The Elevance Health Foundation has launched a new prize program aimed at supporting solutions aimed at improving patient safety, with the first crop of winners targeting challenges like health literacy, fall prevention and medication errors.
Elevance will dispense $4 million in prizes to four organizations through the first round of the program. The goal is to identify scalable, community-based solutions to tackle critical patient safety risks. The Patient Safety Prize falls under the foundation's Community Action Leadership umbrella, and the team saw an opportunity to move beyond its core focus areas with these programs.
The winners include: Care Synergy's CAPABLE, or Community Aging in Place – Advancing Better Living for Elders, program; NYU Grossman School of Medicine; the Public Health Institute's Population Health Innovation Lab; and the Parkland Center for Clinical Evaluation.
Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., chief health officer at Elevance Health, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview that the company's foundation brings a "unique lens" to patient safety. He said the company overall sees significant opportunity to play a greater role in supporting safety.
"We work with a lot of different actors," he said. "This was just an opportunity to say, 'Okay, who's really got some of the most innovative ideas, and how can we as a foundation help them?'"
Argrawal said there is a strong foundation of evidence supporting the importance of fall prevention, medication management and literacy initiatives in the broader patient safety landscape, which is why the program chose to start there. Medication errors, for example, are fairly common but can have severe consequences for patients.
Fall prevention is a key community health focus, he said, as older adults largely wish to maintain their independence for as long as possible. A fall can also lead to an avalanche of medical events that create a lengthy and complex patient journey.
And a patient with greater health literacy can be more engaged in their own health and may recognize risks themselves before an adverse event occurs, Agrawal said.
"Because safety is so multifaceted, we wanted to really think at the beginning about what we would focus on," he said. "I think there's really just a robust set of data around why those are such important areas."
In finding the winners, the team aimed to select programs that would benefit from the investment to support their growth, but that were also established enough for there to be evidence and data behind the approach they were taking, he said. Alongside the financial support, Agrawal said the Elevance Health Foundation is also challenging each of the winning organizations to find community partners and expand their perspective in addition to scale.
He said a key takeaway from year one of the program is that Elevance, as the convener, "can help drive more community involvement" in the platforms.
"A big lesson learned for me is there are some really great organizations across the for-profit and nonprofit spectrum that are working on patient safety, and very few of them are really seeking to connect to communities and make safety part of the community dialog," Agrawal said. "That's just a really untapped area, and I think that's a great reason why the Patient Safety Prize should exist and why we can help drive more community involvement."