Newswise — At a Forum on redesigning care processes and innovations in primary care, CIMIT announced plans to award $400,000 in 2011 prizes as part of its national engineering competition. The CIMIT Prize in Primary Healthcare seeks to encourage graduate and undergraduate engineering students to develop creative technological solutions that could enhance the delivery of care at the frontlines of medicine. Inaugurated in 2009, the CIMIT Prize attracts proposals from leading biomedical engineering programs nationwide.

The CIMIT Prize competition is open to graduate and undergraduate engineering students from accredited engineering programs. Areas of interest include improving access to medical care, leveraging the skills of caregivers, automating routine tasks, increasing efficiency of workflow, supporting patients dealing with chronic disease, increasing compliance with care protocols, and developing tools to enhance the physician-patient relationship.

The annual CIMIT Prize for Primary Healthcare has been made possible through a generous gift from the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust.

For more information visit: http://www.cimit.org/grants-cimitprize.html

About CIMIT

CIMIT is the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. A ten-year-old non-profit consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, CIMIT provides innovators with resources to explore, develop and implement novel technological solutions for today’s most urgent healthcare problems. Participants in the consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Partners HealthCare and VA Boston Healthcare System.

Contact:Elaine Richardson617-643-3847[email protected]