NewYork-Presbyterian Named First-Place Winner of the 2019 American Hospital Association Innovation Challenge to Use Technology to Improve Community Health

Jul 26, 2019

a group of women smiling

The NewYork-Presbyterian team with the 2019 American Hospital Association Innovation Challenge award. From left to right: Tatiana Blue, Manager, IT Innovation, NewYork-Presbyterian; Davina Prabhu, vice president, NewYork-Presbyterian Ambulatory Care Network; and Liora Hoffman, manager, Psychiatry and Adolescent Clinical Services, NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.

New York

A proposal by NewYork-Presbyterian to use telemedicine to improve the health of vulnerable pregnant women, new mothers and young children has won the 2019 American Hospital Association (AHA) Innovation Challenge first-place prize.

The $100,000 award will help to create a pilot program in northern Manhattan to conduct virtual visits in the homes of mothers at-risk of not receiving healthcare and will address pregnancy though early childhood.

“This innovative proposal presents a novel approach that has the potential to reshape and enhance the way we deliver care to vulnerable mothers and their children,” said Davina Prabhu, vice president of the New York-Presbyterian Ambulatory Care Network. “Finding new ways to address the risks that these mothers and their children in the earliest years of life face is critical to ensuring success later in life.”

The AHA Innovation Challenge called for sustainable and scalable solutions that use technology to combat the social determinants of health– the conditions in which people are born and live that affect health– and to improve the health of communities.

The proposed pilot would leverage NewYork-Presbyterian’s telehealth platform to address areas of maternal well-being and birth preparedness and to enhance child developmental assessments. It would use virtual visits to gain a unique view into the home environment and identify risk factors that could affect maternal health and early childhood development, such as access to a safe sleeping space for the baby, developmentally appropriate toys, and food. The proposal also aims to improve engagement and follow-up care for pregnant women and children through virtual check-ins and through observing the mother and baby at home to support positive parenting.

The top three concepts were announced on July 26th by the AHA Center for Health Innovation at the 2019 AHA Leadership Summit in San Diego.

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