PHI Prize

Every year, the Pelzman Foundation provides prizes during the Weill Cornell Medicine Primary Care and Hospital Medicine Innovations Symposium, awarding unrestricted cash prizes to the best abstract submission for medical students, residents, fellows, faculty, and staff. These awards support ongoing scholarship related to the work submitted, and are meant to encourage ongoing research and collaboration.

The Primary Care Innovations Program at Weill Cornell Medicine is an innovative program designed to highlight new work being done in the institution and across disciplines related to primary care and hospitalist medicine. Every year the program supports pilot projects for medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty, along with others such as nursing and hospital administration, to create better ways to take care of patients in multiple settings.

The Pelzman Foundation has provided grant support for these annual pilot grants and the annual symposium, to allow these ideas to flourish and help encourage new opportunities for collaboration and innovation. The Pelzman Healthcare Innovation prize will now be opened up to a wider audience, beyond participants in the WCM symposium, encouraging more involvement from multiple disciplines locally, regionally, and nationally.

Previous winners are listed below:

First Annual Primary Care Innovations Symposium

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Supported Pilot Projects:

  • Joseph K. Shin, MD – Experiences of Sex Trafficking Victims in Healthcare Settings
  • Lisa M. Kern, MD – Patients’ and Providers’ Views on the Causes and Consequences of Healthcare Fragmentation
  • Amanda S. Carmel, MD – The Impact of a Patient Activated Learning System (PALS) on Patient Recall of Hypertension Medication Information: A Pilot Study

Second Annual Primary Care Innovations Symposium

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Supported Pilot Projects:

  • Matthew W. McCarthy, MD – A Pilot Study to Improve the Bedside Teaching of Clinical Ethics: A Novel Collaboration Between Hospital Medicine and Medical Ethics

  • Iris Y. Navarro-Millan, MD – Quality of Care and Characteristics of Middle-Aged Hispanics Disabled with Arthritis

  • Megan Shen, PhD – Using a Web-Based Platform (Patient Activated Learning System) to Improve Knowledge of and Confidence in Completing Advance Directives and Managing Distress Among Racial/Ethnic Minority Patients

  • Joseph K. Shin, MD – (ongoing support) Experiences of Sex Trafficking Victims in Healthcare Settings

Third Annual Primary Care Innovations Symposium

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Supported Pilot Projects:

  • Madeline Sterling, MD – Heart Failure Training for Home Care Workers in New York City
  • Laura Gingras, MD and Helene Strauss, MD – Teaching Doctor-Patient Communication in the Digital Age: A Curriculum for Internal Medicine Residents
  • Melissa Rusli, MD – Evaluation of an Outpatient Near-Peer Teaching Experience for NYP-Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Residents
  • Evguenia Makovkina, BA – Understanding How Providers and Staff Make Decisions About Where to Refer Their Patients
    Leora Haber, BA The Patient Activated Learning System (PALS) for Nutrition Education