HELD

Women's Health Innovation Lab

HELD is a women's health innovation lab built at the intersection of lived experience, human-centered design, and public-interest technology. Founded by Carrie M. Sawyer — design researcher, published author, and breast cancer patient currently completing active treatment — HELD exists to ensure that no one navigating a serious illness has to figure out the system alone.

The name says everything. To be held is what you need most when everything else is falling apart. And HELD is also four words that define what this lab stands for: Healing, Education, Leadership, and Disruption.

Our first project: BenefitBridge

BenefitBridge is a predictive AI tool designed to connect breast cancer patients to the public benefits they're entitled to before financial crisis hits. Not a chatbot, not a directory — a context-aware system that knows where you are in your treatment journey, thinks ahead on your behalf, and tells you what to do next while you still have the capacity to act.

Hear Carrie's Story

Before HELD was a lab, it was a lived experience. In this conversation on The Richness of Our Lives podcast, Carrie talks openly about what it actually looks like to have your life completely disrupted — a breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, motherhood, identity, and finding a way forward in real time. This is where HELD comes from. Watch it first and the rest of this will make a lot more sense.