11 organizations, one mission: AWS announces the 2026 Children’s Health Innovation Award recipients

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the recipients of the 2026 AWS Imagine Grant Children’s Health Innovation Award (CHIA). Whether a child is battling a rare cancer, managing a chronic condition, or growing up downstream from a contaminated waterway, this year’s 11 recipients share a common ambition: using technology to help every child get access to the best possible care.

The winners’ projects are transforming how clinicians diagnose and treat complex pediatric conditions, democratizing world-class diagnostics for children regardless of where they live, and harnessing prediction and prevention to protect children.

The 2026 CHIA recipients are: Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Battelle Memorial Institute, Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters, Cook Children’s Healthcare System, The Jackson Laboratory, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, NYC School Bus Umbrella Services, Orbis International, Sanford Burnham Prebys, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Wildlife Conservation Society.

Transforming pediatric diagnosis, treatment, and prevention

Several 2026 recipients are deploying AI to fundamentally reshape how clinicians diagnose and treat children with complex conditions. Nationwide Children’s Hospital is scaling its GENIUS machine learning platform, which has already cut time to genetic diagnosis by 50 percent for critically ill infants, from their main campus neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to six additional NICUs across central Ohio and into primary care.

In parallel, a new Heart Center Precision Data Lake will link genomic results with long-term cardiac outcomes, moving beyond diagnosis to understand how genetics can inform care for children with complex heart disease. Together, these efforts extend precision medicine across the patient journey, from identifying children who need genetic testing earlier to using those results to improve outcomes.

Seattle Children’s Hospital is building a cloud platform that harmonizes over 35,000 electroencephalogram (EEG) studies, neuroimaging, genomics, and clinical data from over 6,000 pediatric epilepsy patients into AI-ready formats. The platform will power machine learning–driven biomarker discovery and cross-institutional collaboration for children with intractable seizures and rare genetic epilepsies.

Cook Children’s Healthcare System is creating PRECEDE, a more secure cloud platform that unifies fragmented clinical data, including electronic health records (EHRs), EEG waveforms, imaging, and genomics for children with rare and drug-resistant epilepsy. The platform supports AI-driven analytics to improve identification of complex neurologic conditions and accelerate biomarker discovery.

Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters is building an AI system that can predict medication nonadherence risk in real time for children with chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and epilepsy. When risk is detected, automated interventions (care team alerts, reminders, and medication access support) will trigger immediately to keep children on track.

Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago will expand Intelligent Chart Assist to pediatric transplant care. Children referred for transplant often arrive with hundreds of pages of unstructured outside records, and international records may come in different languages and formats. Using Amazon Bedrock, the hospital will turn these documents into clear, clinician-ready summaries in which every fact is traceable to its source, expediting the timely review transplant patients need.

Democratizing access to world-class diagnostics for children everywhere

A defining theme of this year’s cohort is using AI to bring advanced diagnostics within reach of every child, regardless of geography or resources. The Jackson Laboratory is building a cloud-based platform that uses AI to predict pediatric brain tumor types from routine pathology slides as an alternative to DNA-methylation profiling. The tool aims to bring accurate molecular diagnosis within reach of hospitals in low- and middle-income countries, where 80 percent of the world’s children with cancer lack access to advanced diagnostics.

Orbis International is integrating AI-assisted retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) screening, developed by Siloam Vision, into its global telemedicine and e-learning platform, Cybersight. With this system, NICU staff in Mongolia, Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam can capture retinal images for automated analysis and remote specialist review, addressing a leading cause of preventable pediatric blindness.

Sanford Burnham Prebys is developing a multi-agent AI platform to advance functional precision medicine for children with high-risk and recurrent brain tumors. The system integrates genomic, transcriptomic, methylation, imaging, pathology, and drug-response data to generate evidence-based treatment recommendations for molecular tumor boards at Rady Children’s Health.

Protecting children through prediction and prevention

This year’s cohort also includes organizations using AI to prevent harm before it reaches children. Through a regional partnership, the Wildlife Conservation Society is building an AI-powered forecasting platform to predict where new gold mining fronts will emerge and spread across the Amazon Basin and identify which downstream communities face the greatest risk of mercury exposure. By shifting from reactive contamination detection to predictive prevention, the platform could enable authorities to protect over 10,000 children under five, while helping safeguard rivers, forests, wildlife, and the ecosystems that sustain both people and nature.

NYC School Bus Umbrella Services is building an AI-powered dynamic routing engine for electric buses serving students with special needs across New York City. By factoring in each child’s medical needs, wheelchair accessibility, and real-time traffic, the system aims to reduce daily commutes by 30–40 percent, giving children with complex health conditions more time for learning, therapy, and rest.

Battelle Memorial Institute will create a pilot pediatric research solution on AWS that uses AI and causal inference to estimate treatment effects from real-world health care data. The solution will provide researchers with cloud-based solutions for study design, causal effect estimation, fairness assessment, and automated evidence synthesis, reducing barriers to generating pediatric evidence where traditional clinical trials are difficult or infeasible.

Battelle’s project aims to demonstrate a practical, scalable model for accelerating pediatric research and improving evidence available to support children’s health care decisions. The pilot hopes to generate reusable architecture expandable to additional pediatric use cases.

At AWS, we are honored to support these organizations, whose work is creating lasting, meaningful change in the lives of children and caregivers. This year’s winner cohort reminds us that when technology is placed in the hands of those closest to the challenge, the possibilities for children’s health are limitless. We look forward to seeing what they build.

About the Children’s Health Innovation Award

AWS has committed $10 million to advancing children’s health outcomes. The 2026 CHIA recipients will receive a total of over $1.8 million in cash funding and AWS computing credits alongside expert technical guidance to advance their projects.

To learn more about each organization’s vision in more detail, visit AWS Imagine Grant Children’s Health Innovation Award and sign up to be notified about future cycles.