HealthTech
HealthTech
The MassChallenge HealthTech community comprises of physicians, healthcare professionals, scientists, policy leaders, and business mentors all working together to improve health care through entrepreneurship.
From biotechnology to patient communications, from advanced diagnostics to hospital infrastructure, the goal is to progress human health and wellness, and the health care practice, in powerful, equitable ways.
MassChallenge has partnered with organizations like AARP, MassGeneral Hospital, Mass Mutual, MITRE, even White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. With these partners, MassChallenge brings health care’s most promising startups together with powerful leaders to create opportunities to affect some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.
HealthTech-Related Programs
AgeTech
Accelerating senior living technologies to transform the aging population lives by leveraging innovative technologies and make their life easier with more tech-connected solutions.
The Bio-convergence Track (Israel Earl-Stage)
Aims to help startups combining science and engineering in search of creative solutions that will transform the human condition for the better through deep-technologies.
The DisasterTech Track (IL Early Stage Program)
Tackling the mitigation and prevention of large-scale disasters, including earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, fires, etc., as well as the support of post-disaster efforts such as communications, clean water, clean-up, and humanitarian aid.
HealthTech Track (Switzerland’s Earl-Stage)
Leverages Switzerland’s strong heritage in med-tech, life sciences, social-care and education to help startups improve their propositions in this sector.
HealthTech Challenge
Designed to attract innovative, mid to late stage, digital health companies transforming the healthcare space with solutions or products that leverage cutting edge technology to solve for complex issues that span multiple disciplines within the healthcare sector, including Maternal Health, Health Equity, AI/ ML , Insurance, Reproductive Health, AgeTech, Pediatrics, Behavorial Health, and Operations & Logistics.
Health Equity Initiative
Since 2020, health equity has continued to be a leading priority across our digital health community of providers, government agencies, payers, pharmaceutical companies, startups, and other health care organizations.
Maternal-Child Health Equity Challenge
Designed to identify two existing innovative market solutions that if adopted and paired with corresponding policy actions, would enhance equity in maternal and infant care for underserved populations across federal health and healthcare programs.
The Med-tech Track (Israel Early Stage)
Designed for the e-health and medical devices fields, coming up with ideas to solve medical issues and help millions of people around the world.
MITRE Social Innovation Mentorship Program
Designed to lower barriers for under-represented founders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The industry focus is on startups with solutions in Advanced Manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), BlueTech, Cybersecurity, or Digital Health.
PandemicX Accelerator
In 2022 MassChallenge the US Department of Health and Human Services collaborated on a one-of-a-kind project set to support startups working to eliminate disparities and tackle drivers of inequity exacerbated by COVID-19.
Accelerated Technologies
Past programs have focused on sourcing startups innovating with the following tech:
Partner Spotlight
MassChallenge with MassMutual
In 2019, one of the strategic challenges MassMutual identified by collaborating with MassChallenge was accessing electronic health data. After key stakeholders met with 18 selected HealthTech startups during matchmaking, MassMutual identified 1upHealth as one of the startups they had synergy with.
1upHealth is an inclusive data platform for patients, providers, researchers and app developers to automate data integrations with health systems and wearable devices within 1upHealth’s EMR integrated application.
Since the end of the 2019 program, MassMutual has continued their relationship with 1upHealth. When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the company experienced challenges obtaining the customer health data needed as part of the underwriting process for new life insurance policies as the availability of paramedical examiners became scarce. MassMutual leveraged 1upHealth’s technology during an engagement earlier this year to access medical data from external health systems in a HIPAA-compliant way, which allowed the underwriting process to move forward without in-person exams for some customers to get the life insurance they needed to protect themselves and their loved ones.
In addition to their relationship with 1upHealth, MassMutual forged relationships with three other HealthTech startups during the 2019 and 2020 programs which the company is still keeping in close contact with for future opportunities to partner.
Pixm – Pixm is the world’s first award-winning, anti-phishing protection that uses deep learning computer vision to detect phishing attacks in real-time at the point of click.
Posh – Posh is a Boston-based, conversational AI startup that enables developers to efficiently build and deploy conversational agents and text and voice channels.
UDoTest – UDoTest’s SaaS platform designs and personalizes an at-home disease testing kit and collaborates with insurers, physicians, and labs.
From a broader perspective, MassMutual has been able to strengthen the Boston HealthTech ecosystem as innovation and collaboration leaders.
“Our partnership with MassChallenge over the last three years has been impactful, with clear mutual growth opportunities that emerged with startups in the FinTech and HealthTech programs,” said Mike Fanning, Head of MassMutual U.S. “MassChallenge gives us access to hundreds of talented, forward-thinking entrepreneurs who are solving real business challenges. 1upHealth is just one example of a strong partnership we established that led to leveraging the startup’s technology in our underwriting process for some clients during COVID-19. We look forward to our continued engagement on both programs and having MassChallenge housed at our new Boston Seaport office.”