While some patients were able to afford life-saving services, Mosenthal told MassLive others could not receive any care, whether it be because of a disability, chronic homelessness or poverty.
“It’s clear we need to transform healthcare in the United States,” Mosenthal said. “It has never been more clearer since COVID.”
To achieve this “transformation” proposed by Mosenthal, UMass Chan Medical School and Lahey Hospital and Medical Center announced on Thursday its plan to launch a quantitative science research hub focused on researching different uses of digital medicine and health science.
According to the Digital Medicine Society, digital medicine is defined as a field of medicine involving different technologies for intervention in human health.
Mosenthal told MassLive that both UMass-Chan and Lahey Hospital will use the hub and their research to study methods that could reduce healthcare disparities. The institutions will make those findings public for healthcare providers and others in the medical field.
She said faculty and students from UMass-Chan in Worcester, and Lahey Hospital in Burlington, will engage with different communities throughout eastern Massachusetts; and collect data on what forms of healthcare are accessible based on several data points, including income, transportation and housing.
Mosenthal said the first task for the newly launched hub is to hire an associate dean of research — a hiring process she estimates will last until this fall.
“It really is about improving real-world healthcare,” Mosenthal said. “It doesn’t really matter if we have great healthcare if no one can access it.”
As part of the agreement, Mosenthal said Lahey Hospital will create an institute for healthcare delivery science, where research on digital medicine, population health, and healthcare delivery will be conducted.
She also said that the research and results from the institute will be available to staff and faculty of both schools.
“We already have the research at UMass,” Mosenthal explained. “This will expand our research further.”
The partnership between UMass-Chan and Lahey Hospital dates to December 2022, when the two administrations unveiled a new medical research campus in Burlington.
The campus was built to add more physicians in the United States, which could face a shortfall in 10 years based on a prediction made by the Association of American Medical Colleges.
As part of the partnership, a new curriculum known as the UMass Chan-Lahey track, called LEAD@Lahey, was launched in 2023.
A UMass-Chan spokesperson told MassLive the first students who will study under the LEAD@Lahey curriculum will begin in August 2024.
Mosenthal said the students will play a crucial role in helping understand the disparities of healthcare in Massachusetts and hopes they will also help find ways to make healthcare more accessible for every resident in the Bay State and the United States.
“We will be working on this together,” she said. “We need to know what works and what doesn’t work in healthcare.”
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