On Thursday, September 28, Brigham and Women’s Innovation Hub (iHub) speaker series met at the hospital’s building of Transformative Medicine to discuss their digital health innovation, both internally and with local-area startups. Speaker Adam Landman, Chief Information Officer of the BWH, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and attending emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, had an open discussion with Laurance Stuntz, the Director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech, or MeHI. They discussed the current climate for health care startups collaborating with major academic medical centers like BWH.
Landman explained that the iHub is interested in collaborating with health care startups from PULSE@MassChallenge and elsewhere. He explained that one of iHub’s key missions is “to really accelerate the innovator’s ideals, and sometimes that involves matching with industry partners to accelerate idea formation.” For clinicians and staff within the hospital who have an idea that fulfills a clinical need, iHub provides a website where they can explain their idea and potentially be paired with external industry leaders. He further iterated that iHub’s second major goal is “to recognize challenges within the hospital and pair with startups to help solve those problems.”