Elevance Health Foundation names four awardees for its first $4 million Patient Safety Prize

Elevance Health Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Elevance Health, announced on October 14 the recipients of its inaugural Patient Safety Prize, run through its Community Action Leadership program. Four organizations will collectively receive $4 million for patient-safety work in three areas: medication safety, fall prevention and health literacy.

Who won

The prize's awardees page lists three winners and one honorable mention:

• Care Synergy – CAPABLE National Center (fall prevention), for CAPABLE, a program built around an older adult's own goals for staying safe at home.
• NYU Grossman School of Medicine (medication errors), for SAFER-Med, an AI-powered, multilingual teach-back system for heart failure patients going home from the hospital.
• The Population Health Innovation Lab, a program of the Public Health Institute (health literacy), for community health workers who teach cardiac health literacy to Lake County's highest-risk residents, including people experiencing homelessness, through street medicine.
• Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (honorable mention, medication errors), for PARADE 360, which extends an inpatient AI model to predict medication risks across a community.

What the foundation said

"Patient safety is fundamental to high-quality healthcare, yet far too many people still experience preventable harm," said Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., Elevance Health's chief health officer, citing more than 1.5 million emergency room visits a year due to drug events and up to one million patient falls in hospitals annually.

Devin M. Mann, M.D., of NYU Langone Health said SAFER-Med will check that patients understand their medication instructions "in the patient's own language and in their own home," so that a misunderstanding "can reach a nurse before it becomes harm."

How the money splits

The announcement does not give an amount for each awardee. When the prize opened, its rules offered a pool of up to $5 million: up to three winners at $1.5 million each and up to two honorable mentions at $250,000 each. By our arithmetic, three winners and one honorable mention at those amounts would come to $4.75 million, more than the $4 million announced, so the final awards appear to differ from the published terms. The foundation has not explained the difference.

Why it matters for nonprofits

In our view, prizes like this one reward work that already has results rather than new ideas, and they let a corporate foundation step outside its usual focus areas, which the foundation says is the purpose of its Community Action Leadership program. For another open funding competition this month, see the Rockefeller and OpenAI foundations' $50 million Cities Deliver grants.