Technology-driven Care

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.

Anna Young, the co-founder and CEO of MakerHealth, is bringing makerspaces into hospitals and putting technology and fabrication capabilities directly in the hands of frontline teams, such as those at UnityPoint Health Cedar Rapids, led by Nursing Research & Innovation Coordinator Rose Hedges, DNP, RN. In this episode, Anna and Rose share how makerspaces create the conditions that champion and recognize nurses as designers, device manufacturers, and app developers, and bring a sense of empowerment and autonomy to nurses.

Hackathons provide a fast-paced, high energy, community-building opportunity for a wide spectrum of participants to flex their innovation muscles and solve for some of today’s greatest challenges. While these events have traditionally been geared towards computer scientists and software developers, in recent years nurses, clinicians, and health innovators have started to convene health-challenge inspired events. Today the health hackathon landscape is exciting, rapidly evolving, and nurses are playing a lead role in driving them. In this episode, we learn from health influencers, hackers, and innovators Jane Sarashon-Kahn, MA, MHSA; Chris Recinos, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, NEA-BC; Anthony Scarpone-Lambert, BSN ‘21; and Jennifferre Mancillas, BSN, RN, RNC-NIC about how hackathons have impacted their thinking, skills, lives, career trajectory, as well as the landscape of innovative health solutions and products. And -- why you should register your interest at NurseHack4Health.org.

People newly diagnosed and living with chronic conditions increasingly turn to technology, the internet and social media seeking information and education, to share clinical information and the latest research, to receive and provide support, and to share solutions and resources. In the spirit of “meeting people where they are,” clinicians are following and joining patients in these social spaces, learning a lot -- and together -- are improving health.

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.

How do you build, staff, and stand up an online psychiatry and therapy office over the course of 45 days? And in a pandemic, no less? For Lavender founders and seasoned entrepreneurs Pritma Dhillon Chattha, DNP MHA RN and Brighid Gannon, DNP, PMHNP-BC it was experiencing first-hand how the pandemic was moving every aspect of our lives online at lightning speed; hearing from colleagues seeking mental health support the countless difficulties they encountered navigating and accessing services; and having the business skills and entrepreneurial experience to seize the moment to design and deliver much needed innovation in the psychiatric care.

Cancer care is one area where the use of data is rapidly transforming every facet of care, and one rapidly evolving development is the use of real world data to provide important insights that often have not been answered using data from the highly prized clinical trials data. One very specific area that data—particularly real world data—is helping us to understand is how race and ethnicity play a role in disparities in care and outcomes. In this episode, we go deep into the data weeds with clinician, innovator, and data specialist Kathleen Maignan, AGPCNP-BC, MSN, OCN, to reveal what stories the data really has to tell.

Each year, thousands of lives are saved and improved through organ and tissue donation. But despite the remarkable advances in organ recovery, more than 100,000 Americans are currently waiting for a lifesaving transplant with 33 dying every day for lack of an organ. This episode spotlights two nurse CEOs innovating at the system level to maximize organ availability. Ginny McBride, RN, MPH, Executive Director of OurLegacy Organ & Tissue Donor Services at Advent Health in Orlando, Florida, and Patti Niles, RN, BSN, CPTC, CEO of Southwest Transport Alliance in Dallas, Texas, are two nurse innovators from organ procurement organizations (OPOs) working to modernize and streamline organ donor management systems across the nation. Working closely with patients, families, and care teams provides them an understanding of the complexities of organ donation and transplantation enabling them to see the big picture and take action where innovations in health information exchange, donor management, and procurement can have an impact on a national scale. Tune in to hear about the groundbreaking work these nurses are leading so more people are able to give and receive the gift of a lifetime.

In this episode, we meet nurse and innovation sherpa Robbie Freeman, MSN, RN, NE-BC, and learn how he and his team of clinicians, data scientists, and engineers are working with an interesting array of technology partners to design and embed AI into hospital operations and clinical workflows.

Seeing the need to keep homeless shelters, their guests and staff safe and coronavirus free, Nurse Disrupted—a pandemic response start-up in Madison, WI—was launched in record time to build fast, simple, virtual health screenings for homeless shelters and communities. On this episode, we meet nurses Bre Loughlin, MS, RN, and Tracy Zvenyach, PhD, APRN-NP, co-founders of Nurse Disrupted, and dig into the details of launching their new venture.

In this episode, we meet nurse innovator Joshua Littlejohn MPH, MSN, RN, and entrepreneur Gabriela Sabaté, MBA, MHCI, who are experimenting and innovating with technologies that connect data to transform how we not only provide care remotely, but also how we approach and use hackathons as a way to crowdsource ideas and introduce new innovations.

In this episode, Karen Murphy, PhD, RN, executive VP, chief innovation officer and founder of the Steele Institute for Health Innovation at Geisinger offers the thirty thousand foot view of enterprise-level innovation at a scale and pace that was once thought of as too hard, too risky, and just not possible.

In this episode, we hear from Nicole Lincoln MSN, RN, FNP-BC, CCNS about her work on NICI, a radical reimagining of the infant incubator. What started as an idea to create a low-cost, portable, and single-use incubator for our smallest and most fragile citizens, morphed into new concepts about how the incubator could be used in new ways, new places, and solve new problems.

In this episode, nurses Carlos Trochez, Jr., BSN, RN and Simone Hannah-Clark, BN, RN, CCRN two of the many thousands of nurses working in intensive care units around the world, reflect on the intensity and pace of real-time innovation in a pandemic and reveal how crowdsourcing from social media, collaborating across cultures and disciplines, and live choreography played a role in all the pieces coming together—and how they are present and highly attuned when the pieces, for some patients and families, fall apart.

Listen in to hear from nurse practitioner, telehealth consultant, and Founder & CEO of BabyLiveAdvice, Sigi Marmorstein as she shares the clinical realities of working on COVID-19 and explains how telemedicine is putting eyes and ears on patients where they are, while reducing the stress on hospital services.

Gender equality. Economic development. Greater health outcomes. According to nurse, researcher and policy expert Barbara Stilwell, PhD, RN, FRCN and Executive Director of Nursing Now, a global campaign seeking to elevate the nursing profession, more nurses in leadership and policy roles can result in all those things and more. In this episode, Stilwell speaks with Shawna Butler about the need to raise awareness of the impact nurses have in transforming health systems, the groundbreaking work they have accomplished in devising solutions to patient care and health outcomes and the exciting potential of nurse leadership and innovation.

Anna Sort, nurse, gamer and digital health entrepreneur, talks with host Shawna Butler about her groundbreaking work that leverages the fun, thrills and science of gamification to create behavioral change, improved health and innovative ways to learn new skills.