This is the fourth year that Impact Ventures by J&J Foundation has collaborated with MIT Solve to help ensure that communities around the world experiences the good health and well-being they deserve. Our work together has focused on the powerful role technology and innovation play in improving health outcomes and fostering lasting change in health systems.
Johnson & Johnson Foundation was proud to serve as MIT Solve’s Global Health Anchor Supporter, awarding $100,000 across six innovative teams, as well as participating in Solve’s year-long program of skill-building activities.
The 2025 awardees were announced at the Solve Challenge Finals in New York City during the recent 80th United Nations General Assembly. All were distinguished by exceptional solutions responding to the 2025 Global Health Challenge: How can we use technology to make good health and quality care more accessible for all?
We are excited by these entrepreneurs’ successes and promises to expand access to quality care in communities across the globe. We also look forward to seeing how the connections, new organizational capabilities, mentorships and business skills they build through their engagement with Solve’s program will move their work forward, knowing that beyond funding alone, these aspects are critical to a startup’s success in its earliest years.
Congratulations to the 2025 Health Innovation Awardees!
AI-Driven Diabetes Care — Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico
Solution: AI-powered, cost-effective diabetes management for low- and middle-income communities in Mexico and Latin America.
In Mexico, more than 13.5 million adults live with diabetes, but the dual challenges of high private healthcare costs and long waits for public healthcare treatment prevent many from getting the care they need. Untreated, the preventable disease develops into blindness, the need for amputations and early death, especially among low- and middle-income adults.
Clinicas del Azucar, a monthly subscription service, leverages AI to forge a new path for patients to access personalized, timely and integrated treatment plans for managing their diabetes. The solution gives patients access to far more affordable and accessible resources spanning medical consultations, complication screenings, laboratory tests, nutritional counseling, psychological support and an on-site pharmacy. The solution has already borne impressive results: 80% improvement in treatment adherence among participating patients, indicating hopeful effects on diabetes management and long-term health for the country.
IMPALA — 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
Solution: A sustainable transition from reactive to proactive care that unburdens health workers and enables them to save lives and costs.
Pressures on health workers — including lack of training, low staff count, high patient load, high-pressure environments, limited tools and unreliable infrastructure — particularly in low- and middle-income countries keep many health workers from providing patient care to the best of their abilities and create a cycle of staff burn-out.
From social enterprise GOAL 3 comes IMPALA, a digital health platform that helps reduce these challenges by streamlining information that health workers need about their workflows, tasks and patients’ conditions. The solution was co-designed with health workers in Malawi and Rwanda, ensuring that its application was a seamless fit with their actual clinical work and fostered more efficient and informed decision-making that supported patients. Since its development, participating health workers have reported 92% reduced stress and improved efficiency. At Malawi’s St. Luke’s Hospital, pediatric mortality dropped by 50%.
Impulso Previne — São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Solution: A free and open-source solution from ImpulsoGov that empowers Brazil’s public health teams to deliver preventive care to millions of people.
In Brazil, estimates suggest that only about 35% of women aged 25-64 are screened for cervical cancer, even as mortality rates climb, especially in the North and Northeast regions. These remain preventable problems but require nurses and health workers to be equipped with critical tools that help them identify who needs follow-up care. This is especially critical in Brazil, which claims the world’s largest health system, serving more than 200 million people overall.
Through an open-source digital platform, Impulso Previne efficiently and effectively delivers that key gap in information to health workers, integrating national health databases and analyzing existing data to generate lists of patients with key follow-up and treatment needs. The platform alerts health workers to patients that are overdue for services ranging from Pap smears, prenatal visits, chronic disease monitoring and more, and helps them plan their outreach. Over 300,000 health workers and nurses in Brazil stand to benefit from this solution that ultimately strengthens preventive care for patients across the country.
Rightfit — Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Solution: A digital platform that empowers orthotists to easily design patient-specific orthotics optimized for affordable 3D printers.
Orthotists, highly trained healthcare specialists who design and produce medical devices that support body structures, are critical for the estimated 35-40 million people globally who need these devices for everyday mobility and recovery. However, these specialists are rare: There is often fewer than one orthotist per 1 million people in low-income countries. Those who are working are often at risk of burnout, facing low pay and high patient load.
Digital platform Rightfit supports these health workers with major updates to old ways of working. Through 3D scanning, AI-assisted modeling and 3D printing, the solution empowers orthotists with a streamlined workflow from design to production that ensures they can more quickly respond to the needs of their patients with personalized, medically accurate designs, and at deeply affordable levels. Rightfit is equipping and strengthening orthotists’ work and patients’ ability to receive high-quality care for daily living and movement.
Smart Scope® CX — Pune, Maharashtra, India
Solution: AI for real-time detection of diseases of the uterine cervix, including cancer.
Cervical cancer claims about 350,000 lives every year around the world, with the highest rates of mortality occurring in low- and middle-income countries. In countries like India, women living in rural areas are less likely to receive screenings — and therefore much more likely to die. The disease can be easily treated if identified and treated early, but conventional pre-cancer screening methods worldwide are slow, costly, require multiple visits and are dependent on experts with specialized knowledge.
Smart Scope® CX is an AI-powered, handheld device that transforms the accessibility and efficiency of screenings and puts this process in the hands of nurses, who are often the first point of contact for patients within the larger health system. The solution equips nurses to accurately detect the cancer in low-resource settings within a single visit, ensuring they can move forward to counsel patients on the results faster, avoiding late detection and ultimately saving lives.
Visilant — Baltimore, MD, USA
Solution: Accessible AI-powered eye screening to eliminate avoidable blindness globally.
Good vision enables people to work, care for loved ones and play an active role in their communities. It supports quality of life and entire countries’ economic productivity. But for the estimated 1 billion people around the world with preventable or treatable vision issues, this is not possible. In India specifically, 15 million people are blind, and while 90 percent of cases are preventable or treatable. many live in areas isolated from care. Moreover, even where vision care is in reach, a lack of tools and training obstruct health workers’ ability to provide the best care possible.
Visilant is a smartphone-based screening platform that equips health workers across multiple key points of care — door-to-door screening, vision centers (community eye clinics), and health and wellness centers (HWCs) — to efficiently identify eye disease in low-resource settings. The platform provides support all the way from capturing clinical-grade eye images that health workers can learn in under 30 minutes, to giving hospital staff the data they need to follow up with patients through and after treatments. The solution enables health workers to deliver high-quality eye screenings while also reducing longstanding barriers like geography, cost and travel for patients, bringing patients faster and closer to the vision care they need.
Congratulations again to all!