Boston is home to many prominent hospitals. Although both hospitals and digital health startups seek to improve healthcare, collaborations between them aren’t always easy. In Boston, however, health systems like Brigham and Women’s, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital have created processes to connect with digital health startups and facilitate the review and onboarding of proposed pilots and research studies.

The idea came to Hadi Shafiee, PhD: what if you could use a cell phone to test for male infertility from the comfort of your own home? Shafiee’s lab at BWH focuses on developing technologies that use micro and nano-fabrication – devices with dimensions less than a millionth of a millimeter. The team has developed tools with applications in medicine and biology including point-of-care diagnostics for global health. But they had never developed something to test for infertility. To bring his inspiration from idea to reality, Shafiee would need the help of many experts outside of his lab.