Co-Third-Place Winning Team: South Shore Hospital
Leaders at South Shore Hospital in South Weymouth, Massachusetts undertook an initiative to transform their organization’s reconciliation process and reduce adverse drug events, all on a tight budget. By assigning ownership of medication history to the pharmacy department, they’ve been able to make great strides.
Co-Third-Place Winning Team: Mount Sinai Morningside
Leaders at Mount Sinai Morningside, an urban community hospital in New York City, created a command center to manage both emergency incidents and daily operations, and that command center became indispensable once the COVID-19 pandemic hit the city.
Semi-Finalist Teams
Ø L.A. Care Health Plan: Training for family caregivers pays off for everyone
Ø Northwell Health: A new era in self-service, through the creation of a digital patient experience
Ø AU Health: A tele-CCU program that supports the needs of complex rural patients
Ø UC Davis Health: A digital health platform that incorporates digital health navigators
Innovator Awards Vendor Winner: Vital Data Technology
What began as a web-based data analytics solution in the pre-hospital care field transformed into a platform that connects data, solutions, and stakeholders and aligns payers, providers, and patients.
