CU Thrive Innovation Awards
CU Thrive: Office for Well-being supports bold ideas that enhance faculty well-being and reduce burnout.
Through the Faculty Well-Being Innovation Awards, we fund innovative projects that improve efficiency, strengthen culture, and support individual faculty development across CU SOM.
2025 Award Winners
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Lightening the In-basket
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Supporting Nocturnists
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Harnessing AI for Documentation
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Streamlining Physician Communications
Dr. Kristin Jensen, a pediatrician and internist, saw how much time her colleagues spent after hours answering electronic messages. Through a CU THRIVE Innovation Award, her team is developing a new system for inbox management and out-of-office coverage with the goal of more time for patients during the day and more time for family at night.
Dr. Jennifer Caragol, a family medicine physician, also supported by a CU THRIVE Innovation Award, and her team is collaborating with healthcare team members to reduce the in-basket burden. Together, they are redesigning workflows and empowering staff to work at the top of their scope to cut down on administrative load.
Hospitalists who work overnight face unique challenges—fatigue, high patient loads, and isolation. Dr. Alexandra Kilinsky is testing a new “swing shift” model through CU THRIVE support to explore if this change is easing the cognitive load on night teams and making a demanding schedule more sustainable—improving both care and retention.
Paperwork and electronic charting are major sources of stress for clinicians. With CU THRIVE’s help, Dr. Aakriti Pandita and her team launched Project AIDA, an AI-driven tool that helps doctors retrieve critical patient information instantly. The team is testing to see if the innovation reduces burnout, saves time, and lets clinicians focus more on their patients.
Responding to patient portal messages is a major source of stress and burnout for clinicians. With support from UCHealth, Dr. Yanjun Gao and her team are developing a web-based AI platform that uses advanced prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to help providers quickly draft high-quality responses to patient messages. The team is testing whether this innovation reduces documentation burden, saves time, and improves clinician well-being across multiple departments.