News Feature | December 1, 2014

Finalists Named In Harvard Health Acceleration Challenge

Julia Ernst

By Julia Ernst, contributing writer

Harvard Health Acceleration Challenge

The university’s Health Acceleration Challenge recognizes existing healthcare solutions and helps to increase their presence.

Medalogix, Bloodbuy, Twine Health, and I-Pass were named finalists in Harvard University’s Health Acceleration Challenge. According to the Challenge’s website, “The Health Acceleration Challenge is a ‘scale up’ competition that focuses on compelling, already-implemented healthcare solutions and helps them to grow and increase their impact through powerful networking and funding opportunities.”

The four finalists named in the Challenge – a joint venture by Harvard Business School (HBS) and Harvard Medical School – will share the $150,000 Cox Prize equally and have a case study from the HBS written about them.

The Health Acceleration Challenge looks at healthcare solutions currently in use. The “scale-up” competition works to help the winning healthcare solutions become more prominent and to increase their impact through networking and fundraising opportunities.

A brief profile of each of the four finalists follows:

  • Bloodbuy notes that blood is a core commodity of healthcare. For this reason, the Dallas company built a cloud-based platform that addresses the uneven geographic distribution of available blood supply in real time, enabling price transparency and greater efficiency in a critical healthcare market.
  • I-Pass uses a multifaceted approach to improve the exchange of information among healthcare providers by standardizing the patient hand-off process at every change of shift. It has already yielded a 30% reduction in medical errors resulting from patient transfer. The enterprise is led by the I-Pass Executive Council, a group of six individuals from a number of hospitals across the country, including Boston Children’s/Harvard Medical School, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children/Drexel University College of Medicine, and the Benioff Children’s Hospital/University of California San Francisco.
  • The goal of Medalogix is to help provide better quality of life at the end of a patient’s life. The Nashville-based company does this by leveraging predictive analytics to identify patients that are eligible for hospice and then implementing a workflow that allows clinicians to help patients better manage the hospice decision and transfer process, minimizing associated difficulties and costs for all those involved.
  • Twine Health is a collaborative care app that allows patients and their doctors to co-create treatment plans for chronic disease, including access to motivational coaches and virtual support. The app’s efficacy has been proven over six years of research at the MIT Media Lab and is currently demonstrating markedly improved outcomes at one-third the cost of regular treatments.

The finalists have the opportunity to present to 150 senior healthcare executives at the Forum on Healthcare Innovation conference next April. In addition, the finalists can compete for the ultimate prize of $50,000, which will be awarded one year from now depending on how well the finalists have scaled.

The Health Acceleration Challenge began with 478 applicants. Applicants were judged on their potential to improve the quality of care and return value to the healthcare system; performance metrics from existing users of the technology; and their dissemination plan. Medalogix was competing against institutions like the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford, Intermountain, and Massachusetts General Hospital, among others.

Source: PR Newswire