The Medical Society of the District of Columbia’s (MSDC) Healthy Physician Foundation announced the recipient of its 2026 Dr. Cesar A. Caceres Innovation in Healthcare award, along with a $250,000 grant as Mary’s Center, a community health center serving over 65,000 people of all ages, incomes, and backgrounds in the Washington, DC metro area.
Mary’s Center will use the award to implement remote patient monitoring technology that allows patients who face barriers to care to securely share health information from home with their care teams. This infrastructure can support patients managing chronic medical, behavioral health, or maternal health needs, depending on community priorities. Their focus is on building scalable systems that integrate with their electronic health record and strengthen care coordination between visits.
Mary’s Center is one-stop healthcare facility for patients who manage complex health and social challenges that often times cannot be fully addressed through periodic in-person visits alone. To help serve the community, they incorporate telehealth and in-home visits. The use of new technology will allow them to move to more continuous and proactive support. Benefits include earlier identification of risks, more informed clinical decision-making, and more personalized care — while reducing barriers that disproportionately impact underserved communities.
“For us to fully support our patients, healthcare cannot remain confined to exam rooms,” said Nancy Ban, CEO of Mary’s Center. “An investment in remote patient monitoring will allow us to respond faster and support families in real time for an even more proactive and equitable model of community health.”
By enabling care teams to monitor health trends in real time, Mary’s Center will be able to identify concerns earlier, intervene proactively, and support patients before issues escalate. This approach strengthens continuity of care, deepens patient engagement, and helps reduce preventable complications. This investment supports the development of infrastructure that allows Mary’s Center to deliver higher-quality, community-based care beyond the walls of their clinics.
“Mary’s Center is such a deserving winner of this award,” said Healthy Physician Foundation Board Chair Klint Peebles. “The grant will help grow their sustainable and scalable model that improves measurable health outcomes, strengthens patient engagement, and delivers higher-quality, community-based care.”
The award was presented at MSDC’s 2026 Healthcare Honors dinner on March 25th and is supported by a grant from The Institute for Technology in Healthcare, located in Washington, D.C., which is focused on the use of technology to benefit and stimulate others in health care.
The foundation’s award commemorates Dr. Cesar A. Caceres, who was an esteemed medical professional dedicated to identifying and applying technology to solve healthcare problems. He founded the Institute for Technology in Healthcare and worked for the Public Health Service where he won two Superior Service Awards for developing the country’s first functional computer-electrocardiographic interpretive system, among many other achievements.
For more information about MSDC and the Dr. Cesar A. Caceres Award, visit www.msdc.org. For more information about The Institute for Technology in Healthcare, visit www.ithcawards.org.
The editorial staff had no role in this post's creation.