J&J’s Janssen Launches $250,000 Challenge to Improve Transition Care

Janssen Healthcare Innovation, part of Johnson & Johnson’s reconstituted R&D operation in San Diego, is announcing an incentive prize challenge with awards totaling $250,000 for technology solutions that improve care for patients who’ve just been discharged from a hospital.

Janssen says it’s working with the National Transitions of Care Coalition to establish criteria and to recruit experts in transition care to serve as judges. The coalition was established in Little Rock, AR, almost six years ago to address a variety of care issues that often arise after discharge. The lack of coordination often means the primary care physician is unaware a patient was hospitalized (or released), newly prescribed medications don’t get reconciled, and patient complaints go unheeded, which can result in a range of adverse events and increased health care costs.

Hospital readmissions under Medicare cost $15 billion a year, and $12 billion of these readmissions are considered preventable, according to a Janssen spokeswoman. The challenge was announced at the Health Care Innovations Summit in Washington, D.C.

In a statement today, Diego Miralles of Janssen Healthcare Innovation says, “We hope that the Janssen Connected Care Challenge will inspire the best and the brightest entrepreneurs to develop effective, scalable solutions that can be deployed and truly make a meaningful impact in patients’ lives.”

Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, NJ, has consolidated a variety of its business units over the past year under the umbrella of Janssen Healthcare. Janssen says its incentive prize competition is intended to prompt “a crowdsourcing-inspired effort to rally entrepreneurs’ best ideas.” The goal is to create technology for coordinating patient care within and between different healthcare practices.

More information about The Janssen Connected Care Challenge is available on the Janssen Healthcare Innovation website. Janssen plans to award $50,000 to each of three finalists, as well as the chance to consult with healthcare experts to refine their solution. A winner will be selected in May, awarded $100,000, and get help to advance their concept toward commercialization.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.