MassChallenge HealthTech combines the power of innovation and entrepreneurship to advance scalable digital solutions by fostering collaborations between our corporate partners and startups. By bringing health care’s most promising startups together with the sector’s strongest brands, we create opportunities to innovate and solve some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.

MassChallenge HealthTech and our industry-leading partners are dedicated, now more than ever, to accelerate the pace of innovation. We are seeking groundbreaking startups to join us in our efforts to solve health issues like health equity, chronic disease and pain management, maternal health and wellness, and administrative burden. If you are a startup founder looking to disrupt the status quo and make meaningful change, join our global network to collaboratively solve health challenges.

CHALLENGE PARTNERS

Boston Children’s Hospital’s Innovation & Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA) is helping shape the future of pediatric healthcare by incubating new technologies, collaborating with industry leaders & novel startups, and deploying digital health solutions across the enterprise.

For 2023, IDHA continues to focus their efforts on innovations that support unmet needs of the pediatric patient population. This year, IDHA is particularly interested in collaborating with AI/ML startups that can help us decrease administrative task burden on staff and help provide a consistent, connected care experience for patients and families both on campus at Boston Children’s Hospital and at home. Additionally, IDHA is still exploring solutions that help to extend pediatric care beyond hospital walls via remote patient monitoring (RPM), care at home, and remote diagnostics. IDHA believes that a robust and integrated RPM portfolio can positively impact health equity across experience, access, and outcomes.

At MassMutual our unwavering focus is – and will continue to be – helping people secure their future and protect the ones they love. We’re a mutual company, which means we’re owned by our policyowners – so everything we do is focused on our customers. We provide holistic financial solutions, guidance, and education in the way our customers want to engage with us, on their terms – whether in person, online, at the workplace or over the phone. We offer a wide range of financial products and services, including life insurance, protection products, retirement, and investment solutions to help people achieve their financial goals.

We continue to be focused on underwriting efficiency, customer experience. How can we challenge the underwriting process by using alternative data sources, methods, and processes to better assess risk while also doing it faster and less invasive for customers.

Our first challenge is to bring more relevant data into the underwriting process to allow for more access to affordable life insurance. For example, we want to better leverage biometrics and wearables data in the life and DI insurance process, during underwriting and/or post issue. We are exploring solutions that allow our team to (a) aggregate and normalize data across available devices and platforms and (b) translate those data aggregates into something reliable and beneficial for insurance purposes in a private and secure way?

Our second challenge is to generate more relevant health data that can be used by life and disability insurers prior to a specific underwriting process so that new data does not need to be secured each time. The challenge with many data sources today is that the data is incomplete for life and disability underwriting and has gaps. How can we generate and secure additional data in a useful format for the life and disability insurance space? Can the healthcare industry collect data in a way that is more useful in a life and disability insurance context?

Our third challenge relates to comprehensively assessing risk while also making the process fast, frictionless, and non-invasive for our clients and their advisors. The process of having labs drawn and meeting with a paramedical examiner is a tough hurdle for the insurance industry; we can make this process simpler for clients to ensure they are getting the insurance coverage they need. The goal of this challenge is to remove the invasive process in the life cycle of the insurance application and get people insured faster. How can we fill gaps in data sets, secure data more expediently, helps us use and assess the data more accurately, etc?

MassMutual is an excellent partner for startups – we are passionate about innovation, have significant knowledgeable resources available and are committed to help startups grow. Our track record over the past four years with the MassChallenge FinTech and HealthTech programs led to more than 45% of our partnerships turning into engagements.

The United States faces an unprecedented maternal morbidity and mortality crisis with a maternal death rate that is significantly higher than other developed countries and includes pronounced racial disparities.

For example, black women are nearly 3 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. And black babies are twice as likely to die before their first birthday than white babies.  Similarly, American Indian and Alaskan Native (AI/AN) women have a pregnancy-related mortality rate two times that of white women with 41% of AI/AN women not receiving the recommended number of prenatal visits during pregnancy.

This situation is further exacerbated by the fact that these at-risk populations must navigate across disparate, separate federal and state programs to access necessary clinical and social support services. Including the Medicaid health insurance assistance program which covers 42% of all births in the United States.

Given this landscape of maternal mortality in the United States, how does your solution help address these inequities and improve the overall health of black and AI/AN women who are pregnant (through the post-partum period) and their children up to age 3?

Point32Health is a leading health and wellbeing organization, delivering an even-better health care experience to everyone in our communities. Building on the quality, nonprofit heritage of our founding organizations, Tufts Health Plan and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, we leverage our experience to help people find their version of healthier living through a broad range of health plans and tools that make navigating health and wellbeing easier. And we work to guide and empower people by bringing together wide-ranging partners and perspectives to create new approaches that make a real difference for our community, our industry, and our 2.2 million members across New England.

Point32Health is charged with delivering pace-setting innovation that advances health care beyond the expected by creating new ideas that improve health outcomes, increase affordability, and help more people. Spearheaded by the Clinical Innovation Team at Point32Health, we actively seek collaboration opportunities to gather real-world evidence, build partnerships within the innovation community, conduct research, and promote innovation acceleration. We are interested in innovative collaborations that can assist us in addressing some of our biggest challenges.

Some of these challenges include: 

• Behavioral Health: The need for innovative solutions to address behavioral health has never been greater. Solutions around substance use disorders in all populations are critical. Another key area is suicide prevention in the adolescent and young adult populations.
• Chronic Pain Management and Pain Management: Within this challenge, we are looking for solutions in all populations that address Diabetes, Hypertension, Asthma, and Obesity.
• Reproductive Health: Given the poor outcomes and increased maternal mortality rates, this is an area of focus. In particular, areas of interest include prenatal care, postpartum care, and labor/delivery.

The strong program management, analytical, clinical, and diversity in professional backgrounds within Point32Health creates a perfect formula for evaluating equitable and impactful health solutions. Beyond the depth and breadth of the Clinical Innovation Team’s payer and clinical/industry experience, we have access to and collaborate with the subject matter experts in the health insurance industry. Lastly, we have an extensive relationship with the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute (HPHCI).

COMMUNITY PARTNER

The Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity & Inclusion at the City of Boston pushes forward initiatives focusing on sustainable community and economic development, while fostering inclusion and equity for all Bostonians. The City of Boston believes working with startups can provide innovative solutions to city challenges. We look forward to amplifying their work and creating connections with industry experts and creating opportunities for partnership across our city offices.

This year we present the challenge of finding a partner who can leverage the power of innovation and collaboration to help us address persistent inequities in healthcare that impact underserved populations. With the help of community and healthcare stakeholders and partners like MassChallenge, the City of Boston would like to improve quality of life for all Boston residents.

Mass General Brigham (MGB) is an integrated academic healthcare system, one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations, and a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. We connect a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. As a non-profit organization that is committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community, we want to support our digital innovation community for the benefit of patients everywhere.

Coming together as a system, Mass General Brigham is interested in solutions that will decrease both the cost of care for the population we serve and decrease administrative burden for our staff. Specifically, we are looking at innovations in the areas of intelligent automation, home hospital, risk stratification, decreasing length of stay, virtual care, clinical documentation, in-basket messaging, nurse staffing/scheduling, and call center automation. We are eager to collaborate with the MassChallenge community of innovators.