Twelve on the team at its peak, and many more who came through as clinicians, partners, and collaborators. What follows is not a list of where everyone ended up. It is what they did here, in pursuit of the same mission.
Four people turned an idea into a place. Each one was necessary and none of them was sufficient.
It started with something he asked at a board meeting. What if? What if a mid-sized health system in Western Massachusetts stopped waiting for innovation to arrive from Boston and built the place itself. It was not an obvious proposition, and he made the case anyway.
As Baystate Health's Chief Information Officer he backed it with the rest of his agenda, standing up baytechIT and architecting PVIX, the regional health information exchange. TechSpring existed because someone senior enough to be cautious chose not to be.
Took the question and made it operational. He conceived the innovation program, hired and built the team around it, and built the space itself on the fifth floor at 1350 Main Street. Three separate jobs, none of which had a template.
His conviction ran underneath all of it: healthcare's hardest problems are human before they are technical, and the fix has to be built with the people who will live with it.
"We're trying to bring these sides together in a place where we can democratize technology development."
Established the method that made innovation succeed here rather than merely happen, as thought leader for design and product thinking. Her discipline was unglamorous and decisive: watch people work, interview them with real empathy, and find the problem underneath the problem they described.
It is the least glamorous part of innovation and the part that determines whether anything survives the pilot. Almost everything that stuck at TechSpring came from that practice.
Senior Healthcare Innovation Strategist for TechSpring and Chief Medical Information Officer for Baystate Health, which meant he could say with authority whether an idea would survive contact with clinical reality.
He spent his time in the gap between clinicians and the technology meant to support them, translating in both directions. Having that voice in the room early is the difference between a project that gets adopted and a project that gets demonstrated.
An innovation center is easy to admire and easy to defund. These two backed the idea before it had results to point at, and led the governance of the innovation program through the early years when that mattered most.
A Baystate Health executive who was there at the opening and, more importantly, there in the rooms afterward. He helped govern the innovation program in its first years, when the work had to be defended on conviction rather than on a track record.
Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Baystate Health, where he had been since 1988. A CFO backing an innovation program with no proven return is not the obvious move. His support and his governance in the early years are a large part of why TechSpring got the runway to become something.
The colleagues, clinicians, and leaders who brought real problems through the door and put their own clinics and workflows behind the answers.
Clinical partner on the remote maternal health program, monitoring blood pressure for prenatal and postpartum patients outside the clinic walls, including the high-risk patients where it mattered most.
Led the remote maternal health program with TechSpring, from decision to live implementation in roughly six weeks, at a point in 2020 when nobody had six weeks to spare.
Among the Baystate leadership backing the center from its founding and through the years it took to prove itself.
CTO of TechSpring, and a persistent advocate for data democratization inside a health system that, like every health system, held its data close. He turned a stream of ad hoc requests into a process that could be reasoned about, which is what made the technical side of the program repeatable.
State, city, and industry figures who turned up when the doors opened. Their presence said something about how seriously the region took this as an economic development story, not just a hospital project.
The fellows, coordinators, engineers, clinical champions, and partner-company teams who made this place work day to day. This section is thin because press coverage was thin, not because they mattered less. If that is you, or someone you worked alongside, put them here.