In Springfield, a small team put clinicians and innovators in the same room and proved that healthcare could work better. The team has moved on. The mission has not.
People who worked with TechSpring tend to remember a different piece of it depending on when they came through the door. All three were real, and none of them worked without the others.
The fifth floor at 1350 Main Street, Springfield, where a hospital system and the technology world could meet on neutral ground.
Twelve people at its peak. Designers, engineers, clinicians, and project leads who made the introductions and did the work.
Seventy-two innovation projects delivered, each one inside a live, operating health system rather than a demo environment.
The model was simple to describe and hard to run. Clinicians and administrators brought the problems they cared about, the ones nobody had the time to solve. We matched them with innovators and technologists who could help, then gave the resulting team a real clinical environment to build in. Not a sandbox. The actual place where the work happens, with the actual people who do it.
That second half was never an afterthought. A change that works beautifully for patients and quietly burns out the nurses delivering it is not an improvement, it is a transfer. The projects that lasted were the ones that made the day better on both sides of the encounter.
It is the same mission today, pursued by the same people in different chairs.
Plenty of organizations can supply healthcare with technology. Far fewer can tell you whether the people expected to use it will actually change how they work, and what it takes to get them there.
That was always the TechSpring angle and it still is. Human-centered design, practiced properly. Deep expertise in people and process, which is where transformation usually succeeds or quietly fails. Technology almost always supports the change. It is very rarely the change itself.
It is why the work started with observation and interviews rather than requirements documents, and why so much of it was about workflow, incentives, and habit as much as software.
Seventy-two innovation projects over the life of the program. Remote maternal health monitoring for high-risk patients, stood up in about six weeks under pandemic pressure. Predictive analytics and AI tested in a real health system before anyone deployed them at scale. Charge capture built into the clinical workflow instead of bolted alongside it. By 2018 the program had generated more than $7 million in revenue and savings for Baystate Health, and more than 4,000 people had come through the Tap into TechSpring events.
The numbers were never the point, but they made the case that this way of working pays for itself.
TechSpring was founded by Baystate Health in 2014 and ran at full tilt until the pandemic arrived in 2020. What followed was less an ending than an absorption. The innovation team was pulled into the leadership of Baystate Health itself, taking on operational roles leading Digital and Access Strategy. The thinking did not stop. It moved closer to the center.
The fifth floor at 1350 Main Street is now home to Tech Foundry, a Springfield non-profit that trains people from underrepresented backgrounds for careers in IT. The same room, still in community service, still connecting people in this region to work that changes their prospects. That feels like the right inheritance.
And the people scattered outward. They are leaders across the healthcare industry now, in health systems, in technology companies, in consulting. Still inspired by what they learned here, still pursuing the same mission they had when they were part of this community.
This is not only a memorial. The work TechSpring started is carried forward today by Jill McCormick and Christian Lagier, who are still doing it the same way: start with the people, understand the process, treat technology as the support rather than the story.
If you were part of this community and you are still chasing the same thing, you are not working alone. We would like to hear where you landed.
TechSpring did not run on Baystate's commitment alone. The wall inside the door carried the names of the organizations that made it possible. Technology companies, a law firm, a furniture maker, the state's life sciences agency. Some wrote checks, some sent people, some fitted out the space. All of them took a bet on an innovation center in Springfield.
