James J. Peters Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center

The challenge: Nurses are at high risk for violence and assaults in the workplace, and recent research points to an uptick in violence nationally. One in four nurses has experienced workplace violence, demonstrating the clear need for de-escalation strategies that keep nurses and patients safe.

The solution: The emergency department staff at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center (JJP VAMC) identified the need for proactive, rather than reactive, solutions to workplace violence. Led by nurse Salvación Francisco, the Employee De-escalation Intervention for Emergency (EDIE) is a system of interventions reminiscent of emergency resuscitation carts (crash carts) designed to keep healthcare workers safe by empowering them with readily available solutions.

Presented as a hierarchy of interventions, the EDIE cart features a scannable QR code that patients or nurses can use, opening to a menu with selections for different needs, including FAQs, medication information, staff contact information, physical or emotional comfort interventions, and more. The concept provides healthcare workers with the tools to de-escalate a potentially violent situation before it escalates and demonstrates the equal value and necessity of dealing with mental health emergencies.

With the grant funding, James J. Peters Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center would implement two carts within one year.

HEALTHYPALS: Revolutionizing emergency healthcare through advanced tech

The challenge: Nigeria’s emergency medical services providers face severe challenges, from poor nationwide infrastructure to the limited availability of functioning ambulances and a shortage of adequately equipped and trained hospital emergency departments. This, compounded by citizens’ frustration and apprehension of medical services, makes for a dire situation in Africa’s largest and most populous country.

The solution: Registered nurse Seraphim Amafor and nurse scientist Edor Kesiena Tony propose a new app, HEALTHYPALS, designed to provide patients with life-saving emergency care and reduce the number of preventable deaths through innovative technology.

HEALTHYPALS will give users the ability to store critical medical information such as medications and emergency contacts within the app, call for emergency medical services with the tap of a button, and integrate with emergency response systems to encourage real-time communication. This allows emergency personnel to receive important patient information ahead of arriving at the scene and equips others with critical first aid guidance to stabilize the patient until help arrives.

The app combines machine learning with existing navigation technology to enable real-time communication and tracking at a time when every second counts. The solution doesn’t just help patients; it reduces workers’ moral stress and distress by increasing their ability to provide the life-saving care citizens need in the face of continuous challenges in the healthcare landscape.

Grant funding would be dedicated to building the HEALTHYPALS app, fully equipping ambulances with necessary medical equipment, integrating the ambulances with the app, and compensation of emergency medical response personnel.

Seattle Children’s

The challenge: One of the most important roles that a nurse plays is patient advocate. Whether for children, the elderly, or anyone who cannot speak for themselves, nurses have the essential task of ensuring patient care is provided without harm.

The solution: Leading a team of nurses at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Elena Bosque and her partners are piloting a first-of-its-kind, completely AI-powered solution that predicts the failure of Peripheral Intravenous (PIV) catheters, reducing the chance of harm to vulnerable patients that lead to lifelong consequences.

Currently, there is no device on the market that alerts nurses to PIV failure, which can evade even the most skilled healthcare worker. The proposed AI solution will use machine learning to take existing patient data and characteristics and create prediction algorithms equipped with an alarm system to alert nurses of potential failures based on in-line pressure.

The team is seeking grant funding to support equipment, supplies, staff compensation, and more. If the pilot is successful, the team hopes to pursue further licensing and explore the possibility of an LLC.

Cook County Health

The challenge: The seamless flow of care is critical not only for the patient, but the patient’s family and the nurse providing care. When there’s a lack of continuous communication among staff, or from the nurse to the patient, or from the patient to their loved ones, the care experience becomes disjointed and stressful for all involved. Simi Joseph and the team at Cook County Health in Chicago are presenting a solution that enables real-time communication and is intended to bring much needed administrative relief to nurses and emotional relief to the patient and their family.

The solution: RightTRACK is designed to provide tracking and communication of a patient’s upcoming tests or procedures, giving them the knowledge of a procedure’s duration, when to expect the results returned, and more. The app benefits the patient, their loved ones, and the nurse by enabling consistent communication that providing live updates on a patient’s status. Nurses can plan care efficiently and ensure regular updates through Cook County Health’s existing system that is integrated with the RightTRACK app.

The nurse-led solution touches on the often overlooked, yet important patient-provider relationship that also extends to a patient’s support system. The patient’s loved ones are a valuable part of the health care team, providing context to the patient’s health history. RightTRACK prioritizes both the clinical and human side of healthcare by presenting a way to keep every member of the care team in sync. With grant funding, Cook County Health will execute the design, delivery, and integration of RightTRACK into its systems.

Yale New Haven Health

The challenge: What seems like a manageable shift can quickly become overwhelming, especially when it comes to patient assignments. Charge nurses often lack the information they need to adequately assign nurses amid the ever-changing demands of patient care.

The solution: The Electronic Patient Assignment Generator, or ePAG, proposed by Jeannette Bronsord and team at Yale New Haven Health, sets out to create more sustainable patient assignments for nurses by using patient-level workload metrics.

The solution is a more intuitive way to assign patients to nurses using EMR and unit design to cluster patients based on their geographic location within a unit. The generator will reassess the allocations every two hours, alleviating the charge nurse’s burden, and will alert them whenever necessary to reallocate or rearrange. ePAG leans on automation to reduce administrative workload and redirect time spent on assignments to patient care, increasing efficiency and nurse satisfaction. This way, charge nurses are more aware of and can proactively manage their nurses’ workloads before a problem arises.

Grant funding for the solution would be used to implement ePAG across more than 100 units at Yale New Haven Health. If successful, the nurse-led team hopes to expand ePAG to inpatient, ambulatory, and procedural units and eventually integrate paraprofessional and other care team roles.

Jefferson Health

The challenge: The nursing profession continues to face staff shortages, which has led to a significant gap between the number of nurses needed and the number of nurses available to meet the nation’s growing healthcare needs. Addressing the ongoing challenges in the workforce requires new solutions, which Charlene Eltman and her team at Jefferson Health set out to provide with Care Forward.

The solution: Care Forward is a workforce solution that proposes a restructuring of care teams to optimize each role and leverage technology to ensure that each member is operating at the highest capacity possible. This overhauling solution would redesign care teams to include supplementary roles, such as specialists and technicians, as well as a virtual consulting team, extending the care team to be all-encompassing for a patient’s needs.

The solution encourages system-wide and team-wide collaboration and gives opportunities for professional growth through training programs and learning new technologies to improve workers’ skillsets and capabilities. It's a more intuitive way of structuring care teams in the face of nursing schools turning away applicants, increased staff turnover, and more, to ensure operational efficiency and create high quality patient care.

Grant funding for the first year would be dedicated to sourcing virtual technology for units, hiring a data analyst and technical support specialist, creating educational support materials, and more.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

The challenge: Nurses’ administrative burden is a significant contributor to nurse burnout, one of the most common reasons for leaving the profession. Nurses often spend 25 percent of their time charting, directly pulling them away from patient care.

The solution: Ryan Trias and the team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center saw an opportunity to lean into the ever-increasing use of AI in healthcare to relieve nurses’ administrative burden: Aiva Assistant. The AI-powered app addresses the root cause of documentation demands that existing solutions do not, by using conversational voice dictation capabilities to enter patient information directly into the patient’s electronic health record – a method three times faster than typing.

Aiva reduces the burden of nurses’ balancing act between patient care and chart documentation and has translation and voice assistant functionalities, making it interactive and easy to keep up with a patient’s chart.

With the goal of decreasing burnout, improving efficiency in chart documentation, and improving patient care, the team is seeking funding to support licensing and continued EHR integration.

Ghanaian-Diaspora Nursing Alliance (G-DNA)

The challenge: Cardiac complications, specifically hypertension and peripartum cardiomyopathy (PCM), are the leading causes of death among pregnant women in Ghana. The maternal mortality rate in Ghana is 4.3 times higher than the United Nations’ average rate, is compounded by limited cardiac diagnostic screening for pregnant women, inadequately staffed and trained medical centers, and a lack of access to medical centers in rural areas.

The solution: Midwife-Assisted Monitoring and Assessment of CardioVascular Disease Risk in Ghana, or MAMA-CVD, is an effort led by Yvonne Commodore-Mensah and her team at the Ghanaian-Diaspora Nursing Alliance. Identifying a need for greater cardiac maternal health care for Ghanaian women, the solution aims to leverage the abundant nursing and midwife workforce in Ghana by equipping them with an AI-powered focused point-of-care ultrasound (fPoCUS) that can detect cardiac abnormalities, enabling timely and life-saving interventions.

MAMA-CVD aligns with the World Health Organization’s Global Strategic Directions for Nursing and Midwifery and contributes to efforts to create health equity by collecting health data among Black women.

With the requested grant funding, the team will cover stipends and housing for trainees and instructors, hiring a part-time project manager, and purchasing equipment and supplies for implementation.

Mount Sinai Health System

The challenge: Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) affect more than 2.5 million U.S. patients yearly. These preventable injuries come at high costs to patients’ lives and health systems, putting healthcare workers and institutions at risk. Existing reactive protocols for managing HAPIs have resulted in missing more than 50 percent of cases, highlighting the urgent need for a proactive approach that can save lives.

The solution: Maria Sevillano and the Mount Sinai Health System team propose an AI-based product: Pressure Injury Prevention AI (PIPAI), designed to predict patient risk for HAPIs and notify nurses to intervene before the HAPI develops. It’s a low-risk, easily implementable tool that improves patient care without adding additional workload burden and stress to healthcare staff.

Now, PIPAI is piloting in seven units in one of Mount Sinai’s eight hospitals – and already showing a nine percent increase in the number of high-risk patients discharged from the hospital without acquiring a HAPI.

With funding, Mount Sinai hopes to make PIPAI a systemwide standard, developing the product further with more investment in critical technology services to support the business case for long-term investment and development.

Hope for HIV/AIDS Foundation

The challenge: Public awareness of HIV/AIDS is low in Nigeria, and shame around the condition keeps people from valuable health care information. High rates of stigma and discrimination limit people’s engagement with life-saving healthcare and leave them suffering in silence.

The solution: Led by Ogunmuyiwa Ibukunolu and her team at the Hope for HIV/AIDS Foundation, the HIV-CARELINE concept aims to reduce the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS in Nigeria.

Through a multichannel approach including a confidential telephone line and social media, CARELINE intends to provide Nigerian citizens with accurate information on HIV/AIDS and offer counseling and referrals to health care services when needed. It’s also meant to alleviate the burden of already overworked healthcare providers.

The Hope for HIV/AIDS Foundation is seeking grant funding to create this pilot program, develop the telephone line, and increase awareness among Nigerians through a public media campaign.

Want to support nurse-led solutions and transformative healthcare innovation? Tune in to the NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon on Oct. 15, 2024, at 1pm ET! Learn, get inspired, and cheer on nurse leaders – register here!