Digital Health Awards Will Honor Tech That Dramatically Improves Healthcare

UC San Francisco and Health Hub have announced the launch of the first annual UCSF Digital Health Awards. These awards will honor outstanding new digital technologies that not only dramatically improve healthcare but do so by means that reduce costs and improve access to medical innovations.

Submissions in 10 award categories will be accepted from June 15 until August 1, 2019, and the top semifinalist submissions will be showcased on the awards website beginning August 15. Winners will be announced and honored at a live-streamed ceremony from Genentech Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus on October 10, 2019, at 6:00 pm PDT. 

UCSF | Health Hub seek technologies that promote a “faster, better, cheaper” approach to healthcare by improving outcomes, such as shorter hospital stays, reduced costs, faster diagnoses and treatments, and most importantly, happier doctors and patients. 

“We are looking for the big ideas,” said Barry Selick, PhD, Vice Chancellor of UCSF Innovation Ventures. “Ideas that can change our healthcare system so we can provide the same quality of care but make it broadly available and at affordable prices.” 

Categories include: Longevity, Wellness & Preventative Health; Mental, Brain, & Sleep Health; Electronic Health Records; Applications of Artificial Intelligence; Digital Diagnostics – Cardiovascular, Pulmonary, and Cancer; Fem-Tech; Remote and Telemedicine Services; and the Biggest Contributor to the Future of Health.

The UCSF/Health Hub Board of Directors, made up of leading healthcare venture capitalists, together with other top doctors, investors, luminaries and healthcare executives – such as UCSF’s Atul Butte, MD, PhD, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, Singular University’s Daniel Kraft, MD, and Matthew Holt, founder of Health 2.0 – will choose from the best of hundreds of submissions to be judged in each award category.

Judging will be completed online, and the awards team is recruiting all qualified, vetted healthcare professionals with expertise in digital health. In addition, company submissions are also now open and qualified, mature companies, with in-market products that have been used by thousands of patients and have been verified in a validation study or clinical trial, are invited to submit award applications.

“How can we ensure a future where healthcare is done faster, better, cheaper?” said Mark Goldstein, chairman of UCSF Health Hub and a healthcare venture capitalist. “The technologies that win these awards could help lower the cost barriers that block people from needed medical services. We want to encourage more access.” 

Interested judges and qualified companies should visit the UCSF | Health Hub website for more information.

The UCSF Digital Health awards recognize achievements in the burgeoning field of digital health, which has grown to a nearly $7 billion industry that supports almost all of the existing healthcare ecosystem, and enabled by technology that supports prevention, diagnosis, treatment support, disease monitoring, as well as many other subcategories.

UCSF Innovation Ventures, with a mission to help the University’s research community navigate the complexities of translational technology development and commercialization, has come together with Health Hub to guide inventors and qualified entrepreneurs from the community to access the support and professional development they need to grow and build successful medical and digital health companies. 

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals – UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland – as well as Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, UCSF Benioff Children’s Physicians and the UCSF Faculty Practice. UCSF Health has affiliations with hospitals and health organizations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF faculty also provide all physician care at the public Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and the SF VA Medical Center. The UCSF Fresno Medical Education Program is a major branch of the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.