BOSTON (WHDH) - “I think we can discharge and plan on continuing the symptom management that you’re already doing,” a medical professional at Mass General Hospital told Linda via a virtual appointment.
Recovering from a bad bout of COVID, Linda was able to get the news on her couch at home, not in a hospital bed, thanks to technology that could one day change how everyone receives medical treatment.
Linda’s symptoms, including a bad fever, were serious enough that the MGH employee could have been hospitalized. Instead, she is being medically monitored at home with equipment put in place by the hospital’s Healthcare Transformation Lab.
“I had a sense that I was always being watched and that was good,” Linda told 7NEWS.
The lab’s mission: find ways to use technology to revolutionize healthcare, then work with doctors and patients to put it into practice.
“We wanted to give physicians an option to be physician innovators – they could actually take care of patients and come up with new ideas to take care of patients more efficiently, more effectively, more comfortably,” said Dr. Eric Isselbacher, Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab.
The Ansin family, the owners of Channel 7, are helping Dr. Isselbacher with that goal. They have given $2 million and created an endowed chair at MGH, funding the doctor’s work.
The donation honors their late father, Ed Ansin, and carries on his commitment to caring for our community.
“(It’s) literally close to my dad’s heart,” said Sunbeam Television Corporation CEO Andy Ansin. “Yes, the connection with Dr. Isselbacher – he was his cardiovascular doctor and then he really was very intrigued with everything the Transformation Lab was doing.”
“He was very cutting-edge in television, he was very cutting-edge in real estate, and he was always looking for the next cutting-edge technology to support,” said Sunbeam Television Corporation Co-President James Ansin.
Dr. Isselbacher and his colleagues imagine a future where more and more patients will be able to receive life-saving care outside of the hospital. They are already testing handheld devices that use X-rays to gather patient information.
“You can see their actual cardiac activity, the electrical activity of their heart,” said Dr. Jared Conley, Associate Director of the MGH Healthcare Transformation Lab.
Dr. Isselbacher said the Ansin endowment allows his team to spend more time imagining the future of healthcare.
“Funds for this kind of work don’t come from patient care revenue and they don’t come from department overhead,” Dr. Isselbacher said. “It’s very hard to allocate resources to innovation. So what this chair does is it frees up time to be able to dedicate to this work now and in the future. It’s a very generous gift and it will free up a considerable amount of time to devote to innovation.”
Innovation – a common goal for MGH and 7NEWS.
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