Healthcare Transformation Lab

Great ideas to improve healthcare are everywhere.

The Healthcare Transformation Lab (HTL) at Mass General Hospital helps make them real.

Emerging technologies and healthcare delivery science are enabling a patient- and value- centered redesign of healthcare.

Mission

The Healthcare Transformation Lab’s founding mission is to improve the experience and value of healthcare through collaborative innovation.

Located in Boston — a hub of leading teaching hospitals, academia, technology, and start-ups — HTL sits within the Massachusetts General Hospital and collaborates with passionate people from diverse backgrounds to transform how healthcare is delivered.

Building on the Innovation Culture at MGH

MGH has a storied history of fostering medical breakthroughs to the benefit of society’s health. At the lab, we focus on capturing this innovative spirit to re-think the best experience and setting for the provision of 21st century healthcare. With the seismic move towards the home as the center of care, we continuously evaluate the current structure and process of care delivery and the opportunity for emerging technologies to impact how doctors diagnose, treat, and connect with patients–as well as how patients participate in their own care.

Our Methodology

Advances in digital health technology, combined with a focus on human-centered design, are creating the unique opportunity to re-imagine patient care — making it more continuous, coordinated and convenient. As promising ideas emerge in remote patient monitoring, telemedicine, and patient engagement, we support their development and validation and then help champion their implementation to ensure a sustainable impact on patient care.

At the core of our approach is human centered design thinking methodology where we hone-in on pain points identified by the people in the trenches doing the work every day. Using the rapid exchange and iteration of ideas and validation at every step of the design process, we ensure that new products and approaches are accurate and effective and add value. We wrap around the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology to ensure the successful implementation of ideas that move past initial prototyping.

We connect, inspire, and support passionate people from diverse backgrounds to facilitate collaboration on ways to deliver more efficient patient care and improved health outcomes. We bring clinicians, staff, entrepreneurs, and patients together to identify unmet needs. Drawing on the experience of these stakeholders we engage the expertise of engineers, entrepreneurs, and economists to develop and test promising new solutions. We strongly value our work with the startup community and established healthcare tech companies, both locally and nationally, to address pain points.

Operating within an academic medical center, we not only focus on implementing innovative projects, but also studying closely how these transformative ideas can directly affect workplace culture, teamwork, and incentives within a healthcare organization. To ensure that bright new ideas are actually put into practice we provide necessary resources and programmatic infrastructure. This in turn supports a growing culture of innovation.