Dr. Bimal Desai Wins Healthcare Innovator Award

Bimal Desai, MD, MBI, Assistant Vice President and Chief Health Informatics Officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) was honored at the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT) annual black-tie gala as the winner of this year’s Healthcare Innovator Award. The award is given to a company, researcher or investor who provides innovative solutions that have a positive impact on the quality, cost and access to healthcare.

“It is an honor to have Dr. Desai’s work recognized,” says Kisha Hawthorne, MHA, MBA, FACHE, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Information Services at CHOP. “He and his team have taken on the challenge of better connecting our patients, doctors and the CHOP Care Network through technology and innovations in telemedicine.”

Under the direction of CHOP’s president and CEO Madeline Bell, Dr. Desai helped create the Hospital’s new Digital Health Program. The Program is organized into four overarching themes:

• Care Anywhere: allowing clinicians to use telemedicine and personal devices to connect directly with patients.
• Engage and Connect: rethinking how clinical teams connect with patient families and focusing on motivating healthcare teams to collaborate.
• Research Excellence: improving cohort identification, enhancing research enrollment, and creating new methods for data collection and measuring clinical effectiveness.
• Enhanced Partnerships: exploring how Children’s Hospital can connect with healthcare providers outside of the CHOP Care Network, allowing clinicians to access patient information across organizations.

Dr. Desai also co-founded Haystack Informatics, a company spun out of CHOP’s “Open Canvas” innovation competition in 2014 which uses patients’ electronic health records (EHR) and healthcare employees’ patterns of behavior to protect patient privacy.

The Healthcare Innovation award was presented at PACT’s annual black-tie gala on Thursday, May 18, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.