Elevance Health Foundation today announced the recipients of its inaugural Patient Safety Prize, launched through the organization’s Community Action Leadership (CAL) program. The $4 million investment will enable four organizations across the country to accelerate community-informed innovations that improve patient safety and advance quality of care, particularly for underserved populations.

The CAL program was created to bring together external thought leaders from across a range of disciplines. This groundbreaking program encourages the Foundation to explore outside of its core focus areas, allowing the nonprofit to continually assess the effectiveness of its long-term strategies. Because of this program, the Foundation will continue to address large-scale community health needs and incentivize action for change, with the inaugural CAL challenge focusing on patient safety.

Earlier this year, a diverse range of nonprofits, healthcare institutions, patient advocacy groups, and other organizations from across the country presented transformational solutions that address the issue of patient safety, particularly around medication safety, fall prevention, and health literacy. As one of the most pressing challenges facing the health care system today, patient safety incidents continue to disproportionately impact underserved communities and are often preventable.

“Patient safety is fundamental to high-quality healthcare, yet far too many people still experience preventable harm. With more than 1.5 million Americans visiting the emergency room every year due to drug events, and up toward one million patient falls occur in hospitals annually, we need better solutions and interventions in place,” said Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., Chief Health Officer, Elevance Health. “The awardees of this year’s Patient Safety Prize demonstrate what’s possible when communities, clinicians, technologists, and public health leaders come together to design practical solutions that keep people safer – where they live, work, and receive care.”

The following organizations have been selected to collectively receive $4 million toward their patient safety solutions:

  • Care Synergy – CAPABLE National Center (promoting fall prevention)

  • NYU Grossman School of Medicine (eliminating medication errors)

  • Population Health Innovation Lab, a program of the Public Health Institute (improving health literacy)

  • Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (eliminating medication errors)

“Hospital discharge is a well-documented vulnerability point for medication safety. Patients leave with new instructions, yet we’ve never had a reliable way to confirm if they understood them,” said Devin M. Mann, MD, MS, Strategic Director of Digital Health Innovation and Professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. “Through this opportunity from Elevance Health Foundation, we will now be able to implement our SAFER-Med system. This system will use AI-enabled digital technologies to verify that a patient understands the medication guidelines in the days after discharge – in the patient’s own language and in their own home – so that if there are any misunderstandings, it can reach a nurse before it becomes harm.”

For more information about the Patient Safety Prize, or to read more about this year’s winners, please visit www.patientsafetyprize.org/results/awardees.

About Elevance Health Foundation

Elevance Health Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Elevance Health Inc. The Foundation works to improve the health of the socially vulnerable through partnerships and programs in our communities with an emphasis on maternal-infant health; behavioral health; and food as medicine. Through its key areas of focus, the Foundation also strategically aligns with Elevance Health’s focus on community health and becoming a lifetime, trusted health partner that is fueled by its purpose to improve the health of humanity. To learn more about Elevance Health Foundation, please visit www.elevancehealth.foundation or follow us @ElevanceFND on X and Elevance Health Foundation on Facebook.

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