The Challenge
We found a proven need by innovators in our system for formalized support and programming to pursue their ideas.
The Solution
The iSolve Awards supported innovators with $25k in funding and six months of support from the Springboard team.
Project Partners—
Kraton Corporation; Mass General Physicians Organization (MGPO)
Services
Design Research, Prototyping, Practical Implementation Support, Measurement & Impact
Year
2022
Specials Thanks to—
Karim Benali, MD, MSc; Carl Berke, PhD; Aya Caldwell; Christiana Iyasere, MD, MBA; Erin McKenna, MBA, MS; Jim Miller, JD, MPA
Defining the Challenge
The Springboard Studio launched its ‘WeSolve’ sprints to serve as collective problem-solving spaces for providers, staff and patients. The WeSolve sprints’ themes were pre-determined based on a challenge identified by leadership. As we engaged folks in WeSolve sprints, we noticed there were many individuals and small teams who had ideas to solve different challenges, but did not know where to turn to move their idea forward. We asked ourselves: how might we engage these individual innovators to nurture their ideas outside of a WeSolve sprint? From there, iSolve was born. Not long after that, we held an RFP open to anyone at Mass General who had an idea to make healthcare more user-friendly. We selected five stellar teams (out of 47 applications!) addressing a wide range of healthcare challenges with diverse solutions—from care re-design opportunities to hardware innovations to digital solutions.
The iSolve Awards 2022
The Springboard Studio provided up to $25k in funding per team, along with product development support. Because teams came into the program at different stages in the product development process, the Springboard team offered tailored support including: project management support, measuring impact of innovations, conducting interviews and focus groups with end-users and stakeholders, producing marketing materials, and more.
After six months, the program wrapped with our iSolve Demo Day where teams presented the progress of their innovations and met their fellow iSolve Award cohort members. Learn about the teams below:
Representatives from the iSolve teams celebrating with the Springboard team at our inaugural iSolve Awards Demo Day where teams presented the progress made during the program.
By the Numbers—
5
iSolve Award
Winners
47
RFP applications
received
6
Months of
supports provided
Community Care in Reach (CCiR)
Team members: Priya Sarin Gupta, MD, MPH; Craig Regis, MPH; Elsie Tavares, MD, MPH
“The idea behind this mobile health van is to bring care directly to the people. We meet people where they are at, literally, in the communities that they live in,” said Priya Sarin Gupta, MD, MPH. During the iSolve program, the CCiR team explored opportunities to scale and expand their addiction services program provided through their mobile health van.
Team members: Miho Tanaka, MD; Michele Gagne Wertz
“I had a seven-year journey of pain after giving birth because I did not prepare my body for birth and I did not recover properly,” said Core2U co-founder, Michele Gagne Wertz, who realized the need for information about preventing long-term injuries postpartum. Together with Miho Tanaka, MD, they have been developing a digital support system aimed at providing evidence-based content for safe exercise for pregnant and postpartum women. During the iSolve program, they collected user feedback, developed a pilot, and built out their innovation team.
Disati Medical
Team members: Ryan Carroll, MD, MPH; Sope Eweje; Zoe Wolszon, MBA
Ryan Carroll, MD, MPH, said, “I spent most of my career standing over children who are in respiratory distress, wondering ‘How do I get them home to their parents faster and healthier?” Dr. Carroll used his clinical experience in the PICU to help develop Disati Medical, a tool to objectively measure what providers have been measuring subjectively with their eyes. Through iSolve, they developed new prototypes for testing and filed their patent.
Virtual Group Visits
Team members: Anna Baggett; Barbara Canada, MBA; Jacob Mirsky, MD, MA
Jacob Mirsky, MD, MA, spoke of shifting the primary care model—“We are thinking about moving away from a primary care where we’re looking at a patient saying ‘what’s the matter with you?’ And instead we’re asking patients ‘what matters to you?’” During the iSolve program, the VGV team made great strides in increasing their Virtual Group offerings and capacity, with updated and expanded marketing, and in gathering feedback from their program providers.
Wello
Team members: Valerie Dobiesz, MD; Todd Jaffe, MD; Michael Loesche, MD, PHD
“We noticed this truly every single day in the ER—people are really going out of their way to stay late to help with a patient,” said Todd Jaffe, MD. So he and Michael Loesche, MD, PHD, came up with Wello—an app for frontline providers to give shout-outs to their colleagues. While in the iSolve program, they made wireframes a reality through working with a developer and were excited to expand access of their app to more frontline workers.
Impact
At Springboard, we believe the best solutions come from those closest to the challenges and the iSolve innovators proved this through their thoughtful needs identification and tailored solutions, aiming to make healthcare more user-friendly. While the challenges being addressed, and the solutions to do so, varied greatly across the iSolve cohort, each team was able to advance their idea through design-thinking methodology, continuing to refine and iterate from divergent and convergent thinking and end-user feedback.
