Athenapriset (the Athena price) is awarded to research and innovations that have come about through collaboration between health care, academia and industry.
2024-11-12
Pressrelease
We are enormously proud to be able to announce that we have won the Athena price 2024. Our hope is that this prestigious award will help even more healthcare providers discover the positive impact of verified translations on patient satisfaction, patient safety and the quality of care.
“The Athena price is the most significant price for innovations in the medical sphere in Sweden.” says Martin Schalling, professor at the Karolinska Institute and senior advisor at Care to Translate.“This price is awarded to an innovation that has an impact on society and impact on how medicine is practiced. For us, this award will enable us to increase our implementation of AI into our product and, hopefully, implement it even further in the Swedish regions - and beyond.”
We have, throughout our journey, collaborated with a number of different players within academia, health care and the industry in different phases of the development of our translation tool. Among others, the Karolinska Institute, Oslo University Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital, Bitio AB, Stockholm School of Economics and Digital Grammars AB.
As a Microsoft partner, we can tap into their technical expertise and integrate the latest language technologies into our app in order to, combined with our vast medically verified library, broaden the use of the application even more. We are also working on an exciting project with the pharmaceutical company Bayer to further develop our phrase library in medical areas that are particularly important for patient communication.
The idea for Care to Translate was born when the medical student, and our co-fouder, Linus Kullänger was attending his last year of medical school and did his internship at a health center in a migrant dense area. He saw the negative consequences that limited translation support had and decided to build the app that launched in 2017 and quickly gained traction.
“When Linus showed me the pilot version of the app, it was obvious that this could be very beneficial for both patients and healthcare professionals,” says Martin Schalling. “The fact that we are now awarded the Athena prize is a huge confirmation of this. And we hope that the award means that many more regions in Sweden start using the tool, as has already happened in Norway.”
Since 2017, we have developed the app into an advanced digital language support, which today can handle translations between 46 different languages, with more than 700 000 users in roughly 180 countries.
The Athena prize is awarded each year by the medical journal Dagens Medicin, Lif (the trade association for the research-based pharmaceutical industry in Sweden), The Swedish Research Council and Vinnova (Sweden´s innovation agency).
The purpose of the Athena prize is to draw attention to and reward research and innovations that have taken place in collaboration between academia, health care and industry. This year marks the 17th year that the price is awarded.
"This year's winner identified a concrete problem in health care and created a ground-breaking innovation that provides clear patient benefit. In collaboration with academia and industry, they break language and cultural barriers with the goal of raising the quality of care, increasing patient safety and contributing to more equal and accessible care for everyone."
Read the article from Dagens Medicin here.
Read the article from Lif here.
See the award ceremony (in Swedish) below. Recording from Dagens Medicin.
