There are twelve sandboxes and one sandbox tool approved under the Mass Digital Health Sandbox Program, providing a variety of testing and validation environments. The program is administered by the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and advised by an Independent Steering Committee.
Brigham Digital Innovation Hub |
Contact: Chen Cao |
| The Brigham Digital Innovation Hub (iHub) at Brigham Health uses digital health technology to provide patient-centered, efficient and safe healthcare. The iHub evaluates and advances ideas from Brigham Health clinicians, researchers and staff and builds digital health infrastructures around technologies that meet hospital challenges. The iHub strives to become the collaborator of choice in digital healthcare. Through an innovative partnership model at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, start-ups and industry partners can work with iHub to build and validate products in clinical settings. The companies that partner with iHub will have access to researchers, clinicians and other staff as well as the expanding ecosystem of digital health initiatives and infrastructure at Brigham Health. | |
Carelon
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Contact: Spencer Ward |
| The Carelon Digital Data Sandbox connects people and data. Questions and answers. Problems and solutions. And it’s all powered by one of the world’s largest certified de-identified healthcare data sets of commercially insured unique lives. The Digital Data Sandbox offers approved users the ability to discover insights, test and train algorithms, and validate solutions with Carelon experts, then deploy those solutions in the real world. Together, we’re solving the most complex problems in healthcare. | |
Medical Device Interoperability & Cybersecurity Program at MGH |
Contact: Colin Gorman |
| The Medical Device Plug-and-Play Interoperability & Cybersecurity (MD PnP) Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is a nationally recognized leader in research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) of medical device and digital health technologies, focusing on system safety, interoperability, and cybersecurity. The MD PnP Program has established a sophisticated virtual hospital testbed that can be efficiently reconfigured to emulate various clinical and IT environments. The testbed consists of diverse medical devices, mechanical and electronic patient simulators, medical gas supplies, extensive and flexible computing and networking resources, data acquisition and storage, and cyber-range. The MD PnP Program provides a range of services to medical device and digital health companies that leverage their testbed to expedite the RDT&E cycle of their products, including rapid product prototyping, safety assurance and product de-risking, standard-driven testing to produce regulatory acceptable evidence, pre-deployment integration testing, threat modeling and cybersecurity impact/mitigation analysis. | |
MITRE |
Contact: Russ Graves |
| MITRE’s mission-driven teams are dedicated to solving problems for a safer world. Through public-private partnerships and federally funded R&D centers, MITRE works across government and in partnership with industry to discover new possibilities, create unexpected opportunities, and lead by pioneering together for the public good to bring innovative ideas into existence. Within this sandbox, MITRE offers access to domain and technical expertise, open source software tools and artifacts, and unique test facilities to lower the barrier for access to data, improve healthcare interoperability, and increase the security of medical devices in care settings. | |
MIT IMES Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) |
Contact: Casper Peterson |
| The Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) is a GCP, multidisciplinary research network supporting cutting-edge research from concept to clinical translation. Their goal is to support the clinical research lifecycle by providing resources to support protocol design, regulatory compliance, clinical consultation, iterative design, oversight and participant monitoring, in addition to operationalizing clinical research protocols. The Center space spans 11,650 square feet of reconfigurable and flexible testing space that easily conforms to a variety of settings. | |
New England Deaconess Association |
Contact: Jenny Baldassarre |
| Deaconess Abundant Life Communities is the first senior living organization to join the network. They have the ability to offer a consulting and testing atmosphere for new technology. Deaconess looks forward to sharing the expertise of some of the Commonwealth’s most knowledgeable seniors, their families, and their staff, with diverse backgrounds. They are mission driven to provide quality, purpose, and graceful aging to the seniors that live and age in place throughout their community through their continuum. They serve a varied population with simple to complex medical health conditions that would benefit from inspiring and trialing new technologies. Deaconess is passionate about empowering older adults through programs and new technologies. The companies that will work with Deaconess Abundant Life Communities will have access to their best resources, their people, and will be able to focus on user experience and feedback for confirmed efficacy and future development. | |
Point32Health |
Contact: Jason Parent |
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Point32Health, one of the largest plans in New England, brings depth and breadth across their payer, consulting, clinical (medical, pharmacy, genetics) and broader industry experience. Their leadership is deeply dedicated to innovation and are committed to sharing learnings, making connections, and building relationships with the startups in this program. |
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PracticePoint at WPI |
Contact: PracticePoint |
| Worcester Polytechnic Institute's PracticePoint is a membership-based research, development, and commercialization alliance founded to advance healthcare technologies. This facility brings together a community of research institutions, healthcare providers, and companies to work collaboratively on new technologies and incorporate them quickly into commercially viable products. Companies partnering with PracticePoint have access to state of the art equipment, clinical partners within WPI’s ecosystem, and WPI researchers and experts. | |
TechSpring @ Baystate Health |
Contact: Joe Diver |
| TechSpring serves as a bridge between digital health innovators and Baystate Health. TechSpring offers product development acceleration services in a real healthcare environment. Once TechSpring creates alignment with appropriate Baystate stakeholders, innovators have full access to the assets of Baystate Health, a 12,500 employee integrated delivery network. For five years they have served in a match making capacity, linking passionate problems from Baystate Health's leadership to corresponding digital health solutions in the marketplace. | |
UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences |
Contact: Andrew Vinard umasscores@umass.edu | 413-577-4582 |
| The UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences translates fundamental research into innovative product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being. IALS offers more than 30 Core Facilities, available to both internal and external users enabling faculty, students, and industry collaborators to access a broad array of equipment to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and product candidates more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding. The facilities include a state-of-the-art testbed for performing mobile health experiments at scale, the Center for Human Health and Performance, a roll-to-roll fabrication and processing facility, and leasable research laboratory space. | |
UMass Lowell |
Contact: Mary Ann Picard |
| UMass Lowell, both through its robust Core Research Facility and M2D2, its incubator program for emerging life sciences startups, is able to translate fundamental research into innovative products and technologies. Through physical space, resources, services and human capital, UMass Lowell delivers benefits to healthcare. UMass Lowell and M2D2 offer 10 Core Facilities with over 100 instruments, lab space and services. These are available to both internal and external users enabling faculty, students, and many industry collaborators to access a broad array of equipment and human capital to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and products more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding. | |
UMass Chan Medical School |
Contact: Nathaniel Hafer |
| The UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science (UMCCTS) leverages the strong scientific environment of UMass with the clinical strengths of its health system partners to build an ecosystem that transcends traditional departmental and organizational boundaries and encourages collaborative problem-solving with communities and across historically siloed disciplines such as the biological, physical, computational, and engineering sciences. UMCCTS can provide facilitated access for inventors and entrepreneurs to 50 research cores at UMMS and four primary validation environments: the Data Science Core (with the UMMS Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences), the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center, the interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation, and D3Health. | |
Sandbox Tools
Sandbox Tools provide a technical service for digital health companies to test and validate their products and services, but unlike sandboxes, they do not actively consult with and guide the development of digital health companies. Companies are encouraged to learn more and work with sandbox tools, but projects with sandbox tools are not eligible for funding through the MeHI Sandbox Grant Program.
1up Health |
Contact: Khristina Butenko |
| The 1upHealth Digital Sandbox provides digital health apps with live access to medical records for over 280 million patients in Massachusetts and across the US via their network of over 10,000 hospitals and health centers. Any developer can get up and running with 1upHealth’s Digital Sandbox for free, allowing over 280 million patients to authorize access to share their full medical records in seconds to digital health apps. In addition, the 1upHealth Digital Sandbox includes free population-level access to over 1.2 million patient records generated synthetically to accelerate development for healthcare systems, health insurance, and digital health applications. | |