The Brigham Innovation Hub surveyed more than 450 people and put together a list of Top 10 Healthcare Innovations in 2015. We asked the BWH clinical and research community to tell us more about their top picks and why they chose them. Want to add your thoughts? Tell us your picks in the comments section.

Oren Levy

My pick for the top healthcare innovation for 2015 would be the increased prescription of health apps. Such easy-to-use apps encourage patients to be more aware and responsible for their health. Clinical indicators readily communicated from the patient’s home to his clinician at the hospital can facilitate doctor-patient communication and expedite treatment, while minimizing the need for time consuming and costly on-site visits. I think increasing prescription of such powerful health apps has the potential to significantly reduce healthcare costs and improve patient care.

-Oren Levy, PhD, Instructor of Medicine and Associate Bioengineer, Department of Medicine

David Bates

“I think this is a great list—‘big data’ techniques will almost certainly help us care more effectively for high-cost patients, employers are increasingly interested in the findings from behavioral economics to incent behavior changes in their employees and we desperately need to do better with dealing with outpatient behavioral health needs. As we make the switch from fee-for-service to accountable care, these are the kinds of innovations that leading healthcare organizations will want to adopt.”

-David Bates, MD, Brigham Innovation Hub Executive Sponsor and Chief Innovation Officer

Elizabeth Nabel

“Our precision medicine work at BWH has a lot of momentum, and I look forward to seeing how we can harness big data to improve the care we offer our patients. We perform over a million imaging studies and seven million lab tests annually, and now we’re developing ways to use this rich dataset to more precisely diagnose and treat diseases.”

-Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD, President, Brigham and Women’s Health Care

Bob Walsh

“3-D printing is becoming prolific and is used throughout the hospital. I see this as a very disruptive technology for the procurement side of things. I also work closely with the corporate sustainability group and think 3-D printing can be a boost to the environment. I see uses all over the hospital and would love to learn more about how it will change procurement and the cost structure for goods.”

-Bob Walsh, Contract Manager, PHS MM Contracts, Partners HealthCare

Thomas Lee

“One of the top health care innovations that’s allowing us to improve and advance patient care is intraoperative MRI guidance in the Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating (AMIGO) suite, the vision of Dr. Ferenc Jolesz who sadly passed away this past winter. Thanks to Dr. Jolesz’s vision, carried on by Ferenc Jolesz Chair of Radiology Research and AMIGO Clinical Director Dr. Clare Tempany and AMIGO executive director Dr. Tina Kapur and the AMIGO team, we’re now able to perform new procedures such as, but not limited to: MRI guided deep brain stimulator implants led by neurosurgeon Dr. Travis Tierney, recently featured in ABC News; MRI guided thyroid and parathyroid surgery led by endocrine surgeon Dr. Daniel Ruan; MRI guided cryoablations of renal and prostate tumors led by interventional body radiologist Dr. Kemal Tuncali; and MRI guided cryoablations in the head, neck and spine led by myself with cryoablation expertise from Dr. Tuncali. The applications of image-guided therapy techniques continue to evolve and expand as AMIGO researchers, such as Dr. Jayender Jagadeesan and Dan Kacher, study new ways to optimize techniques that are more targeted and less invasive for patients.”

-Thomas Lee, MD, Assistant Section Head, Neuroradiology, Department of Radiology