Innovate Health Yale Past Recipients

Carys Cares, Thorne Prize Winner, 2023
Carys Cares is the award-winning social enterprise based in Indonesia committed to stop the pity-party, and embrace our Down Syndrome community.

The Educator Wellness Project, Thorne Prize Winner, 2022
The Educator Wellness Project supports well-being and retention of teachers through individualized wellness coaching, small group healing circles, and social-emotional learning resources. Recent news: Edwell has expanded to serve 26 school partners and over 1,200 teachers. They have also expanded the team with a Program Director, two Wellbeing Directors, and over 50 part-time coaches who are working in six states across the US. They are raising funds to support growth over the coming year and are looking to connect with individual donors or foundations that believe in the importance of supporting teachers and keeping them in the profession.

Sprxng, Thorne Prize Winner, 2021
Sprxng is the first, reusable menstrual product that includes a treatment for menstrual pains. The product was engineered with menstruators in humanitarian settings such as refugee camps, menstruators in rural settings, and menstruators with disabilities in mind. Recent news: Sprxng was recently awarded the Pozen Social Innovation Prize that is awarded to a solution that improves the lives of women and girls. They have been selected as 1 of 10 teams to join the inaugural cohort for MIT Solv[ed] youth innovators cohort. The team is hiring for a communications manager.

UrPharm/Pills2Me, Thorne Prize Winner, 2020
Urpharm aims to facilitate access to authentic drugs in sub-saharan Africa by providing a platform by which patients can easily locate these drugs, compare prices between pharmacies and purchase the drugs with just a few clicks. Pills2Me is a pharmacist-founded pharmacy delivery service that picks up your prescriptions from any pharmacy and delivers to you in as little as 30 minutes. Recent news: Pills2Me recently participated in Techstars NYC where they received mentorship from industry leaders and an investment of $120,000. Google will be providing Pills2Me with $150k in equity-free award money. In addition to that, they will have access to Google resources for the next six months to help them scale and launch multiple cities.

EdSightful , Thorne Prize Winner, 2019
Edsightful is an application that helps schools more effectively run their instructional coaching and teacher evaluation programs. Recent news: They will be working with 8-10 organizations this year, including school districts, coaching organizations, and private schools.

EasyEC, Thorne Prize Winner, 2018
Easy EC is an award-winning tool to help young people access emergency contraception.

BridgeYear, Thorne Prize Winner, 2017
BridgeYear delivers career exploration and support services to high school seniors. They provides "career test drives," pathway mapping, and traditional mapping to navigate community college to gain employment or transfer to four-year colleges. Recent News: In the 2020-2021 school year, BridgeYear adapted their in-person Fairs to socially distanced Career Test Drive® Kits for students to explore careers at home and in the classroom. Through online facilitation and pre-recorded curriculum, they reached over 3,000 youth nationwide.

Spring, Thorne Prize Winner, 2016
Spring Health is an AI-enabled online mental health clinic for employee mental wellness. They have been featured on NBC News, Crain’s, Forbes & STAT. Recent News: The company became a unicorn (a privately held start-up valued at over $1 billion) in 2022 and is the subject of a case study appearing in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Khushi Baby, Thorne Prize Winner, 2014
Khushi Baby focuses on tying tradition with technology to uplift community healthcare, especially reproductive and child health (RCH), for underserved populations in rural India. The vision involves scaling across India and building a digital integrated community health platform which covers all national programs. Recent News: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India has approved a budget of $13.6 million to scale up Khushi Baby’s Community Health Integrated Platform to all 72,000 community health workers in Rajasthan.

Raise Green, Aetna Prizer Winner, 2018
Raise Green is a financial technology platform for community-driven project finance. We empower all individuals with the tools they need to create and invest directly into climate solution projects, like community solar. Recent News: Raise Green has raised $1.3 million USD to support their environmental work.

MyHealthEd, Aetna Prizer Winner, 2017
Mobile app known as Real Talk that uses stories written by teenagers to engage middle school students on topics surrounding sexual health. Recent news: Real Talk has reached over 25,000 users world wide with over 4,000 stories shared and more than 10,000 resources accessed.

NoirUnited International, Seed Grant Winner, 2022
NoirUnited International (NUI) is an international NGO focused on centering Black and other marginalized people in creating development solutions for their communities. NoirUnited provides community-based development interventions to address social, economic, and political challenges primarily in African descent communities across the globe. NoirUnited also provides life-saving humanitarian assistance in response to varying crises that affect vulnerable communities.

Balma Health, Seed Grant Winner, 2022
Balma Health champions the creation of innovative do-it-yourself public health educational tools to help communicate difficult health information to children in an empowering manner. We seek to transform the way children understand healthcare concepts and, ultimately, improve patient satisfaction and healthcare outcomes.

First Mile Health, Seed Grant Winner, 2022
First Mile Health is a platform solution that enables on-demand scheduling of healthcare and medical-social services. We are committed to building the community health ecosystem via home visits, developing locally and culturally sensitive connections, and providing an alternative to inefficient labor markets.

Eje le Eje, Seed Grant Winner, 2022
Eje le Eje aims to help underprivileged children from single-mother households in Ethiopia access basic education. We help sponsor these children to go to school and help their mothers acquire skills to empower them economically.

Health News Around the World , Seed Grant Winner, 2021
Health News Around the World is a weekly health newsletter designed to combat health information online.

Host Health, Seed Grant Winner, 2021
Host Health is focused on designing an innovative solution to tackle the disparities in migrant health education in the US.

Mobile Memory , Seed Grant Winner, 2021
Mobile Memory is committed to developing an AI/ML algorithm to analyze speech patterns and assess an individual’s likelihood for onset of dementia in the future.

NüHer , Seed Grant Winner, 2021
NüHer is focused on providing personalized mental healthcare for diverse communities with a focus on multilingual and multicultural services. Recent news: The team just finished a summer fellowship with Tsai CITY and are raising a seed round.

RDonCall, Seed Grant Winner, 2021
RDonCall is an integrated telehealth-management platform designed to empower people with chronic disease to live up to their full potential and eliminate health disparity by offering affordable and people-centered healthcare management.

CtrlTrial , Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
Patient recruitment for clinical trials is a problem with African American and Hispanic patients in particular having been historically underrepresented. CtrlTrial is an AI-powered tool to help physicians identify patients for clinical trials to solve inequitable under-recruitment of patients to clinical trials within their catchment area.

Elevation Med Prep Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
Lack of racial, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity in medicine is a rate-limiting factor in efforts to eliminate health care disparities. Elevation Med Prep offers medical school admissions consulting services and envisions a day when socioeconomic barriers, social connections, and access to information are no longer contributing factors to medical school acceptance. Recent news: The team recently cheered on a second cohort of medical school applicants as they received their white coats at institutions across the nation. Half of these students are underrepresented minorities. Elevation Med Prep is looking for sponsors to support their work.

Sprxng, Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
Sprxng is the first, reusable menstrual product that includes a treatment for menstrual pains. The product was engineered with menstruators in humanitarian settings such as refugee camps, menstruators in rural settings, and menstruators with disabilities in mind. Recent news: Sprxng was recently awarded the Pozen Social Innovation Prize that is awarded to a solution that improves the lives of women and girls. They have been selected as 1 of 10 teams to join the inaugural cohort for MIT Solv[ed] youth innovators cohort. The team is hiring for a communications manager.

Let's Diversifi , Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
DiversifiMedEd is a web-based platform where students who self-identify as historically underrepresented in medicine can connect with medical schools, residency programs, and fellowships across the country. Applicants can interface with trainees of color, and program leadership through multiple live sessions to gain insight into the inclusivity of the learning environment prior to the decision to apply. Recent news: In 2021, they expanded their platform offerings to include even more healthcare professions and project based activities.

Origin Healthcare Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
Origin Healthcare provides high touch, acute hospital level care in the home, through a combination of daily in-person and Telehealth visits from an expert medical team, empowering patients by providing them a choice to meet their acute hospital level healthcare needs. Recent news: Origin Healthcare launched in 2021 and has cared for almost 900 patients in Colorado. The team has an incredible staff of 14 nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians providing in-home and virtual advanced medical care. They have exceptional quality outcomes and a net promoter score of 96 from patients. They have signed contracts for services from 14 self-funded employers covering 7.5k lives and are continuing to add more partnerships. The team is looking for investors in their $2M SAFE round and are always interested in partnering and meeting others who are passionate about improving healthcare.

The Bandana Project Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2020
The Bandana Project is a grassroots mental health awareness and suicide prevention campaign aimed at reducing the stigmas of mental illnesses and seeking care on college campuses -giving folks the tools to support themselves and others - and more.

Cocoa360, Seed Grant Winner, 2019
Cocoa360 is pioneering a new model of development that leverages existing community resources to improve access to education and healthcare for rural cocoa farming communities. Our Tarkwa Breman Center of Excellence (TBCE) – a girls’ school, clinic, and community library – is situated in Tarkwa Breman, a cocoa farming community in the Western Ghana. In exchange for tuition-free education and subsidized healthcare services, community members work on a community-run cocoa farm. Recent news: Cocoa360 has acquired a new 15-acre cocoa farm, six new water tanks, two new buses, and fully set up a library and computer room. The team is looking for funding to expand operations and is in need of development and research fellows.

BambooAbility, Seed Grant Winner, 2019
BambooAbility sees the development and design for manufacture of low-cost, durable, sustainable, purpose-built personal mobility equipment in order to support wheelchair users and others with mobility impairment in low-resource and tropical settings. Recent news: The team is currently in the process of raising seed funding and has begun a collaboration with the University of Uganda.

4Beez, Seed Grant Winner, 2019
4 Beez International's vision is to build a viable and sustainable Haiti for Haitians, by Haitians.

Agricore, Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2019
There is a rift between environmental scientists and ranchers, farmers, and land managers when it comes to soil analysis due to a lack of simple, scalable, and affordable soil-sampling and soil-testing methods. In-field carbon content light spectrometry could solve this problem; our company is making use of this technology possible.

Agora, Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2019
Agora Good Life, Inc. is an app connecting university students with wellness events, so they live their best lives. Agora aggregates and provides diverse, personalized wellness recommendations using a growth-mindset algorithm.

Fresh Air Wrist Band, Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2019
FreshAir wristband is a wearable tool for assessing personal exposure to environmental chemicals.

Enlighten, Rita Wilson Seed Grant Winner, 2019
Enlighten Naloxone Sensory Injector is a medical device start-up working to detect and reverse opioid overdose events. Enlighten has received funding from National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) to propel their work. Recent News: Enlighten was selected as one of twelve teams developing solutions that use advanced technology to address pressing societal needs in education, public health, environment, and peace and human rights as a part of the Verizon’s and the Clinton Global Health Initiative’s Forward for Good challenge. Recent news: This summer, three members of the Enlighten team received funding from and participated in the VentureWell accelerator, co-sponsored by Verizon and the Clinton Global Initiative. The team is searching for MPH interns.

Brio, Seed Grant Winner, 2018
Brio was founded in 2018 to develop an effective mental health design process to bring scalable services and training to vulnerable communities internationally. They provide local partners with human-centered design services and consultation, empowering them to build programs and interventions sustainably and strategically. Recent news: They have provided effective programming to more than 10,000 people directly and have just received an institutional grant to scale a wellbeing skills program for government schoolteachers in India. They are always looking for funders and supporters interested in partnering with them.

WISSP (Widely Integrated Social Services Platform), Seed Grant Winner, 2018
Source Development Hub is a service aimed to reduce evictions and homelessness for tenants, eviction-associated costs for landlords, and care burdens for social service providers, in New Haven, Connecticut. The goal of the platform is to develop an accurate metric to assess individual level housing vulnerability using input data from United Way’s 211 service, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), Coordinated Access Network (CAN) provider intake, internal platform surveys, and citywide markers of socioeconomic status, and to use that metric to improve housing outcomes. Recent news: The team has partnered with United Way’s Prosperikey Platform, the Connecticut Property Owner’s Association, and the Housing Collective to release the platform for use across Connecticut. They are currently wrapping up software development and will soon release a public launch.

Easy EC, Seed Grant Winner, 2017
Easy EC is an award-winning tool to help young people access emergency contraception.

RAMP Seed Grant Winner, 2017
RAMP (Resource Access Mapping Project) is a group working to create a multilingual mobile app that maps out the healthcare and social services, community programs, and public resources in the Greater New Haven area in order to alleviate barriers to access by presenting those services and resources in an accessible and accurate way.

YouCOMM, Aetna Foundation Prize for Health Equity Innovation non-Yale Seed Stage Award Winner, 2017
YouCOMM is an app designed for a smart device that enables the user to indicate their specific needs to caregiving staff, thus promoting efficiency and enhancing quality of care, designed specifically for hospitals, nursing homes and/ or outpatient care facilities. YouCOMM is a project from the University of Connecticut.

Bridging the Gap, Aetna Foundation Prize for Health Equity Innovation non-Yale Seed Stage Award Winner, 2017
Bridging the Gap provides low-income populations with accessible screenings for high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular risk factors, and then offers culturally sensitive patient education as well as assistance navigating the healthcare system and accessing providers. This is a project of the University of Bridgeport.

Better Care, Seed Grant Winner, 2016
Better Care aims to address implicit biases among physicians' as well as improving standards of care for patients prone to structural vulnerabilities such as food insecurity and housing instability via educational tools and reminders, which have been shown to have a positive impact on implicit bias.

Mindscope, Seed Grant Winner, 2016
MindScope is an app that improves doctor-patient communication about the "invisible" symptoms of patients with mental illnesses and brain diseases. This program is designed by patients, used by both doctors and patients as a diagnosis and treatment tool, and improves patient quality of life. The MindScope team is from Wesleyan University.

MyHealthEd, Seed Grant Winner, 2016
Real Talk from MyHealthEd is a mobile app that uses daily stories instead of traditional health messages to help middle school students learn about sexual health topics. All of the daily stories are written from four different perspectives and are presented as text message conversations. Recent news: Real Talk has reached over 25,000 users world wide with over 4,000 stories shared and more than 10,000 resources accessed.

RxAll, Seed Grant Winner, 2016
RxAll is an online marketplace platform for pharmacies in Africa that enables them to buy authentic healthcare products directly from verified and licensed pharma manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers.

Be Art, Seed Grant Winner, 2016
Be Art provides after-school programming to create safe spaces for open dialogue and skill-building around self-care in social and emotional wellness. It teaches mindfulness and creative self-expression to young women in underserved communities.

Ensight-AI, Rita Wilson Prize Winner, 2023
Ensight-AI represents a new paradigm in cardiovascular diagnosis through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to electrocardiograms (ECGs).

Adiona, Rita Wilson Prize Winner, 2022
Adiona uses novel analytics to predict the onset of key dementia symptoms from consumer-grade, wearable sensors.

Mindful Kala, Rita Wilson Prize Winner, 2021
Mindful Kala aims to help elevate mental and social well-being by utilizing Indian Classical Dance to explore mind-body movements and cultivate intercultural relationships. Recent news: The team recently launched their newest product: a book called “Alarippu – Blossoming of the Mind and Body” and have started generating revenue using this product with their first paying customer. They have received certification from the State of Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction, making them eligible for federal funding, and are raising a seed round. They are looking for digital art interns.

KovaDx , Rita Wilson Prize Winner, 2020
KovaDx is making the diagnosis and monitoring of sickle cell disease patients faster, easier to perform, and more affordable. Recent news: The team recently participated in the NSF I-Corps program, interviewing more than 100 customers. They have begun participation in the Black Ambition Futurist Program as a Prize semi-finalist. They need support getting connected to angel investors interested in health equity for BIPOC communities and are looking for MBA and/or MPH interns, as well as mentors who may be a good fit for their scientific advisory board.