It is our pleasure to announce the winners of our annual Innovator Awards Program—three teams in the provider division, and one organization in the vendor division. For the sixteenth year in a row, we, the editors of Healthcare Innovation (formerly Healthcare Informatics) have been proud to showcase examples of innovation springing up all over the U.S. healthcare system.
The three provider/plan organizations being recognized are Cary Medical Management, Blue Shield of California, and Mercy Health (St. Louis). Our first-place-winning team are the leaders at Cary Medical Management, an eight-clinic medical group, who have made huge strides in population health management and care management by developing and deploying a sophisticated health risk management program, supported by patient health risk-level algorithms, connectivity to North Carolina’s statewide health information exchange, and a comprehensive specialist-referral program that ensures that insights from specialist visits come back to the primary care physicians. Through all that work, Cary Medical Management’s physicians and care managers have significantly lowered patient care costs while improving outcomes.
Senior leaders at Blue Shield of California, our second-place-winning team, recognized that they needed to transform their technology infrastructure to better support the health plan’s care managers. The platform they’ve built has dramatically improved outreach, case creation, and care plan completion, especially for the health plan’s dual-eligible population. Meanwhile, our third-place-winning team, nursing leaders at the St. Louis-based Mercy Health, have successfully implemented two related programs that are improving nurses’ worklives by reducing their administrative burden and improving clinical workflow.
What these leaders have done through their diverse initiatives, shows clearly that teams of pioneers are reworking clinical operations and organizational processes in order to lower costs and improve patient and plan member outcomes. These initiatives go to the heart of what healthcare leaders are being asked to do, as the U.S. healthcare system careens towards unsustainability. We are excited to be able to share with our audience examples of innovation that are not only admirable, but also highly replicable.”
And you can read all three of these profiles here:
Innovator Awards 2024: First-Place Winning Team
Innovator Awards 2024: Second-Place Winning Team
Innovator Awards 2024: Third-Place Winning Team
Meanwhile, we are also pleased to recognize a winner in the vendor division of the Innovator Awards Program. Leaders at the Norristown, Pennsylvania-based MRO Corp. have been focusing on innovating the exchange of information across healthcare stakeholders to streamline every step of the quality reporting process. The company’s clinical data exchange solution incorporates all relevant data to support such quality reporting requirements as MIPS, HEDIS, eCQMs, APPs, and other non-APPs. By reducing administrative burdens associated with quality reporting, MRO introduces a mutually beneficial payer-provider clinical data exchange process.
Innovator Awards 2024: Vendor Winning Team
We heartily congratulate all the winners.