More than 500 digital health organizations across the country submitted their new technology for consideration in areas such as telemedicine and genomics for the inaugural University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Digital Health Awards.
Finalists were selected across 14 categories by a team of expert judges from the health care industry, including AMA Chief Medical Information Officer Michael Hodgkins, MD. Each digital health company was judged on how its technology can cut health care costs while improving health care. Ten finalists per category were chosen for the UCSF Digital Health Awards.
AMA Digital Health Strategy Product Manager Matthew Koerner spoke at the awards event held in San Francisco. He outlined the AMA Physician Innovation Network, also known as PIN, which has 10,000-plus users and more than 20 organizational collaborators nationwide—including UCSF Health Hub.
“Together,” Koerner said, “we are working to ensure that digital health solutions—such as remote care and diagnostics—that are needed to deliver care both inside and outside the four walls of the clinic are evidence-based and meet the needs of patients and physicians alike so that we can improve outcomes.”
Judges were referred to mHealth app guidelines from Xcertia, a nonprofit co-founded by the AMA, as part of the review process. The AMA does not endorse any of the digital health companies listed below.
Solving health care problems
Each award category covers the most important problems that digital health is solving for millions of patients.
The winners for each category for the UCSF Digital Health Awards include:
- Application of augmented intelligence (AI): Livongo
- Behavioral health company: Sana
- Consumer wellness and prevention: Butterfly Network.
- Digital diagnostic—cardiovascular: Nanowear.
- Digital diagnostic—cancer: Flatiron Health.
- EHR–data interoperability: Qventus.
- EHR–patient engagement: Luma Health.
- Employer wellness and prevention: Sword Health.
- Femtech: Wildflower Health.
- Mental health: Meru Health.
- Patient cost savings: Grand Rounds.
- Remote care and diagnostics: AliveCor.
- Telemedicine: Doctor on Demand.
- Digital health hall of fame: 23andMe.
“I had been waiting for digital to enter the world of health care for a couple decades after seeing it roll through the rest of my life incredibly excited about it, thinking that it was going to solve all of our problems. …It solved many problems, but it was creating others,” said AMA member Robert Wachter, MD, professor and chair of the medicine department at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
“The hope is that these companies will be wildly successful in what they do, and patients will actually not lie in hospitals dying of nothing, but actually won’t make it to hospitals,” said Dr. Wachter. “They’ll stay well. They’ll stay out of hospitals. They’ll stay out of emergency rooms and live their lives healthier and better for it.”
