Participants in the first LEAPS Design Lab in July 2018 were tasked with considering disease areas offering the prospect of significant healthcare impact and identifying early practical and technical challenges to the pilot project’s success. Four possible diseases were considered and discussed: Asthma, Type 1 Diabetes, Type 2 Diabetes, and Rheumatoid Arthritis.

After careful deliberation with the MIT CBI Leadership Team, the LEAPS Strategic Advisory Network, and the LEAPS Steering Committee, the program will advance Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) as the primary target for the MA Pilot project. In addition, building on input from the Design Lab, Asthma will become a secondary disease target, helping the teams to make sure that the toolkits and learnings are scalable in different disease areas. Though RA will move forward as the first pilot, LEAPS hopes to catalyze other pilots through dissemination of its generalizable principles for application in other disease ecosystems.