Becker's Hospital Review

27 CIO / HEALTH IT The health system helping staff find their inner inventor By Ella Jeffries H ospitals are full of improvised fixes — work-arounds nurses, therapists and other staff members invent to make a task safer or faster. At Radnor, Pa.- based Main Line Health, those solutions are coming out of the shadows. Through a program that pairs clinicians with engineers, Main Line staff members are transforming sketches and conversations into patented devices. The idea took shape in a conversation between Barbara Wadsworth, DNP, RN, COO of Main Line Health, and George Prendergast, PhD, president of the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research. As they talked through challenges in patient care, Dr. Wadsworth mentioned falls and sketched out a concept for preventing injuries in real time. To her surprise, Dr. Prendergast told her she had just described something that could be turned into a patented invention. That conversation crystallized the program's purpose: to capture insights from the staff members who spend the most time with patients. Clinicians were invited to bring forward the everyday challenges they had long worked around. With the support of Lankenau Ventures and its engineers, their ideas could move from drawing to prototype, and sometimes all the way to market. What makes the program distinctive, Dr. Wadsworth said, is who drives it. Front-line staff spend the most time with patients, and they see problems first. "Who better to identify things that they need to make the care better or easier?" she said. The process does not require technical expertise on the part of hospital staff. Clinicians describe the problem, and engineers translate it into design. Analysts check for existing patents, and if the idea is viable, prototypes are built and tested. Some of the first inventions included a set of stackable foam blocks that support a patient's leg during a dressing change, sparing the need for another nurse to stand by for 15 minutes. Another clinician developed a device that allows a single nurse to catheterize a patient without assistance — a fix for a task that had long been nearly impossible to do alone. Both are now in use in hospitals, rehab centers and home-care settings. Dr. Wadsworth's own device, an airbag-like cushion that inflates when motion sensors detect a fall, recently received a patent and is now seeking investment to move beyond the prototype stage. The device, she said, embodies the program's philosophy: Make the safest option the easiest one. To encourage more ideas, Main Line Health has experimented with different approaches: issuing calls for invention, holding a "Shark Tank"-style event where hundreds of nurses shared their wish lists, and simply creating space for conversations. Often, Dr. Wadsworth said, staff do not see themselves as inventors. But when they start talking, solutions emerge. The inventions can take years to move through patent and prototype phases, and not all make it to the bedside. But Dr. Wadsworth sees value in the process itself. Giving staff a platform to shape patient care has energized Main Line's culture. "When health systems open a door like this, where they're inviting people to share their ideas and potentially identify inventions, it's invigorating and exciting," she said. "It makes people really proud of where they work." Main Line is not alone in pursuing front-line innovation. Cleveland Clinic operates a commercialization arm, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, that helps bring new medical technologies to market. Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic supports clinical innovation through its Innovation Exchange. For Dr. Wadsworth, the experience has been personal as well. She now holds a patent herself, something she said she never imagined. And as Main Line colleagues continue to approach her with their own ideas, she sees momentum building. "Even if they don't have something themselves, when they listen to other people's ideas or they see their inventions come to fruition, I think it's very empowering and exciting," she said. n Amer Saati, MD, CMIO at Roseville, Calif.-based Adventist Health, said the organizations seeing success are those investing as much in workflow redesign and change management as in the technology itself. Elie Razzouk, CMIO at Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based AdventHealth, added that vendors oen highlight performance under idealized conditions, which rarely reflect real-world outcomes. e true value of AI, he said, lies in its ability to produce meaningful, sustainable impact in actual clinical settings. Some CMIOs suggested that the problem lies not just in timelines or implementation — but in how ROI is defined. "For clinicians not using AI going forward, it would be equivalent to using carbon-copy order forms today: inefficient and unsafe," Nadeem Ahmed, MD, CMIO at e Valley Health System in Paramus, N.J., said. "AI has not been marketed in this manner, and maybe it should be." Mark Mabus, CMIO at Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Parkview Health, cautioned against overgeneralizing from early pilots. "Many of the early ROI claims for GenAI came from carefully selected pilot groups that don't represent the broader provider population, making those benchmarks unrealistic for real-world adoption," he said. n

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