Advancing patient-centered care through transformative clinical innovations
New Haven, CT (Aug. 19, 2022) – The YNHHS Center for Health Care Innovation (CHI) is pleased to announce the winners of the Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS) Innovation Awards and to celebrate early-stage innovations emerging from our academic medical center and health system. Established in 2019 as a joint initiative between YNHHS and Yale University, CHI champions innovation and leads the implementation of novel solutions to improve healthcare delivery. The YNHHS Innovation Awards seek to provide needed resources to YNHHS employees and Yale University faculty working on promising ideas with potential for impact.
This year’s call for proposals, the first ever, had a robust response characterized by high quality submissions and strong collaboration among teams. After initial review, semi-finalists were advanced via two tracks. Hospital innovation track submissions were selected for their potential to immediately offer positive impact to health system workflows and were reviewed by system experts across clinical, IT and finance domains. Pitch track submissions were selected for their promise to be commercially viable and were evaluated by a panel of investors and strategists from AlleyCorp, Elm Street Ventures, LRVHealth, OSF Ventures and Rock Health. Winning teams will receive grants to advance their innovations. Proposals that received awards include:
YNHHS Innovation Award Winners
Hospital Innovation Track
- CHATogether Family Intervention (Eunice Yuen, MD, PhD; Ruby Lekwauwa MD; Carol Cestaro; Sarah Barnes, PhD; Katie Klingensmith, MD; Naomi Kunstler; Tammy Smith; Stephanie Leblanc): Compassionate Home, Action Together, platform combining different creative digital modalities to address cross-cultural and generational needs, to promote mental health for teens and families. The CHATogether platform will help alleviate the constraints related to the threefold volume increase in children and adolescents visiting YNHH for behavioral health services, while improving care outcomes for patients and families.*
- Mobile Resuscitation Application (Emily Gilmore, MD; Rachel Beekman, MD; Laura Devaux; Kevin Sigovitch; Gloria Bindelglass; Akhil Khosla, MD): App-based electronic mobile guide and documentation system for cardiac arrests that will not only facilitate automated documentation of and implement a platform that assists cardiac arrest code teams in running successful code events, minimizes loss, and streamlines information flow into the electronic medical record - all of which will improve the overall quality of care and outcomes for approximately 500 patients per year.*
- Prediction of Death after Terminal Extubation (TE), the Machine Learning Way! (Ramesh Batra, MBBS; Smita Krishnaswamy, PhD): Advanced machine learning platform to assist care teams in more accurately predicting patient end of life (EOL) post-TE to maximize time for closure with families, in-line with hospital EOL policies, while increasing the success rate and clinical efficiency of organ donation for transplant programs and organ procurement organizations.
- TrackMyMilk (Eliza Myers, MD; Laura DeFrancesco; Michelle DeWitt; Rick Meskill; Chas Cota; Trevor Young): EMR integrated mobile app to support human milk supply and management of up to 1,500 lactating parents annually. It will reduce substantial surgical and bedside costs related to donor milk use, hospital complications, length of stay, and readmissions while materially impacting the quality of care.*
Pitch Track
- Patient-Controlled Dispenser and Deactivator (Daniel Wiznia, MD; Jinlei Li, MD, PhD; Claudia See, MD): A novel medical device that extends the benefits of patient-controlled intravenous (IV) analgesia to a non-invasive oral format by empowering patients to self-administer liquid pain medication orally within predefined limits without the need for IV or nursing resources to administer medication. The device will enhance patient safety and optimize opioid management workflows.
- VirusCheck (Ellen Foxman, MD, PhD; Wade Schulz, MD, PhD; Marie Landry, MD): Simple, low-cost biomarker test which enables providers to confidently rule out a wide array of viral respiratory infections. The test has the potential to facilitate rapid, low-cost screening in low resource and public health settings.
- Yale M-Select (Amber Childs, PhD): New measurement-based care (MBC) selection platform to assist providers with standardized behavioral health measurements, thereby enhancing care quality, simplifying ongoing accreditation requirements, and creating new revenue potential through MBC reimbursement.
In addition to the detailed teams, CHI will be working with Eve Insight, Stroke Education*, Accessible Physical Therapy* and Clinical Provider Bias teams to integrate their innovative solutions into existing workflows to deliver clinical value and strengthen patient care. The CHI plans to announce the next YNHHS Innovation Award call for proposals in spring 2023.
*Denotes innovation/submission developed by cross-institutional teams comprised of members from both YNHHS and Yale University.
Yale New Haven Health (YNHHS), the largest and most comprehensive healthcare system in Connecticut, is recognized for advanced clinical care, quality, service, cost effectiveness and commitment to improving the health status of the communities it serves. YNHHS includes five hospitals – Bridgeport, Greenwich, Lawrence + Memorial, Westerly and Yale New Haven hospitals, several specialty networks and Northeast Medical Group, a non-profit medical foundation with several hundred community-based and hospital-employed physicians. YNHHS is affiliated with Yale University and Yale Medicine, the clinical practice of the Yale School of Medicine and the largest academic multi-specialty practice in New England. Yale New Haven Hospital is the primary teaching hospital of Yale School of Medicine. www.ynhhs.org
