There are ten sandboxes approved under the Mass Digital Health Sandbox Program, providing a variety of testing and validation environments. The program is administered by the Massachusetts eHealth Institute and advised by an Independent Steering Committee.
Carelon | Contact: Spencer Ward |
| The Carelon Digital Data Sandbox connects people and data. Questions and answers. Problems and solutions. And it’s all powered by one of the world’s largest certified de-identified healthcare data sets of commercially insured unique lives. The Digital Data Sandbox offers approved users the ability to discover insights, test and train algorithms, and validate solutions with Carelon experts, then deploy those solutions in the real world. Together, we’re solving the most complex problems in healthcare. | |
Lahey Innovation Hub | Contact: Richard Meiklejohn |
| Lahey Innovation Hub is the strategic engine for translating novel concepts into measurable clinical and operational impact. The hub provides a structured pathway for innovation, connecting the real-world challenges faced by their clinicians with transformative solutions from both internal innovators and external partners. The hub offers a unique validation environment for startups and industry collaborators. By partnering with the Hub, innovators gain direct access to Lahey’s world-class clinical experts, complex operational workflows and diverse clinical environments. Lahey facilitates the co-development and rigorous testing of new technologies in a controlled, real-world setting, with a focus on solving pressing needs such as surgical efficiency, virtual nursing and AI-driven diagnostics. The Lahey Innovation Hub aims to be the premier partner for innovators who are ready to move beyond theory and build practical, scalable and patient-centered solutions for the future of health care. | |
Mass General Brigham Emerging Technologies and Solutions (MGBETS)
| Contact: Chen Cao |
| Mass General Brigham Emerging Technologies and Solutions (MGBETS) uses digital health technology to provide patient-centered, efficient and safe healthcare. MGBETS evaluates and advances ideas from Mass General Brigham clinicians, researchers and staff and builds digital health infrastructures around technologies that meet hospital challenges. MGBETS strives to become the collaborator of choice in digital healthcare. Through an innovative partnership model at Mass General Brigham, start-ups and industry partners can work with MGBETS to build and validate products in clinical settings. The companies that partner with MGBETS will have access to researchers, clinicians and other staff as well as the expanding ecosystem of digital health initiatives and infrastructure at Mass General Brigham. | |
Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers | Contact: Linda Naval |
| The Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers (Mass League) supports 50 community health centers across Massachusetts through training, technical assistance and advocacy. As both a Primary Care Association (PCA) and a Health Center Controlled Network (HCCN), Mass League bridges technology and clinical operations to help digital health innovators understand and support the safety net. We offer access to aggregated, de-identified data from 26 health centers for AI development, interoperability testing with leading EHRs, real-world workflow validation and user feedback from frontline staff and executives. Additional value includes group purchasing power through our Commonwealth Purchasing Group and matchmaking with CHCs for high-impact pilots. | |
Medical Device Interoperability & Cybersecurity Program at MGH | Contact: Colin Gorman cgorman@mgh.harvard.edu |
| The Medical Device Plug-and-Play Interoperability & Cybersecurity (MD PnP) Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) is a nationally recognized leader in research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E) of medical device and digital health technologies, focusing on system safety, interoperability, and cybersecurity. The MD PnP Program has established a sophisticated virtual hospital testbed that can be efficiently reconfigured to emulate various clinical and IT environments. The testbed consists of diverse medical devices, mechanical and electronic patient simulators, medical gas supplies, extensive and flexible computing and networking resources, data acquisition and storage, and cyber-range. The MD PnP Program provides a range of services to medical device and digital health companies that leverage their testbed to expedite the RDT&E cycle of their products, including rapid product prototyping, safety assurance and product de-risking, standard-driven testing to produce regulatory acceptable evidence, pre-deployment integration testing, threat modeling and cybersecurity impact/mitigation analysis. | |
MITRE | Contact: Russ Graves BridgeSandbox@mitre.org |
| MITRE’s mission-driven teams are dedicated to solving problems for a safer world. Through public-private partnerships and federally funded R&D centers, MITRE works across government and in partnership with industry to discover new possibilities, create unexpected opportunities, and lead by pioneering together for the public good to bring innovative ideas into existence. Within this sandbox, MITRE offers access to domain and technical expertise, open source software tools and artifacts, and unique test facilities to lower the barrier for access to data, improve healthcare interoperability, and increase the security of medical devices in care settings. | |
MIT IMES Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) | Contact: Tatiana Urman tlevko@mit.edu |
| The Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR) is a GCP, multidisciplinary research network supporting cutting-edge research from concept to clinical translation. Their goal is to support the clinical research lifecycle by providing resources to support protocol design, regulatory compliance, clinical consultation, iterative design, oversight and participant monitoring, in addition to operationalizing clinical research protocols. The Center space spans 11,650 square feet of reconfigurable and flexible testing space that easily conforms to a variety of settings. | |
New England Deaconess Association | Contact: Jenny Baldassarre jbaldassarre@nedeaconess.org |
| Deaconess Abundant Life Communities is the first senior living organization to join the network. They have the ability to offer a consulting and testing atmosphere for new technology. Deaconess looks forward to sharing the expertise of some of the Commonwealth’s most knowledgeable seniors, their families, and their staff, with diverse backgrounds. They are mission driven to provide quality, purpose, and graceful aging to the seniors that live and age in place throughout their community through their continuum. They serve a varied population with simple to complex medical health conditions that would benefit from inspiring and trialing new technologies. Deaconess is passionate about empowering older adults through programs and new technologies. The companies that will work with Deaconess Abundant Life Communities will have access to their best resources, their people, and will be able to focus on user experience and feedback for confirmed efficacy and future development. | |
PracticePoint at WPI | Contact: PracticePoint |
| Worcester Polytechnic Institute's PracticePoint is a membership-based research, development, and commercialization alliance founded to advance healthcare technologies. This facility brings together a community of research institutions, healthcare providers, and companies to work collaboratively on new technologies and incorporate them quickly into commercially viable products. Companies partnering with PracticePoint have access to state of the art equipment, clinical partners within WPI’s ecosystem, and WPI researchers and experts. | |
UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences | Contact: Michael Busa |
| The UMass Amherst Institute for Applied Life Sciences translates fundamental research into innovative product candidates, technologies, and services that deliver benefits to human health and well-being. IALS offers more than 30 Core Facilities, available to both internal and external users enabling faculty, students, and industry collaborators to access a broad array of equipment to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and product candidates more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding. The facilities include a state-of-the-art testbed for performing mobile health experiments at scale, the Center for Human Health and Performance, a roll-to-roll fabrication and processing facility, and leasable research laboratory space. | |
UMass Lowell | Contact: Mary Ann Picard |
| UMass Lowell, both through its robust Core Research Facility and M2D2, its incubator program for emerging life sciences startups, is able to translate fundamental research into innovative products and technologies. Through physical space, resources, services and human capital, UMass Lowell delivers benefits to healthcare. UMass Lowell and M2D2 offer 10 Core Facilities with over 100 instruments, lab space and services. These are available to both internal and external users enabling faculty, students, and many industry collaborators to access a broad array of equipment and human capital to enhance their R&D capabilities, address both basic and translational questions, deliver technologies and products more rapidly, and become more competitive in obtaining state, federal, foundation, and private funding. | |
UMass Chan Medical School | Contact: Nathaniel Hafer |
| The UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science (UMCCTS) leverages the strong scientific environment of UMass with the clinical strengths of its health system partners to build an ecosystem that transcends traditional departmental and organizational boundaries and encourages collaborative problem-solving with communities and across historically siloed disciplines such as the biological, physical, computational, and engineering sciences. UMCCTS can provide facilitated access for inventors and entrepreneurs to 50 research cores at UMMS and four primary validation environments: the Data Science Core (with the UMMS Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences), the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center, the interprofessional Center for Experiential Learning and Simulation, and D3Health. | |