Elevance Health Foundation Announces First Patient Safety Prize: Four Organizations to Share $4 Million
The Elevance Health Foundation announced the winners of its inaugural Patient Safety Prize in Indianapolis on October 14. Four organizations will collectively receive $4 million through the foundation's Community Action Leadership (CAL) program, funding work in three areas: medication safety, fall prevention and health literacy, with a focus on underserved populations.
The four awardees are Care Synergy's CAPABLE National Center, for fall prevention; NYU Grossman School of Medicine, for eliminating medication errors; the Population Health Innovation Lab, a program of the Public Health Institute, for improving health literacy; and the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, for eliminating medication errors. Earlier this year, nonprofits, healthcare institutions and patient advocacy groups from across the country presented their patient safety proposals for the prize.
According to figures cited by the foundation, more than 1.5 million Americans visit the emergency room every year due to drug events, and up to nearly one million patient falls occur in hospitals annually. Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., chief health officer of Elevance Health, said patient safety is fundamental to high-quality healthcare, yet too many people still experience preventable harm.
NYU Grossman School of Medicine's project, SAFER-Med, will use SI-enabled digital technology to check, in the days after discharge and in the patient's own language, whether patients understood their medication guidelines at home, so that any misunderstanding can reach a nurse before it becomes harm. Devin M. Mann, M.D., of NYU Langone Health, said hospital discharge is a well-documented weak point for medication safety.
The Elevance Health Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Elevance Health Inc., with long-standing focus areas including maternal-infant health, behavioral health and food as medicine. The foundation said details of this year's awardees are available on the Patient Safety Prize website.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 纽约东河畔的纽约大学朗格尼医学中心与基梅尔馆黄昏全景（2018年6月摄，获奖机构纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院所属医疗系统）· Ajay Suresh 摄，CC BY 2.0（维基共享资源） / NYU Langone Medical Center and the Kimmel Pavilion on New York's East River at dusk, photographed June 2018; the medical center is home to awardee NYU Grossman School of Medicine · Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
