MGH Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation Needs Ideas About Rapid Testing Solutions for Primary Care - Nov 2nd Deadline

To: Primary Care Clinicians and AdministratorsFrom: The MGH Stoeckle Center for Primary Care InnovationSubject: We need your ideas about rapid testing solutions for primary care! What more would you like to be able to do in your primary care practice that you can’t do today? We would like your help in defining unmet clinical needs in primary care that could benefit from “point-of-care” (POC) technologies. To capture your ideas and opinions, we have created a brief survey to help us prioritize and meet those clinical needs. Please login to the CIMIT/Stoeckle Center website at https://cimitconnect.induct.no/welcome.aspx to complete the survey so that we can get engineering teams working on solutions.To give you a sense of what we are looking for, imagine a primary care practice where in-office test results arrive as quickly and seamlessly as a search on Google maps, thus eliminating unnecessary steps and delays; or a practice where selected testing and self-monitoring capabilities are available in the home for patient self-management. Such POC technologies may already be familiar to you; examples include urine strips testing, rapid strep throat tests, blood glucose measurement, pregnancy testing, and fecal occult testing.Defined as medical testing at or near the site of patient care (office or home), POC technologies are convenient and user-friendly information-sharing tools and medical devices. They deliver trusted information in real-time, increasing the likelihood that patient, physician, and care team can make immediate clinical management decisions.CIMIT (The Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology), in collaboration with the MGH Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation, is creating a Point-of-Care Technology Research Network, funded by the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Over a five-year period, engineering labs will be selected from across the country to develop point-of-care technology solutions to the clinical needs identified by the primary care community. For example, this year, one of the six funded teams is developing a microchip for cheap, rapid measurement of complete blood counts; another is working on a technique to distinguish between bacterial, viral, and fungal infections.How important are these solutions to your practice? What else would you like to be able to do?Again, please share your ideas by logging into the CIMIT/Stoeckle Center website at https://cimitconnect.induct.no/welcome.aspx. Deadline to submit ideas is Friday, November 2nd.Thank you very much for your time and ideas!