Boston, MA—The Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) awarded the 1st annual Gupta Family Endowed Prize for Innovation in ALS Care to Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center ALS Clinic for pioneering decentralized multidisciplinary ALS care using digital health and targeted remote monitoring technologies. The award was virtually presented to the team during the 20th Annual Northeast ALS Consortium (NEALS) Meeting by Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, Director of the Healey & AMG Center at Mass General and Anita Gupta.

The award recipients include Amit Chahwala, BS, Andrew Geronimo, PhD, James Grogan, MD, Yojana Kanade, MS, CCR, Mansoureh Mamarabadi, MD, Zachary Simmons, MD, and Susan Walsh, RN, MSN of Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center ALS Clinic. The team was awarded the Gupta Family Endowed Prize for Innovation in ALS Care for their pioneering work using digital health technologies to revolutionize ALS care. The team has had an impressive impact on the well-being of people living with ALS and their families through the innovative use of digital health.  

“The Penn State ALS Clinic team are leaders in the field of telemedicine and their pivotal work in digital health helped equip the entire field to continue monitoring and caring for patients when COVID-19 changed the healthcare landscape,” said Merit Cudkowicz, MD, MSc, Director of the Healey Center and chief of Department of Neurology at MGH.

“It is an honor to be recognized with the Gupta Family Endowed Prize,” said Dr. Andrew Geronimo of Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center ALS Clinic. “This award will enable our clinical-research partnership to expand the use of remote health monitoring in the care of patients.”

“'Curing' is not the only way of providing care. Our goal in using telehealth and remote monitoring has always been to benefit those with ALS and reduce the burden on them and their families.  Technology can help make care ‘person-centric’ rather than ‘clinic-centric,’” said Dr. Zachary Simmons of Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center ALS Clinic. “The Gupta Family Endowed Prize will permit us to expand mechanisms for enhancing care for those with ALS, and to increase opportunities for research participation.”

The Gupta Family Endowed Prize for Innovation in ALS Care is a global prize to honor ground-breaking new approaches that lead to exceptional care for individuals living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This annual prize is awarded to a nominated team who has developed promising new approaches to improving care for people living with ALS. The goal of this prize is to encourage idea sharing, innovation, and forward thinking on scalable ongoing and ground-breaking projects that have directly improved ALS patient care.

“We are delighted that The Sean M. Healey & AMG Center for ALS at MGH has chosen the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center ALS Clinic as our first prize recipients,” said the Gupta family. “We hope that the Gupta Family Endowed Prize for Innovation in ALS Care will encourage cutting edge and innovative solutions so one day soon, this debilitating neurological disease will be successfully treated.”

For more information about the Sean M. Healey and AMG Center for ALS, please visit the website.