Steer Health Wins 2026 Hearst Health Prize for AI-Powered Clinical Orchestration; Dana-Farber's MatchMiner Named Finalist
Key Insights
Steer Health (search) received the 2026 Hearst Health (search) Prize and $100,000 for its AI-driven platform that reduced care gaps for over 1.6 million patients across 34 states.
The platform achieved a 2.2% no-show rate compared to the 18–20% national average and executed more than 4 million automated follow-ups in 2025 without human intervention.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was named finalist and awarded $25,000 for MatchMiner, an open-source platform that has facilitated 402 clinical trial enrollments and reduced time to patient consent by a median of 55 days.
Steer Health (search), an AI-driven clinical orchestration company, has been awarded the 2026 Hearst Health (search) Prize for its platform that has measurably reduced care gaps for more than 1.6 million patients across 34 states. The award, presented by Hearst Health in partnership with the UCLA Center for AI & SMART Health (search), carries a $100,000 prize. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute was recognized as the 2026 finalist for its MatchMiner platform, receiving $25,000. Greg Dorn, senior vice president of Hearst and president of Hearst Health, presented both awards on June 16, 2026, at the UCLA Health Data Day event in Los Angeles.
Tackling Clinical Inertia with Predictive AI
Steer Health (search) was recognized for its AI-powered patient engagement and care coordination engine, which targets one of the most persistent and costly problems in U.S. healthcare: clinical inertia. According to data cited by the prize organizers, up to 40% of patients in the U.S. never complete a specialist referral, and nearly one in five scheduled appointments result in no-shows. This represents an estimated $150 billion in annual waste and leaves millions of patients disconnected from the care continuum each year.
Steer Health (search) reframes the gap between a physician's order and a completed patient visit as a data problem rather than a staffing problem. The platform employs a gradient-boosted predictive model to identify patients at risk of disengaging and a multi-agent AI system to act on those signals in real time. It autonomously guides patients through scheduling, intake, and post-visit follow-up, integrated with more than 50 electronic health record (EHR) systems.
"We started Steer Health (search) because too many patients fall through the cracks of a system that was never designed to keep them engaged," said Sridhar Yerramreddy, founder and CEO of Steer Health. "This recognition from Hearst Health (search) validates what our teams and our hospital partners already know: that AI can do the hard, invisible work of keeping patients connected to care — and do it at a scale no human workforce could match alone. We're honored, and we're just getting started."
In 2025, the platform supported 1.68 million patients across more than 950 care sites, achieving a 2.2% no-show rate against a national average of 18–20%. It also executed more than 4 million automated follow-ups without human intervention.
MatchMiner: Accelerating Precision Medicine Trial Enrollment
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Knowledge Systems Group was named the 2026 finalist for MatchMiner, an open-source clinical trial matching platform that has been operational at Dana-Farber since 2016. The platform addresses a critical bottleneck in oncology: fewer than 10% of adult cancer (search) patients ever enroll in a clinical trial, despite trials being the primary mechanism through which new cancer treatments are developed.
The matching challenge is formidable, with thousands of active trials, increasingly complex genomic eligibility criteria, and oncologists who cannot manually track all available options. MatchMiner automatically matches patients to precision medicine trials using genomic data and AI that reads unstructured clinical notes. To date, the platform has facilitated 402 trial enrollments and reduced the time to patient consent by a median of 55 days — a window that can be critical as patients' health declines.
MatchMiner is fully open-source, enabling any cancer (search) center to adopt it without licensing fees. Its AI models are trained on synthetic patient data, allowing them to be shared across institutions without privacy barriers. The platform is now expanding to Mayo Clinic.
A Shared Vision for Data-Driven Healthcare
"The Hearst Health (search) Prize exists because we believe data science is one of the most powerful tools we have to close the gaps between patients and the care they need. Steer Health (search) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are doing exactly that — not in theory, but at scale, in real clinical environments, with measurable results," said Dorn.
Dr. Alex Bui, director of the Medical & Imaging Informatics group at UCLA, highlighted the complementary nature of the two recognized innovations: "The 2026 finalists represent two very different problems — care access and clinical trial matching — but the same underlying insight: that intelligently applied data can find the patients who need help and connect them to it faster."
The Hearst Health (search) Prize is an annual competition that showcases data science programs making a tangible health impact. The award is administered in partnership with the UCLA Center for AI & SMART Health (search), a campus-wide collaborative focused on the integrated transformation of healthcare through emergent data and technologies.