New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health unveiled the winners of its third annual innovation challenge May 15.
For the challenge, Northwell Health encouraged employees systemwide to submit proposals for projects that have the potential to improve healthcare. Northwell Health awarded the winning teams up to $500,000 in funding to bring their concepts to market following a pitch showcase May 8.
A panel of judges at the May 8 showcase — comprised of representatives from Deloitte, Press Ganey, DGI and Northwell Ventures — selected seven winning teams from 121 submissions.
The first place prize went to a noninvasive blood test that aims to use menstrual blood to detect endometriosis. The second place prize went to a project dubbed EMRBot, a chatbot that allows physicians and nurses to talk with the EMR using natural language text messages.
Northwell Health's IT department plans to launch an internal trial of EMRBot during summer 2018.
"EMRBot will completely revolutionize how clinicians interact with patient data and will restore the human 'face-to-face' interaction that electronic health records have slowly eroded," Vishwanath Anantraman, MD, chief innovation architect at Northwell Health and one of the project leaders on EMRBot, said in a May 15 statement.