Upkeep Care awarded 2024 Thorne Prize for Innovation

Upkeep Care, an artificial intelligence platform the connects older adults and caregivers to resources, topped a record 36 teams to win the 2024 Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health or Education, presented by InnovateHealth Yale (IHY).

The four-member team, including three Yale School of Public Health students, bested three other Yale student-led teams with their final pitch at Startup Yale, the university’s largest entrepreneurial event, April 5 at the Hotel Marcel in New Haven.

The $25,000 Thorne Prize, launched in 2014 with generous support from the Thorne family, is awarded annually to the best student-led venture focused on social innovation in health or education within underserved communities in the United States or low-resource countries. Upkeep also earned an additional $2,000 Audience Choice Award, as well as a previously awarded Rita Wilson Seed Grant.

The winning team is led by Blake Robertson, MPH ’24 (health care management), and includes Kiley Pratt, MPH ’24 (health policy, climate change and health); Wendy Jiang, MPH ’24 (health policy management); and Peter Yu, MS ’24 (math, computer science).

Upkeep Care connects older adults and their caregivers to its database of resources using conversational AI. The team’s goal, Robertson said, is to lessen the burden on caregivers and older adults by giving them immediate, personalized support, and guidance to access readily available government and community resources.

“It’s exciting to see Upkeep, a beneficiary of the Rita Wilson Seed Grant from InnovateHealth Yale and a member of the Yale Institute for Global Health’s [YIGH] inaugural Sustainable Health Initiative venture-development cohort, take this significant stride,” said Fatema Basrai, managing director of IHY and the Sustainable Health Initiative.

Robertson’s family experiences – he was raised by his mother and maternal grandfather and saw the struggles his mother faced in her father’s later years – inspired him to study gerontology as a minor at Cornell University, where he earned his BS in human development in 2022. Coming to Yale, he said, “My hope was to get to the bottom of the problems that affected my family and so many like ours.”

In the bigger picture, Robertson said there is a crisis in this country where older adults and family caregivers don’t have access to the support and resources they need. Robertson said research has shown that 10,000 Americans turn 65 each day and nine out of 10 want to stay aging in their homes; 50% of older adults surveyed said they would rather die than go to a nursing home. Older adults staying at home can be a huge financial burden that often falls on family caregivers. Robertson said it doesn’t have to be that way.

“The truth is that there are a lot of resources out there, in the forms of social benefits and social resources,” he said. “However, older adults and caregivers are disconnected from these resources, and Upkeep aims to bridge this gap.”

Robertson said his reaction to his team winning was tears.

“I went home that night and went on a walk at like 1 a.m.,” he said. “I was crying thinking about my mother and grandfather. We pitched our business with my mother and grandfather's faces on the screen. I have wanted our struggle to have meaning for so long, and the more people become invested in our idea, the truer that feels.”

In all, Startup Yale, a two-day event, saw 107 applicants for its awards, and presented seven prizes, and seven audience choice award-winners. Over 300 attendees saw the pitch competitions, nine speakers, and six featured workshops. In addition, there was a poster session from Yale and New Haven innovators, and six young innovators from the Connecticut Invention Convention. Rounding out the event was a keynote fireside chat featuring Yale College alum Khalil Greene in conversation with entrepreneur Nathan Barry.

The Upkeep team plans to work on the project full time after graduation. If they need inspiration as to what a Thorne Prize can do to advance public health, they don’t have to look further than the inaugural winner – a class project that morphed into Khushi Baby, an organization that uses technology and data to improve immunization efforts in underrepresented areas of India.

The same app that the team designed to track child immunization in 100 villages is now also being used 10 years later to plan routine immunization camps across 40,000 villages as well as strengthening primary health care across domains, including maternal and child health, and non-communicable and communicable diseases.

In the fall of 2013, Ruchit Nagar, MD, MPH ’16 (epidemiology of microbial diseases and global health), BS ’15 (molecular, cellular, and developmental biology), learned about the Thorne Prize from one of his YSPH professors, Martin Klein, currently senior advisor to the dean and director of YSPH’s Executive MPH program.

In the spring of 2014, as a junior undergraduate and Global Health Fellow at Yale, Nagar took the course Appropriate Technology for the Developing World, with professors Joseph Zinter and Robert Hopkins at the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design. Nagar said he applied for the course because he learned it would be centered around developing innovations to improve infant immunizations in low- and middle-income countries, and would include students from several academic disciplines. The two professors offered Nagar and his classmates the option of applying for the Thorne Prize in lieu of submitting a final report

Nagar and his team focused on the area of data and accountability, specifically to create a digital vaccine record. They learned that near field communication (NFC) tags could be used to store compressed vaccine records offline and battery-free; the records were accessible by scanning the tag with an Android device. IHY saw the potential in this nascent project and awarded the team the first-ever Thorne Prize.

“Out of the four finalists, we had the least amount of traction, funding raised, or evidence that the solution would work,” said Nagar, who earned his MD magna cum laude at Harvard in 2019. “My initial surprise and joy soon became a realization that I now had an opportunity to pursue my passion in a way that would otherwise never have been possible.”

Nagar has since returned to New Haven, where he is currently a resident physician of internal medicine and pediatrics at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Nagar, who remains Khushi Baby’s CEO, said the $25,000 Thorne Prize allowed the team to establish Khushi Baby as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and to contract a postdoctoral fellow and an Android hobbyist to develop the first version of their idea. They also bought plane tickets to India to conduct three weeks of research with their implementation partner: Seva Mandir, an NGO in the state of Rajasthan that provides maternal and child health services to communities unreached by the government’s health system.

Part of the funds would be used later for conducting their first randomized controlled trial of the digital health intervention to improve infant immunization. During the same period, Nagar connected with a postdoctoral fellow in India to be their field guide; Mohammed Shahnawaz is now their COO.

With the Thorne Prize helping them establish an initial business foothold, Khushi Baby went on to raise $6.4 million over the next decade through 52 grants and awards from organizations such as GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, the Skoll, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. It also received research funding from Yale and Johns Hopkins University.

Khushi Baby has now expanded into a 90-member team and is the technical support team for Rajahsthan’s Department of Health. Its platform has expanded to track all primary health care in the region. At the same time, Nagar said, Khushi Baby is leading a massive effort to identify and immunize 42,000 suspected “zero-dose” infants across Rajasthan.

The data tell the story. Since Khushi Baby began operating in the region, 70,000 community health care workers across 40,000 villages have reached 45 million people, 5 million of whom have had high-risk health conditions, Nagar said. In return, the Indian government has sanctioned $20 million to support Khushi Baby’s community health integrated platform (CHIP), and Khushi Baby is preparing to expand to two other states, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Looking back, Nagar said winning the Thorne Prize “was an inflection point in my life. It set me on a course to take Khushi Baby from classroom project to a full-fledged organization.”