Dear Colleagues,
This summer completes the fifth year of existence for the UMass Chan Program in Digital Medicine (PDM). We are excited to share a brief reflection and announce a few updates about where we are headed. We are committed to our mission of "Transforming Healthcare through Innovation in Digital Technology" and are doubling down on our core strategy of "Developing, Validating, and Deploying Technologies in the Real World." We reaffirm our conviction of serving as the bridge between research and clinical enterprises through the three pillars of Service, Research, and Education. We hope you will join our growing community and help us learn from each other as we advance our capabilities of using technologies to improve how we care for our patients and improve health of our community.

Reflection on 5 years of PDM

As a group, we have had the privilege of shepherding this effort, initially envisioned and founded by then Chair of Medicine, Dr. David McManus.

Service

A core tenet of PDM remains its orientation to supporting frontline workers with healthcare delivery innovation. Grounded in the foundational experience of collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have remained steadfast in our commitment to provide service to our clinical partners. We are proud to have supported 5 novel care at home programs, which cumulatively have cared for more than 10,000 patients in the community. We have also helped support 20 projects that focus on transforming healthcare. This work is possible because of the collaboration with our flagship clinical partner UMass Memorial Health and its relentless commitment to providing the best care for its patients.

Research

Countering the chasm between research and clinical enterprises, infamously dubbed a "house divided," we have continuously reinforced our support for service with rigorous research. We have developed new technologies and algorithms to identify diseases and risk factors using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced data science methods including a novel partnership with Boston Scientific and Virgo; validated existing technologies including external innovation through a collaboration with Morningside Ventures that has featured studies ranging from peripartum care to geriatric care and developed a first-of-its kind AI assurance lab through support from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and deployed technologies and novel care programs in routine clinical care through use of pragmatic study designs and integrated clinical trials that hold the promise of shrinking the translational gap between research and clinical practice. Along the way, PDM has curated a repository of data that includes electronic health records from 16+ digital studies that collected patient-reported outcomes and wearable device data, 100,000+ endoscopic procedures and more than 1 million ECG waveforms recorded and annotated to support development of AI algorithms.

Education

We are proud to be comprised of a dedicated team of physician-scientists, the vast majority of whom are alums of UMass Chan Medical School and embody the principle of paying it forward by empowering the next generation of leaders. Our post-graduate program has supported 14 trainees, including 6 PDM fellows. Our graduate program has supported 5 trainees, including 3 MD-PhD candidates. Notably, more than half of the trainees (10) have received support from an NIH training grant, underscoring the recognition of the merit of their science and training. The trainees have altogether published more than 40 manuscripts, including featured articles in prominent journals like Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, and Nature Digital Medicine.

Charting a course for the next 5 years

Over the past year, we engaged with healthcare providers, digital medicine researchers, institutional leaders, and trainees to identify ways we can grow as a program and enhance the impact of our efforts. A few salient themes emerged, which forms the basis of our roadmap for the next five years.

• Staying true to our mission: PDM will hyper focus on projects and initiatives that directly impact and transform healthcare delivery in real-world settings.
• Aligning with clinical partners' priorities: We will seek to develop, validate, and deploy technology solutions that address the top priorities of our clinical partners and will institute regular review of alignment of PDM's efforts with clinical partner priorities.
• Balancing art-of-the-possible with art-of-the-feasible: The PDM speaker series featured luminaries in the field such as Drs. Robert Wachter, Kristen Bibbins Domingo, John Halamka, Dimitris Bertsimas, and Bon Ku, who inspired us to dream big. We will intersperse seminars with roundtables that highlight the current state-of-the-art within the UMass community to facilitate a practical discussion of how to implement care transformation within our environment.
• Advancing together: We will continue to expand the service, research, and education efforts across departments and training programs through new partnerships with Tan Chingfen Graduate School of Nursing, Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and community workforce development partners like MassAHEC and Center for Health Impact.
• Multisectoral sandboxes: Appending the famous proverb about collaboration, we believe that in order to go "fast and far," we need to pick the right team. This includes partnerships across academic, clinical, community, industry, government, and foundations. We will pursue a sandbox that allows for rapid implementation and evaluation of digital health technologies in clinical settings through an incubator-accelerator model.

We will be announcing a series of initiatives aligned with this roadmap in the days, weeks, and months to come. If you are interested in contributing and participating in our effort, please join the PDM mailing list to stay informed. We are excited to pursue this journey together.

On Behalf of the Program in Digital Medicine Team

Apurv Soni MD PhD

Director, Program in Digital Medicine and Lead of home-based Learning Health System track in PDM

Laurel O'Connor MD ScM

Lead of mobile health track in PDM

Neil Marya MD

Lead of vision AI track in PDM

Honghuang Lin PhD

Lead of digital biomarkers and precision medicine track in PDM