UCLA Health and Hearst Health Announce Winner of the 2022 Hearst Health Prize

The UCLA Center for SMART Health, an interdisciplinary collaborative that looks to the integrated transformation of healthcare through emergent data and technologies, and Hearst Health, a division of Hearst and leader in care guidance, yesterday announced that Constant Therapy Health is the winner of the 2022 Hearst Health Prize. The program was recognized for its digital personalized speech, language and cognitive therapy solutions which have improved health outcomes for patients recovering from neurological disorders.

The $100,000 award for excellence in data science in healthcare was announced by Gregory Dorn, MD, MPH, president of Hearst Health; Arash Naeim, MD, PhD, co-director of UCLA Center for SMART Health; and Alex Bui, PhD, co-director of the Center for SMART Health, at the Center’s annual symposium in Los Angeles.

Veera Anantha, PhD, CEO and Co-founder of Constant Therapy Health commented: “The entire Constant Therapy team is honored to be named this year’s Hearst Health Prize winner. This award is recognition of the many milestones we’ve achieved this year, including delivering over 200 million therapy exercises to patients and launching an enterprise offering of our brain rehabilitation that will enable greater access for clinicians and patients to Constant Therapy.”

Constant Therapy Health’s machine learning platform continuously identifies optimal therapy exercises for patients using their past performance metrics, population performance data for similar patient types, their clinician inputs, and self-submitted preferences and profile information. Using the Constant Therapy platform at home, stroke patients have seen significant improvements on standardized cognitive and language skills assessments compared with patients receiving standard of care workbooks. Patients with traumatic brain injury or stroke showed significant improvement on cognitive and language skills when given access to Constant Therapy at home in addition to clinic therapy. 

“The Constant Therapy Health program serves as a groundbreaking example of how advanced care algorithms help patients regain function and recover from brain injury,” said Dorn. “We are pleased to recognize their great work as the 2022 winner of the Hearst Health Prize.”

Hearst Health Prize applications were evaluated by experts at the UCLA Center for SMART Health and by a distinguished panel of judges. Applicants were scored based on their data science program’s health impact or outcome; data science approach; operational and financial sustainability; scalability and generalizability; mitigation of bias; and significance of the problem and solution. Constant Therapy Health scored the highest across these criteria.

“Not only does this solution support patients recovering from traumatic brain injuries and other neurological disorders, it helps the healthcare system overall by addressing a need where clinical resources can be scarce,” said Naeim.

“The program’s machine learning solution demonstrates the positive impact digital therapeutics can have on patients with limited access to in-person treatment, providing them a meaningful intervention they can use at home,” added Bui.

In addition to the $100,000 award for the winner, $25,000 awards were given to each of the two finalists:
Geisinger was awarded for its data science solution that identifies at-risk individuals across the health system’s largely rural population and provides them with appropriate clinical services.

Prenosis was awarded for its Immunix™ Platform and Sepsis ImmunoScore™, an artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based Software-as-a-Medical-Device that identifies hospital patients at risk for having or developing sepsis.

To submit an entry to the 2023 Hearst Health Prize or learn more about the competition, visit https://go.hearsthealth.hearst.com/Hearst-Health-Prize-22prwin.

Original Article: "UCLA Health and Hearst Health Announce Winner of the 2022 Hearst Health Prize"