Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | May 4, 2026 | Worcester Business Journal 13 Department. McManus' track record Since 2020, McManus has served as professor and chair of the Depart- ment of Medicine at UMass Chan's T.H. Chan School of Medicine and at UMass Memorial. A graduate of UMass Chan, he founded the school's Program in Dig- ital Medicine and co-founded UMass Chan's AI Assurance Lab, securing $140 million in National Institutes of Health funding and publishing more than 400 scientific papers. As a physician and scientist, McMa- nus' specialty of integrating artificial intelligence and healthcare gave Meehan confidence he can to lead the institution during a time of immense technological changes in medicine and education, Meehan said. e oth- er two finalists for the chancellor job were Dr. Steven Goldstein from the University of California, Irvine, who was known for increasing the system's revenue, and Dr. Frances Jensen, a neurology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who had written a New York Times bestseller. In 2020, one in six people in the U.S. was age 65 or older, and that per- centage is expected to grow, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Due to this aging population, over the course of the next decade, the country is going to experience a 50% to 75% in- crease in the number of patients with chronic diseases, said Dickson. "More people are in need of care, and there are fewer and fewer people in the nursing and healthcare profes- sion," said McManus. eoretically, that will require an additional 1,000 hospital beds in Cen- tral Massachusetts alone, which is an impossible ask, said Dickson. Instead, the hospital system will need to rely on decentralized care and remote patient monitoring to provide for its sickest patients, areas Dickson and McManus have already partnered in when they launched UMass Memo- rial's Hospital at Home program. Looking forward, Dickson plans for the school and hospital system to collaborate on creating and testing wearable monitoring devices, espe- cially e-textiles: clothing embedded with sensors for the hearts and lungs. AI will use that data to identify pa- tients' health problems. "I see great opportunity to pair that research and innovation piece of the Chan Medical School with that in- novation ecosystem of the healthcare system, to almost treat the healthcare system as a learning laboratory," said McManus. Finding ways to work together McManus views the relationship between UMass Memorial and UMass Chan as that of a family. "When the medical school was founded in the 70s, it was founded with the hospital together as one en- tity. And so the two have both a joint history, and I would argue, a joint future," he said. Traditionally, UMass Memorial hasn't invested in many UMass Chan research initiatives due to the school's heavy emphasis on gene therapies, which can take up to 20 years to develop. "We don't have 20 years, because the population is aging today," said Dickson. By contrast, digital health tools and AI care models can be implement- ed far more quickly, allowing both institutions to reap benefits in months rather than years, he said. Moving forward, Dickson said the organizations will emphasize joint investments designed to generate revenue for both sides. "We're going to find things with a quick return on investment, where you take the knowledge, intellec- tual capital of the school and the clinical experience of the healthcare system, and you create this synergy," Dickson said. "at's the potential for us." W Dr. McManus' experience UMass system President Marty Meehan said the scope of Dr. David McManus' leadership as the chair of UMass Chan's Department of Medicine made him confident McManus was ready for the chancellor position. As the medicine department chair, McManus manages: • 16 divisions • More than $70 million in research funding • More than 370 faculty members • 80 principal investigators Source: UMass Chan Medical school

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