The San Diego-based Alliance Healthcare Foundation (AHF) announced late last month that the winners of its 2010 Innovation Initiative grant competition of more than $1.2 million were Social Interest Solutions (SIS) and the San Diego Text4Baby Coalition. Both groups worked to improve access to health and social services for San Diego's medically underserved population.

AHF granted SIS $800,000 to expand its service, One-e-App, which searches a database of all available social services to help low income clients figure out which programs are available to them. Text4Baby's San Diego group received nearly $242,000 from the grant. Text4Baby is a nationwide SMS powered health tips service for new or expectant mothers and fathers. The program is free and includes the White House, Johnson & Johnson, Voxiva, all of the major US mobile operators and many others as its partners. In San Diego Text4Baby is administered by the San Diego Medical Society Foundation.

With the AHF's Innovation Initiative (i2) grant, the San Diego Text4baby Coalition will create a San Diego version of the national text4baby service offering customized prenatal and maternal text messages to 18,000 pregnant women and new moms per year for two years, with the aim of decreasing San Diego’s infant mortality rate, according to the AHF's press release.

“AHF is proud to support SIS and Text4baby in our joint fight to dissolve silos in the health care sector,” said Robert B. McCray, chairman of the AHF board of directors.

McCray is also the CEO and President of the Wireless Life-Sciences Alliance in San Diego. Qualcomm's VP of business development for health and life sciences Don Jones is also on the AHF board. Since 1989, AHF has awarded more than $45 million in grants in the San Diego area.

For more on the grant, read the release here (PDF)