Every year, hundreds of organizations pitch Mass General Brigham on the idea that their solutions can close a gap traditional healthcare hasn’t.
Only one wins the Somerville, Mass.-based health system’s Kraft Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Community Health — and the criteria for winning have to do with what happens after a patient is screened.
In 2026, Mass General Brigham received about 250 submissions for the prize, now in its second year, said Elsie Taveras, MD, chief community health and health equity officer at Mass General Brigham.
This year’s winner, Oben Health, is an AI-enabled solution that trains barbers and salon stylists to screen clients for hypertension, then uses its technology to connect anyone who screens positive to clinical treatment. Winners get $100,000, along with support and mentorship from Mass General Brigham’s innovation arm.
The startup “creates essentially community-embedded hubs and workers to increase hypertension screening out in the community, and they do it through training barbers in barber shops and stylists in salons, essentially closing that gap between screening and that kind of warm handoff to care,” Dr. Taveras told Becker’s in a Sept. 23 interview at the World Medical Innovation Forum in Boston, where prize funder Robert Kraft announced the winner.
The selection criteria reflect a philosophy Dr. Taveras has tried to build into Mass General Brigham’s approach to community health over the five years since she took the role: A new technology is not, by itself, an innovation worth funding.
What matters is whether an organization has also solved for what she calls “this last mile” — the logistics and trust required to get that tool into the hands of the people who need it most, rather than leaving it to sit unused.
That framework is also why Dr. Taveras defines innovation more broadly than a new device or algorithm. “I think of it also as new models of care, new frameworks for improving health outcomes,” she said.
The prize’s first winner offers a preview of what a successful pipeline can look like several years out. ThriveLink, an AI-based telephonic tool that screens hospital patients for social risk factors and connects them to services, won the inaugural Kraft Prize last year. Mass General Brigham has since piloted the tool across multiple sites and is preparing to roll it out systemwide, Dr. Taveras said.
Dr. Taveras described the scenario where ThriveLink would be needed: “If I am seeing a patient that has hypertension, but at that clinical encounter in the emergency department or in a primary care setting, that patient identifies that they run out of food at the end of the month and don’t have enough food to feed their family and they have food insecurity.”
She said she can now refer that patient directly to ThriveLink, which uses AI to connect the person to food assistance without requiring additional legwork from clinical staff.
The roughly yearlong path from prize to near-systemwide deployment was not incidental, Dr. Taveras said. ThriveLink had already piloted across multiple organizations before Mass General Brigham adopted it. “So we had a lot of confidence in their ability to help us with these just vexing issues with our patient care,” she said.
