The American Medical Association (AMA) announced Twiage as the winner of its Healthier Nation Innovation Challenge. Twiage, a secure, interoperable prehospital communication and triage platform that empowers first responders to share real-time patient data with hospitals, was awarded the top prize from a total of more than 100 physician-led innovations aimed at improving 21st century medicine and patient care.
Twiage Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. YiDing Yu, a practicing physician, shared the problem plaguing hospitals and first responders. “Across the country, radios are the standard of communication between ambulances and hospitals. Nurses have to step away from patient care to pick up these calls first call, first served. Which means… an ambulance carrying a patient with a heart attack might have to wait on hold.” Citing the Joint Commission, Dr. Yu noted that failures in communication are the number one cause of delays in treatment in Emergency Departments, leading to $2.1 billion in excess costs to health systems each year due to longer length of stays and higher readmission rates. In her winning pitch, Dr. Yu highlighted data from Twiage clients and emphasized the opportunity to deliver better, faster data to accelerate life-saving care, streamline Emergency Departments, and improve referral relationships with ambulances, nursing homes, and urgent care centers.
Secure and HIPAA-compliant, Twiage delivers real-time data from ambulances to hospitals to accelerate life-saving emergency care. EMS providers use Twiage’s smartphone app to share patient demographics, vital signs, EKGs, photos, and videos. Each case is tracked by GPS and sent to hospitals in real time with the Twiage dashboard. EMS providers testify that on average, Twiage saves 5 to 8 minutes per patient case.
Powered by MedStartr, the inaugural AMA Healthier Nation Challenge empowered physicians, residents, medical students, hospitals, and other partners to participate in medical innovations eligible to win a total of $50,000 in grant prizes. All entries to the challenge appeared in the AMA CrowdChallenge Showcase, where physicians, residents, medical students, nurses, patients, hospital staff, health leaders and investors had the opportunity to review and provide feedback on the ideas. This crowd engagement generated nearly 16,000 online interactions between applicants and reviewers, including votes, follows, interest to pilot, interest to partner, and feedback.
Four finalists were selected to pitch at the Finale, hosted by MATTER Chicago. The judging panel included leaders in medical innovation. In addition to monetary prizes, the top three winners will have access to the AMA’s network of partners that specialize in strategy and design support for entrepreneurs and startups, including Business Models, Inc., Edge One Medical, Healthbox, MATTER, MU/DAI and Techstars. Light Line Catheter, a device that uses blue light to reduce catheter-associated infections, took 2nd place while Ceeable, an app-based visual field test, took 3rd Place.
“A passion for transforming health care is a quality physicians and medical students share with many pioneering entrepreneurs,” said AMA CEO and Executive Vice President James L. Madara, M.D. “To harness this passion for health care innovation, the AMA is expanding efforts to inspire and support physician-led medical advances, and is proud to support the best new ideas to create a healthier nation.”
