Andrey Ostrovsky Wins Information Technology Award
2011 MED grad honored by Mass Medical Society
The day before Boston University bestowed the title of doctor on him, Andrey Ostrovsky achieved yet another distinction: winning an information technology award from the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Ostrovsky (CAS’06, MED’11) received the $3,000 award for building a tool within the website Health Matters in San Francisco, which combines public health and social media. His tool, San Francisco Community Vital Signs, is designed to help promote the city’s health priorities by establishing ten priority health goals and by building an agenda for community health improvement. The MMS typically awards two such prizes a year for technological accomplishments that help doctors practice or teach medicine or pursue clinical research.
“I came up with the concept, organized and led the management team that implemented the project, wrote and advocated for the legislation that backed the tool, secured funding for the project, published the paper outlining the tool’s impact, and did lots of other odds and ends,” says Ostrovsky.
Health Matters in San Francisco was developed by the Health Communities Institute and the Building a Healthier San Francisco coalition, a collaborative of nonprofit hospitals, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and other health organizations and philanthropic foundations. The collaborative prioritizes health concerns in the city by setting a public health agenda and allows users to participate in local health initiatives.
“Being recognized by the MMS is a huge honor and I’m extremely grateful,” Ostrovsky says. “Besides the recognition and award money, the competition introduced me to a fellow award semifinalist, Dr. David Buck, who is now my business partner at eClinic.com. As far as the award money, I used it as seed funding for two projects in which I am applying lean start-up methodology to improve health. Getting the award almost makes me feel obligated to step up my game and achieve higher-level change.”
Ostrovsky was a Doris Duke Foundation Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, from 2009 to 2010, where he was engaged in pediatric brain research. It was during that year of clinical research training that he also developed the award-winning website.
Yet another honor recently came Ostrovsky’s way—the top prize and $5,000 from the National Patient Safety Foundation—for a paper that highlighted the dangers of language barriers in hospitals.
Ostrovsky has begun a residency in pediatrics in the Boston Combined Residency Program of Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center.
John Fichera can be reached at jfichera@bu.edu.
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