As members of our Brigham family, you have joined us in facing the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis head-on, and we are deeply grateful for your outpouring of support. Your generosity has fueled our response, and as you will read in the highlights below, it is having a tremendous impact on our patients, our frontline staff, and the communities we serve.
With your help, we stand ready to navigate our new normal, as our research teams lead work at the new Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation to identify new tools for testing and treatment, and ultimately, a vaccine that can truly bring this crisis to an end. Your support of these efforts is vital to our progress, and for that we thank you.
Betsy Nabel, MD
President, Brigham Health
$21,300,000
total dollars raised to date
11,044
donors
612,673
gifts in kind, including personal protective equipment (PPE)
Thanks to your generosity, the Brigham was fully prepared to treat the first major surge of patients with COVID-19, providing expert, compassionate care while supporting them and their loved ones. Extending this care to our communities, we were able to deliver testing and other important resources to neighborhoods hit hardest by the virus.
Your philanthropic support and gifts of personal protective equipment (PPE) allowed us to quickly adopt a universal masking policy, which has been critical in keeping patients and staff safe.
Hospital leadership pivoted quickly in response to rapidly changing conditions. Flexibility proved critical, as we repurposed spaces for COVID diagnosis and treatment and redeployed staff to address the most urgent needs.
With a limited visitor policy, we adopted widespread use of tablets at the bedside, which allowed care providers to monitor patients even more closely and enabled patients to communicate with their families.
We deployed pop-up testing sites in heavily impacted neighborhoods including Hyde Park, Roxbury, and Mattapan. Testing was free, and we assured all community members that immigration status would never be in question.
At testing sites, our volunteers handed out care kits with masks, hand sanitizer, gift cards, educational pamphlets, and boxes of food. Compassionate care for our most vulnerable neighbors is more important now than ever.
Our staff took to the phones to conduct culturally appropriate outreach to non-English-speaking patients and the elderly about the virus, mobile COVID care, and food security, ensuring they had the necessary information to stay healthy and safe.
Our diagnostics teams are laser focused on swift development and deployment of highly sensitive tools to detect COVID-19, including an antibody test that is 1,000% more sensitive than other currently available tests. Our tests are now widely considered the gold standard, and the team is working to validate newly developed tests as they become available on the market.
As the world eagerly awaits effective treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine for COVID-19, our researchers are working at an unprecedented pace to develop and test new therapies and vaccine candidates. Among numerous strategies in development, we are leading the first high-quality, randomized controlled trial to evaluate blood plasma transfusions for COVID. This promising technique uses blood plasma from recovered patients to boost immunity in the sickest patients and may provide an effective treatment option.
At the outset of the crisis, we quickly mobilized to protect frontline healthcare workers by addressing the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). In one extraordinary innovation, we developed a testing booth (pictured) to safeguard staff, dramatically reducing the need for disposable PPE while supply chains caught up to demand. The Brigham was able to share this transformational tool with hospitals in New York City at the peak of their surge, helping them keep their own care teams safe at a critical time.
The MGBCCI is collecting vast amounts of data with sophisticated analytical tools to address pressing issues posed by this ever-changing pandemic. We are building systems to harness the power of big data in understanding the biology of the coronavirus, creating a central biobank portal to illuminate how the virus affects patients, leveraging AI to predict hotspots, and using demographic information to improve health equity for disproportionately affected communities.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital is working around the clock to care for our patients, support our staff, and rapidly develop new solutions, testing, and treatment capabilities in the fight against COVID-19. Thank you for your support. We’re stronger together.
To learn more about the Brigham COVID-19 Response Fund and how you can help, contact Kristin Garrity at 617-416-9350 or kgarrity1@bwh.harvard.edu, or Susan Roux at 617-596-8513 or sroux@bwh.harvard.edu.
*Statistics as of 6/26/2020
© Brigham and Women’s Hospital 2020 | Brigham and Women’s Hospital | Development Office | 116 Huntington Avenue | Boston, MA 02116 | 617–424–4300