Big Boston medical centers seem to like taking digital healthcare into their own hands.

For example, three years ago, Boston Children’s Hospital launched its Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator as a means to research and launch digital healthcare initiatives inside the hospital and help to fund and grow promising startup companies.

In particular, Boston Children’s has been testing programs such as voice activation in several pilots since 2016. For example, in the intensive care unit where a clinician’s hands are scrubbed and gloved, voice activation helps nurses ask for help and information, such as “Who is the charge nurse on 7 South?” or using voice to access care guidelines and protocols.

“

—these range from apps to systemic or operational changes to AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms—our mission is to shape the future of healthcare and extend our reach around the globe,” Carla Small, senior director of Boston Children Hospital’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator, tells Internet Health Management.

But now Boston Children’s isn’t the only health system in town with a digital healthcare center. This morning Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center launched the Health Technology Exploration Center to research, evaluate and launch new initiatives for digital and mobile health that include the Internet of Things, telemedicine, machine learning and other emerging technology.

The center will be headed up by Dr. John Halamka, Beth Israel’s chief information officer and a professor at Harvard Medical School. “Patients today are accustomed to having a world of information at their fingertips,” Halamka says. “The work of this new center will help expand our ability to use technology to evaluate and share all types of data with both clinicians and patients to improve the care they receive and the delivery of that care.”

Beth Israel has some significant startup funding to work with: Halamka already leads a $50 million healthcare information sharing project in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Initially, the center will be staffed by 10 clinicians and related employees and will take on projects looking at blockchain, the IoT, artificial intelligence, telemedicine and machine learning.

“Now is the time to think more expansively about how diverse technological tools can improve all aspects of healthcare from clinical advances to communications and medical decision-making,” says Beth Israel CEO Kevin Tabb.

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