Nurses are always solving problems for patients. Some of those ideas could be the next big thing

Jackie Anzalone, a nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is well-acquainted with the internal struggle that her peers have each time they go into a young patient’s room in the middle of the night.

Young children with intravenous lines — those unwieldy devices used to deliver fluids or medication — typically wear a soft sleeve, similar to an athletic wrist guard, to hold the catheters in place on squirmy limbs. But nurses need to constantly check that the IV didn’t get dislodged because the catheters will continue to leak fluid, causing pain and swelling in an arm or leg.

In the middle of the night, that’s a dilemma. The velcro is loud and the sound can wake a sleeping child.

After countless nights of the same issue, “I wondered why we couldn’t use something with a window and quieter closure so the nurse could see the IV site more easily,” Anzalone said.

It’s a problem so common in hospitals that another pediatric nurse at CHOP, Michele Davey, and Cheryl Gebeline-Myers, the hospital’s director of performance improvement, were already mulling over the same idea. In summer of 2015, the three individuals met through CHOP’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OEI), and the idea for See-IV, an IV sleeve with a transparent window, was born.

The product is now available through Medline, a medical supplies manufacturer, after launching last month. (Sales figures were not available for the new product.)

Much of the prototyping for See-IV happened off-hours, at home. “We pulled out our sewing machines; we sat at kitchen tables,” Davey said.

That kind of ingenuity is often a key part of the job for nurses, but many don’t even realize that what they’re doing is innovating. “We call it workarounds or making our little MacGyver moments,” said Bonnie Clipper, vice president of practice and innovation at the American Nurses Association. “But that’s innovation. Nurses haven’t seen themselves in that way.”

The ANA has even started a new campaign in recent months to help guide nurse-inventors through the development process and ultimately bring their ideas to market.

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Anzalone didn’t know that Davey and Gebeline-Myers had come up with a nearly identical idea. All three individuals ended up applying for an OEI program called Sprint, where would-be inventors pitch their ideas and compete for a chance to work with the office on developing their product.

“The office reached out to all of us and asked if we’d consider working together,” Anzalone said. “The three of us met to discuss our ideas and the potential to work together and the rest is history.”

An increasing number of hospitals have their own innovation labs that offer similar resources. At CHOP, the OEI helped with prototyping and patenting the product and then connected the See-IV team with Medline, a company where the hospital already has a contract for medical supplies. While the prototype was close to the final product design, Medline ironed out details like making sure See-IV could be used in magnetic resonance imaging machines and testing it for skin reactions.

“It’s seldom that you get to work directly with the product inventors,” said Teri Burke, Medline’s senior product manager. “This was the first time we had an inventor with a completely new and different product that they brought to us. They came up with the basic design and we worked very closely with them to choose the final materials.”

Just like any new product, See-IV had to go through a trial period at CHOP, where nurses could test it out and decide whether they wanted to place a purchase order. Medline also debuted the product at the ANA’s annual meeting and a critical care nursing conference, generating 800 sales leads from people who said they wanted more information about the product.

The interest came from not only pediatric nurses but those who work with geriatric and behavioral health patients.

The disconnect in healthcare

The amount of venture capital flowing into digital health companies continued to increase last year, with a record $6 billion in funding recorded, according to Rock Health, which tracks the industry.

Doctors, nurses and other medical professionals uniquely understand where healthcare needs to innovate. But a number of healthcare professionals have said over the years that while the industry is crying out for innovation, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — eager to tackle healthcare — don’t necessarily have the deep knowledge of how it works.

“Sometimes tech developers don't have a full perspective of what it takes to integrate with a provider's workflow,” said Megan Zweig, Rock Health’s director of research. As a result, “oftentimes, I think technology can be viewed — which is what happened with the electronic health records — more of a nuisance and something that they have to spend more of their day on, rather than something that's making them more efficient and more effective."

Some of the best ideas for healthcare innovation are coming from bedside nurses, but they aren’t always getting credit for their ideas, said the ANA’s Clipper.

At its annual conference in March, the ANA launched an innovation awards program with sponsor BD, a medical technology company. The awards offer $25,000 per year to an individual or $50,000 per year for a nurse-led team for up to three years.

The group earlier this month also hosted a Shark Tank-style pitchathon with partners AARP and Northeastern University. The theme of the event focused on home health innovations.

Longer term, the ANA wants to match nurses with incubators and accelerators, and it will support budding innovators with conference sessions and webinars along the way.

As for See-IV founders Davey and Anzalone, their inventions has inspired a newfound interest in working with other nurses and energizing them to bring their ideas to reality. “Now that’s all I want to do,” Davey said.