Announcing the Innovator Awards Winners: Profiles in Innovation

Ever since 2009, we, the editors of Healthcare Innovation, have hosted our Innovator Awards Program, with the intention of recognizing and showcasing all types of innovation in U.S. healthcare—clinical, clinical-operational, financial-operational, interoperability, and so on. We’ve awarded hospitals, medical groups, integrated health systems, health plans, health information exchanges, and even a public health department. Showcasing innovation of all kinds is core to our mission and vision as a publication, and we are always very glad to showcase the winning teams, not only to recognize their accomplishments, but at least as importantly, to use these case studies to encourage other teams forward.

This year, we’re delighted to share today the names of the three winning organizations—Penn Medicine (Philadelphia), Metrolina Nephrology Associates (Charlotte), and Northeast Valley Health Corporation (Los Angeles).

At Penn Medicine, radiologists and IT specialists have developed an artificial intelligence solution, PennAInsights, that automates the workflow from image capture through AI analysis to diagnostic reporting. That team has tackled head on the twin problems of rapidly growing procedure volumes in radiology and a smaller pace of growth in the number of radiologists. At Metrolina, leaders have implemented and developed a care management system that identifies at-risk patients kidney care patients and tailors interventions to improve their outcomes, resulting in enhanced management of the care of patients going into dialysis, improved patient engagement, and considerable reductions in cost through averting high-cost hospitalizations. And in Los Angeles County, Northeast Valley Health Corporation has partnered with the Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services (LANES), a health information network, to reduce unnecessary emergency and inpatient visits for diabetic and asthmatic patients, with that partnership resulting in far better data-sharing among clinicians and intensive care management for the patients involved.

These three winning teams have produced documented results that are improving patient outcomes, clinician workflow, and better processes all around care delivery. And everything that they’ve been accomplishing is highly replicable and deeply meaningful.

We’ve published our feature articles on all three of these case studies, and offer our heartiest congratulations to the winning teams. All of their work speaks to the kinds of innovation that are highly possible in the current U.S. healthcare system, and eminently replicable. Congratulations to all the winning teams!

—the Editors of Healthcare Innovation