Health care

Arsenal Health developed a schedule-optimization service for health care providers that analyzes scheduling and other data to predict which patients might not show up to appointments. Health-care providers can then double-book over those potential no-show patients or prioritize their outreach as needed.

Reducing wait times at the doctor’s office

MIT spinout helps health-care providers schedule patients more efficiently.

July 21, 2016

A new system that can anticipate room assignments and suggest which nurses to assign to patients for C-sections and other procedures provided satisfactory recommendations to nurses 90 percent of the time.

Robot helps nurses schedule tasks on labor floor

System from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab suggests where to move patients and who should do C-sections.

July 13, 2016

Andrea Campbell, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and head of the MIT Department of Political Science

How political science can help us solve global health care issues

MIT political scientist Andrea Campbell discusses the impact of equity on health care innovation and outcomes.

July 12, 2016

Image courtesy of the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology.

Supporting clinical research with an intensive-care database

Crowdsourcing clinical data from some 40,000 patients could vastly improve research and critical-care decisions.

July 8, 2016

MIT announces Solve program activities

Addressing the world’s most pressing issues, second year of program will focus on in-person gatherings, solution proposals.

July 7, 2016

Cara Lai, MIT Class of 2016, is double-majoring in literature and mechanical engineering.

Powered by literature on her way toward an MD

Senior Cara Lai cites MIT Literature studies as key to her preparation for medical practice.

June 1, 2016

A Massachusetts General Hospital surgeon demonstrates the Lincoln Laboratory’s near-infrared fluorescence imaging (NIRF) system.

Glowing tumors light a path to cancer treatment

Mechanism developed at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital shows promising results for improved ovarian cancer detection and removal.

May 20, 2016

MIT $100K grand-prize-winning team Astraeus Technologies (left to right): Graham Lieberman, Jay Kumar, Alexander Blair, and Joseph Azzarelli.

Lung cancer “breathalyzer” wins $100K Entrepreneurship Competition

Team’s smartphone-connected device can detect lung cancer early from a single breath.

May 12, 2016

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to healthcare,” Daniela Rus says. Pictured, an example of a capsule and the unfolded origami device.

Ingestible origami robot

Robot unfolds from ingestible capsule, removes button battery stuck to wall of simulated stomach.

May 12, 2016

Good medicine

Varesh Prasad, an MIT graduate student in health sciences and technology, is creating a multidisciplinary future in health care.

April 26, 2016

“As you go up in the income distribution, life expectancy continues to increase, at every point in the income distribution,” Michael Stepner says.

New study shows rich, poor have huge mortality gap in U.S.

In unprecedented detail, lifespan gap shown to be large and growing rapidly.

April 11, 2016

Thomas Heldt (left) with Massachusetts General Hospital collaborator Michael Filbin.

Big, intensive data

Assistant Professor Thomas Heldt mines critical care data to support real-time clinical decision making and improve patient care.

March 31, 2016

J-PAL North America launches health care delivery innovation competition

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT aims to help U.S. health care leaders find solutions to key challenges in health care delivery.

March 24, 2016

The Emerging Worlds innovation lab in Mumbai is a home away from home for MIT graduate students (l-r) Alicia Chong, Mrinal Mohit, Tristan Swedish, and Shantanu Sinha.

Innovating for billions

Emerging Worlds, a Media Lab and Tata Center initiative, seeks to catalyze change on a massive scale.

March 9, 2016

Empatica's wristband, called Embrace (pictured here), is “a consumer-looking, but medical-quality device” for monitoring stress and seizures, Rosalind Picard says.

Wristband detects and alerts for seizures, monitors stress

Wearable tracks increased skin conductance that signals stress, helps identify dangerous seizures.