Healthcare Lab Teams' Presentations Address Real-World Challenges

On January 31, 2025, 7 Healthcare Lab teams presented their recommendations to the challenges posed by their host organizations. This year’s hosts ran the gamut from healthcare providers (Boston Children’s Hospital, Hartford Healthcare, Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, Mass General Brigham) to large and small companies (Novartis, Abionic, and Surgicure).

Healthcare Lab is a required course for the Healthcare Certificate; the team project is the culmination of a semester-long engagement with an outside company or organization. The team members get insights about real-world challenges from working with senior healthcare leaders. They aim to offer actionable recommendations to help organizations make progress on a critical issue.

Similar to previous years’ project presentations, each team had 60 seconds to present their work and pitch to tempt audience members to attend their breakout session. Audience members also voted on which pitch was the funniest, the most likely to entice visitors, and the most surprising. This year the winners, in order, were Novartis, Boston Children’s Hospital and Surgicure.

The team member who made the Novartis project pitch revealed that they made several missteps on the way to a strategy recommendation for finding a new vendor and promised to share insights so others would not make the same mistakes. Boston Children’s Hospital wanted advice for a process optimization problem. The team’s recommendation of adjustments, as well as plans for implementation, can help the neurosurgery department see more patients with shorter wait times. Surgicure’s founder and CEO, Irena King, was featured in an earlier article for the company’s first medical device. For Healthcare Lab, Surgicure asked the team to help them design a platform for identifying, acquiring, and commercializing high-quality patents in the MedTech industry.

Several of the organizations' hosts attended the presentation session and complimented the teams’ efforts. The Hartford Healthcare team worked on a project to reduce falls and were tasked with assessing and improving current protocols. Their host complimented the students, saying, “You delivered exceptional results and I am confident your findings and recommendations will contribute to future improvements and enhancements in patient safety.”

Finally, the Boston Children’s Hospital hosts were so impressed with their Healthcare Lab team that they presented the team's work at their annual retreat. They also offered one team member, who is considering medical school, an all-day shadowing opportunity to help inform their decision.

Learn more about all of the teams’ projects from their presentation posters.