Sutter Health Award Honors Health Innovations at Tech Awards Gala
Honorees Create Tech-Based Solutions to Address Global Health Challenges
Sutter Health Award winners Nexleaf Analytics and PrePex will formally receive their healthcare innovation honors tonight at the renowned Tech Awards Gala, taking place at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
“It’s inspiring to learn how all the Sutter Health Award finalists dreamed big and defied conventional wisdom to make the world a better place,” said Albert Chan, M.D., Sutter Health vice president and chief of digital patient experience. “On behalf of the more than 50,000 doctors, employees, volunteers and innovators at Sutter Health, we applaud the solutions they developed with a compassionate spirit and through the power of technology at scale.”
The Tech Awards, a signature program of The Tech Museum of Innovation, honors international innovators who apply technology to confront humanity’s most urgent challenges. The Tech Awards honors individuals, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies that use new or existing technology to improve human conditions.
Sutter Health Award Winner: Nexleaf Analytics
Twenty percent of children born each year in developing countries lack access to vaccines, and millions more may receive vaccine doses with reduced or no potency due to challenges in the supply-chain infrastructure that transports and stores medications.
ColdTrace, developed by Nexleaf Analytics, offers a low-cost remote temperature monitoring system that uses cell phones as the core hardware platform to record the temperature inside of vaccine refrigerators, and sends customizable SMS alerts to personnel when the temperature moves outside acceptable limits, or when the power goes out. Currently there are 210 ColdTrace sensors monitoring more than 4 million vaccine doses in clinics worldwide, serving thousands of residents.
Sutter Health Award Winner: PrePex
Despite the World Health Organization and UNAIDS concluding that voluntary medical male circumcision can reduce the risk of HIV infection by approximately 60 percent in high-risk areas, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa lack the personnel and healthcare infrastructure to scale-up the procedure in their populations.
PrePex offers a safe and simple non-surgical solution. Community clinics may offer patients the PrePex device, which men wear for seven days. Clinic personnel then easily remove the tissue with minimal discomfort to the patient and little disruption to the patient’s daily activities. To date, 12 sub-Saharan African countries use PrePex to scale-up their voluntary medical male circumcision programs. More than 80,000 procedures have been performed, and 11 local training centers are spread across eight countries.
Other finalists for the Sutter Health Awards include:
- APOPO, which developed a unique and efficient system using African giant rats to identify the scent of tuberculosis in saliva;
- Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA), which created a set of pregnancy and baby-care messages delivered to mothers to increase healthy outcomes.
- PulsePoint, which provided a mobile-phone app for CPR-trained citizen responders so they may provide aid to others during cardiac emergencies.