Downstate and UAlbany Awarded "Best of New York" for Health Disparities Tool

Sep 23, 2016

Brooklyn, NY – SUNY Downstate Medical Center and the SUNY University at Albany have jointly received a Best of New York Award from the Center for Digital Government (CDG) for a collaboration tool designed to share health-disparities research and scholarship between the two institutions.

CDG's awards program salutes IT professionals and projects in New York State and local government organizations and educational institutions. Its "Best IT Collaboration Among Organizations Award" recognized Downstate and UAlbany for their "Health Disparities and Inequalities Collaboration Platform (HDIC)." The platform enables faculty, researchers, and clinicians at Downstate and UAlbany to communicate, access real-time information, and share ideas and resources.

"I'm extremely pleased that Downstate and UAlbany were recognized for this project," said Moro O. Salifu, MD, MPH, MBA, professor and chair of medicine at Downstate, and principal investigator for the Brooklyn Health Disparities Program at Downstate. "The tool enhances collaboration between our faculties and expands our ability to conduct research on barriers to high quality health care."

HDIC was developed by the IT team at UAlbany. It is a one-stop destination allowing access to resources and information and includes federal funding opportunity announcements, faculty, researcher and clinician profiles, publications and papers, federal awards databases, national analytical resources, and a communications and notification portal. While the HDIC platform is still in its infancy, the tool has tremendous potential for replication in other scientific fields.

“Ingenuity, collaboration and a lot of hard work on the part of New York government departments have yielded great innovations that are improving government interactions with citizens,” said Todd Sander, executive director of the Center for Digital Government.

The NIH-funded Brooklyn Health Disparities Center at SUNY Downstate Medical Center is a multidisciplinary partnership between Downstate, the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, and the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President. A borough-wide resource, BHDC's agenda includes advocating for parity in medical health and mental health care, increasing the number of people of color who work in the health professions, and understanding the underlying social, environmental, economic and political determinants of health disparities.

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About SUNY Downstate Medical Center

SUNY Downstate Medical Center, founded in 1860, was the first medical school in the United States to bring teaching out of the lecture hall and to the patient’s bedside. A center of innovation and excellence in research and clinical service delivery, SUNY Downstate Medical Center comprises a College of Medicine, College of Nursing, School of Health Professions, a School of Graduate Studies, School of Public Health, University Hospital of Brooklyn, and a multifaceted biotechnology initiative including the Downstate Biotechnology Incubator and BioBAT for early-stage and more mature companies, respectively.

SUNY Downstate ranks twelfth nationally in the number of alumni who are on the faculty of American medical schools. More physicians practicing in New York City have graduated from SUNY Downstate than from any other medical school.