Spark Grants provide seed-funding for new and early-stage ideas
Ariadne Labs today announced Associate Faculty members Maximilian J. Pany, MD, PhD, and J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD, as the recipients of the 2024-2025 Spark Grant innovation award. The grantees will use their funding to study innovations and opportunities to improve primary care referrals to specialty care.
Now in its 12th year, the Spark Grant program provides support for new and early-stage ideas to make health care safer, more equitable, and more integrated for patients everywhere. The program has funded more than 30 projects to date. More than a dozen of those projects have become major programs or initiatives within the Ariadne Labs portfolio, while others have kickstarted work that continues outside of Ariadne.
“Our Spark Grant program continues to be a critical component of our innovation pipeline. It connects us with new people and new ideas to improve the quality of health care through innovative approaches to new and old challenges in health care,” said Asaf Bitton, MD, MPH, Executive Director of Ariadne Labs. “This year’s project will allow our well-regarded health care policy experts to apply design-thinking to gaps around efficient and effective specialty referrals that affect the care of countless patients.”
Specialist referrals are crucial moments in patients’ care journeys, affecting downstream care as well as patient experience, earlier and better diagnosis, and seamless coordination of care. Yet Dr. Pany says most referrals are made haphazardly. “Referrals are often based on physicians’ individual perspectives rather than on a collective understanding of which physicians are the best match with a given patient’s specific health and social needs,” said Dr. Pany. “By systematizing physicians’ collective wisdom about patient-specialist fit, our project has the potential to optimize referrals to elevate patients’ experiences and downstream outcomes.”
Dr. McWilliams added, “We’re hoping to figure out ways to make better use of what physicians have to offer – they have a wealth of knowledge and are always eager to teach each other and help their patients if given easy ways to engage in those all-important goals.”
Funding from the Spark Grant will accelerate efforts to design and evaluate tools to improve the referral process, leading to the design and eventual testing of new tools and solutions in this area.
Spark Grantees are provided with up to one year of seed-funding for their work. Grantees receive support from Ariadne Labs’ Innovation Platform to guide the project through the Ariadne Labs Arc, our proven innovation pathway for effectively designing, testing, and spreading solutions. Through this process, projects benefit from Ariadne Labs’ expertise in human-centered design, rigorous testing methodology, and implementation science. “This is a gap in care that affects nearly every patient at some point in their health care journey,” said Meghan Long, MHA, Assistant Director of the Innovation Platform. “We’re excited to bring Ariadne Labs’ expertise to create a solution to improve care for patients everywhere.”