Microsoft announces Healthcare Innovation winners

The winners of the 2019 Microsoft for Healthcare Innovation Awards were announced at HIMSS19 during the Microsoft Health Forum. Each year, the awards acknowledge health and life sciences organizations and their technology solution partners that are achieving innovation excellence with a Microsoft-based solution.

The winners in each of the submission categories:

Award Category:  Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and KenSci

To better understand which patients are at the highest riskof COPD, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde worked with KenSci to leverage AI and machinelearning to predict long-term hospital stays based on clinical history,socio-economic factors and risk to stratify the top 20 percent high-riskpatients likely to admit for the first time due to COPD, in order to drivepreventive intervention.

Award Category:  Empower Your Care Teams and Employees

Vision Source, LP and Kno2

To meet the needs of populations with diabetes, Vision Source needed to establish a nationwide interoperability network for their 3,350 independent locations. As a result, Vision Source selected Kno2’s Interoperability as a Service, enabling immediate access to over 2-million referring providers through the U.S. nation’s major health information networks: direct, referral networks, care quality and those connected through Commonwell Health Alliance.

Award Category:  Engage Your Patients & EnablePersonalized Care

Premera Blue Cross

Premera Scout is an intelligent virtual assistant that helpscustomers find the information they need to make the most of their health plan.Premera powers this solution using advanced AI from Microsoft Healthcare.Guided by a customer-centered strategy, Premera transforms complicated andconfusing experiences to simple and easy ones.

Award Category:  Optimize Clinical Operational Effectiveness& Improve Outcomes

Prediction of Patient Placement (POPP) Team at BostonChildren’s Hospital

Boston Children’s Hospital uses Prediction of PatientPlacement (POPP), a real time forecasting tool, to predict incoming admissionsfrom the emergency department. This tool enables proactive coordination ofdownstream operations in order to reduce transfer wait time. The model useshospital-specific, historical data and is EHR- and hospital-agnostic.

Award Category:  Outstanding Innovation

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and DNAnexus

A partnership between St. Jude, DNAnexus, and Microsoftdeveloped the St. Jude Cloud, a secure cloud-based data-sharing andcollaboration environment, to provide researchers access to an extensive publicrepository of pediatric cancer genomics data, accelerated data mining, analysisand visualization capabilities.

Award Category:  Transform the Care Continuum & ReimagineHealthcare

Johns Hopkins Medicine

Johns Hopkins Medicine developed the Precision Medicine AnalyticsPlatform (PMAP) to empower faculty to make discoveries; improve diagnosis,treatment and outcomes; and lower the cost of care. PMAP is comprised of twoparts: discovery – for faculty researchers to fuel the discovery of newinsights and algorithms; and care delivery – after discovery medicalvalidation, promoted for use by other physicians.

Judges who reviewed this year’s entries: