June 16, 2026: Steer Health, an AI-native platform for health systems, has been named the winner of the 2026 Hearst Health Prize, awarded by Hearst Health in partnership with the UCLA Center for AI & SMART Health. The award was presented by Greg Dorn, senior vice president of Hearst and president of Hearst Health, at UCLA Health Data Day. Steer was selected over finalist Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and joins past recipients including Stanford Medicine, Mount Sinai, and SCAN.
The Hearst Health Prize is an annual award that recognizes data science programs making a measurable impact on health. Steer received the $100,000 award. Dana-Farber received $25,000 as the 2026 finalist for MatchMiner, an open-source platform that matches cancer patients to precision medicine clinical trials.
Steer's AI predicts which patients are about to fall out of care and autonomously guides them through scheduling, intake, and follow-up, integrated with more than 50 EHR systems. Across its customer base in 2025, the platform kept 1.68 million patients connected to care across more than 950 care sites in 34 states, achieving a 2.2 percent no-show rate against a national average of 18 to 20 percent and completing more than 4 million automated patient follow-ups.
"Healthcare's most expensive failures are the ones no one can see: the referral that is never scheduled, the screening that goes overdue, the patient who quietly falls out of care," said Sridhar Yerramreddy, Founder and CEO of Steer Health. "Being recognized by UCLA and Hearst Health, alongside institutions like Stanford and Mount Sinai, tells us the industry is ready to treat that gap as the priority it is. This milestone belongs to our customers and our team."
"The Hearst Health 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 and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute are doing exactly that, not in theory, but at scale, in real clinical environments, with measurable results," said Greg Dorn, senior vice president of Hearst and president of Hearst Health.
Closing the gap between a physician's order and a completed visit has long been handled as a staffing shortage. Steer treats it as a data problem instead. Up to 40 percent of U.S. patients never complete a specialist referral, and nearly one in five scheduled appointments are no-shows, an estimated $150 billion in annual waste. Using a gradient-boosted predictive model to flag at-risk patients and a multi-agent AI system to act on those signals in real time, Steer keeps patients moving through care without adding to clinical workload.
Steer Health is an AI-native platform that closes the gap between the care patients need and the care they actually complete: the referrals, appointments, and screenings that are ordered or overdue but never happen. Steer’s AI predicts which patients are about to fall out of care and autonomously guides them through scheduling, intake, and follow-up. For patients, that means staying connected to care. For the practices that serve them, it means capturing growth they were losing, with economics tied to results. In 2026, UCLA and Hearst Health named Steer the Hearst Health Prize winner, selected over Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and joining past recipients Stanford Medicine, Mount Sinai, and SCAN.
To learn more about Steer Health, visit steerhealth.io
