American Heart Association Center for Health Technology & Innovation announces winning innovation solution for the 2022 AHA Health Tech Competition

CHICAGO, Nov. 6, 2022 – The American Health Association Center for Health Technology & Innovation today announced the winning submission for the AHA Health Tech Competition is AvoMD of Brooklyn, New York.

The Association holds the competition to highlight the innovations and market advancements from the health care and technology companies that engage with its Center for Health Technology and Innovation throughout the year.

AvoMD co-founder Laurence Coman presented the winning solution: a no-code software platform that transforms clinical content — guidelines, algorithms, pathways and checklists — into “virtual clinical consults” available instantly at the point-of-care on standalone web/mobile apps and in the electronic health records.

“We’ve built a solution that takes the clinical knowledge — that could be clinical guidelines, hospital pathways, AI predictions, really any type of clinical knowledge — and it gets transformed into point-of-care physician support without needing coding experience,” Coman said. “So we built an application to help clinicians build their own clinical decision-support applications without needing IT or coding knowledge.”

The idea from AvoMD was evaluated on the following:

• Validity: How well is the working prototype or product functioning in the market with customers?
• Scientific Rigor: How well does the validation research utilize evidence-based health research?
• Impact: To what extent does the product improve patient outcomes through innovative technology?

Coman said he was honored to receive the award from the judges, which included Star Jones, national AHA volunteer, lawyer, TV personality and heart disease survivor. “I am honored by the privilege just to be at the AHA and given this opportunity,” Coman said. “Both my parents are physicans and to be able to tell them that I’m even presenting at the AHA makes them proud and makes them happy. I’m doing all of this work as a consolation prize to them for not going to med school.”

AvoMD will receive a membership to the AHA’s Center for the Health Technology & Innovation Innovators Network, a consortium that connects entrepreneurs, providers, researchers and payers. Members also have access to the association’s digital guidelines, recommendations and best-in-class science as they develop their digital health care technologies.

Volunteer judges from the health care and technology fields evaluated the impact and business case around the submitted proposals, as well as present the impact on science and the evidence of health and patient impact in two separate evaluations.

Additional judges included Eric Peterson, M.D. of University of Texas, Southwestern (Dallas); Lee Shapiro of 7wire Ventures (Chicago); Heather Provino of The Scanlon Group (East Greenwich, R.I.); Asif Ali, M.D. of Memorial Hermann Hospital (Houston); Seth Martin, M.D. of Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore); Azizi Seixas, Ph.D. of the University of Miami (Miami, Fla.); Anekwe Onwuanyi, M.D. of the Association of Black Cardiologists/ Moorehouse School of Medicine (Atlanta); Neil Patel of Redesign Health (New York); Animesh Aashoo Tandon of Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland); Robert A Harrington, M.D. of Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.); Tiffany M Powell-Wiley, M.D. of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Md.); Ann Marie Navar, M.D. of University of Texas, Southwestern (Dallas), and Mike McConnell, M.D. of Tesseract (Guilford, Conn.).

Other finalists included Bloomer Tech (Boston, Massachusetts), Cipherome (San Jose, Calif.), NimbleHeart (Sunnyvale, Calif.), and Opsis (Golden, Colo.).

About the finalists

Bloomer Tech uses ordinary clothing made with advanced fabrics technology integrated with machine learning to turn everyday items into lifestyle medical health care devices with a focus on women’s physiology. The clothing uses a patented platform called LILY to collect medical-grade data for women. Aceil Halaby, chief operating officer, said this addresses a major problem for women’s health care.

Founded on the belief that everyone deserves the best medicine, Cipherome’s goal is to personalize drug treatment by understanding a patient’s genomic information and combining that with clinical factors to provide the best drug for a patient. Chief business officer Jose Estabil said adverse medical events in the U.S. and patients being prescribed drugs that may not best fit their needs is a $100 billion problem.

Recognizing the limitations of traditional, exercise-based ECG monitoring, NimbleHeart has created a custom hardware design for its ECG Harness with patent-pending motion artifact reduction technology and a biomechanics-based harness design with shape and sensor locations for men and women and for different body types. CEO Sonal Tambe said these can be used for monitoring from home, the office, gym or alternate care settings.

Launching this month, Plateful by Opsis is a free smartphone app that will give you the complete picture of your food — from nutritional value and portion size to its impact on the planet. It allows users to tell how healthy their food is, learn how to eat better with motivation and guidance, track their nutrition journey and scan products for simple, actionable food choices.

Members participate with the Center in different ways, including building models for clinical outcome studies, lowering the significant cost of developing those studies independently, helping connect the science to technology, and providing evidence that a digital platform improves healthcare outcomes – a key concern for providers and payers.

Additional information on judges and criteria is available here.

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About the American Heart Association
The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public’s health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.

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