Nurse Entrepreneurs

Around the country, makerspaces are popping up in collaborative hot spots like universities and community centers, making innovation and invention more accessible. It’s part of a growing, broader maker culture, which brings a DIY, democratized attitude to disciplines like engineering, coding, robotics, hardware development and more. And it’s a perfect environment to foster nurse-led innovation and direct it toward actionable solutions for the health workforce crisis.

As a hospital-based nurse, Kwamane Liddell saw how important it was for patients to have healthy meals tailored to their medical needs. Liddell created Nutrible, a technology platform that helps healthcare providers connect patients with healthy food aligned with their medical and cultural needs.

Nurse-led, multidisciplinary health system teams took center stage to pitch their solutions for redesigning a healthcare workplace where nurses and other health care professionals can thrive. Meet the 2022 NurseHack4Health Pitch-A-Thon awardees.

Two years ago, when COVID-19 patients began arriving in her hospital, Lisa Kilgard, BSN, RN-BC, raised her hand to move full-time to that unit, where she thought she could learn something new and take care of vulnerable members of her community.

Maria Striemer, RN, BA, was in the emergency department when she treated a child accidentally left in a car from heat exhaustion. Unable to leave the experience behind, Maria began a journey that was anything but routine. She and her engineer husband worked to develop Backseet Buddy, a sensor that uses a Bluetooth connected app to detect when a phone has moved more than 50 meters from a car seat and sends a phone alert.

Necessity is often cited as the Mother of Invention. And, nurses who have been part of the inventing process share that exasperation, empathy, and determination are members of the same family. While caring for a patient in an interventional radiology lab and witnessing the exasperation on a patient’s face while struggling to secure a fluid-filled leg bag, nurse and inventor Brian Mohika, RN, BSN, was inspired to create smart, active-living underwear designed to secure catheters and fluid collection bags. He knew people needed solutions that were practical, comfortable, washable, discreet, and liberating. Brian stated, “it is about more than just selling a medical product. It’s about improving lives and returning people to actively living theirs.”

Issac Asimov believed robots could have a true humanizing influence, and one day do the work to make life easier, freeing us to do the work that makes life worthwhile. For many nurses, caring for patients is that worthwhile work. However, studies have shown that roughly 30 percent of a nursing shift is devoted to patient care, with the rest given over to other tasks like finding medications, tracking down equipment, tracking down supplies, and documentation.

Shaken by the experience of witnessing a child nearly die from heat exhaustion after accidentally being left in a hot car, emergency room nurse Maria Striemer, RN, BA, channeled her insight to invent the Backseet Buddy, an app that provides parents with peace of mind that it won’t happen to them.