The Innovator Awards: Green Sprouts Everywhere

It is in that context that we, the editors of Healthcare Innovation, are delighted to present profiles of the four winning teams in our 2020 Innovator Awards Program, as well as capsule summaries of innovations produced by the six semi-finalist teams.

The accomplishments of the four winning teams represent a spectrum of achievement:

• Hennepin Health, a safety-net ACO serving Medicaid patients in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, has been one organization on the leading edge of spurring change through a comprehensive, multi-layered initiative designed to properly address patients’ social needs that are leading contributors to high healthcare utilization, and then appropriately intervene with care management to reduce medical costs and improve health outcomes for underserved members. This specific project began by overhauling the system’s approach to identifying homeless patients via a “homeless indicator” tool and then introducing them to outpatient ACO case managers during hospitalization.
• A multidisciplinary team at Kaiser Permanente Colorado has developed a program to identify patients with significant incidental imaging findings and has created an automated imaging finding tracking and management system to close care gaps.
• At the University of Minnesota Health/Fairview Health, also in the Minneapolis metropolitan area, leaders have collaborated to create a framework for better predicting the potential for severe infection among chemotherapy patients, successfully identifying three times as many chemotherapy patients at risk for life-threatening infections than the model that has long been used by a national cancer care collaborative.
• Leaders at the renowned Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City have developed a care management program that intervenes early on behalf of high-risk cancer patients—using patient-reported and other data. Their work is breaking new ground in the oncology area, with strategies and techniques learned from programs long established for the care management of patients with common chronic diseases.

It is our pleasure and privilege to showcase the achievements of all of the winning and semi-finalist teams in our Innovator Awards Program. We hope that all our readers will find these profiles useful as they forge ahead in the new healthcare.