The Healthcare Landscape is Ripe for Nursing Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Let’s Get to Work!
An Innovator’s Lens
In such a difficult year for the healthcare industry, it seems counterintuitive to feel more inspired and optimistic than previous years of my career as a Nurse Innovator. While demands on the system were overwhelming and unexpected, nurse-led innovation from simple to complex was unfolding in institutions around the country. Many of these innovative solutions addressed community needs emerging from COVID-19, for example establishing and leading vaccination clinics within existing institutions or in the community, defining remote monitoring programs for post-acute care COVID patients returning to the community, or ensuring service continuity for students when their place of care; schools, shuttered indefinitely.
These programs showcase the breadth and depth of nursing practice and the natural leadership skills of nurses. A recent survey of the nursing workforce echoes these elements of optimism and attention on nursing, finding that nurses directly involved in the care of COVID-19 patients felt they had greater opportunities to lead programs, influence decisions, and advance professionally. Simultaneously, burnout and anticipated departure from the profession is present within many cohorts. Opportunities to contribute and grow remain fragmented by care focus, setting, gender and other factors. Early involvement in decisions critical to daily workflow continues to be overlooked. An ability to overcome these deficiencies and use recent success stories and barrier removal to springboard further innovation will be essential to the vitality of an organization’s workforce and its longevity in this changing industry.
Using Current Success as an Accelerator
Barrier removing trends show no signs of slowing down as we press deeper into 2021, and these promising trends are backed by supportive policies that healthcare institutions are watching closely and planning around. Organizations can draw on recent success stories harnessing nurses to drive innovation as they think through the specific opportunities each of these policy changes catalyze. Specific examples include:
The CONNECT for Health Act permanently removes telehealth barriers temporarily lifted at the onset of the pandemic, such as originating site requirements, and adds infrastructure investments to ensure access to technology in underserved populations or geographies. If your organization sprinted to deploy a telehealth program to support remote patient use cases during the initial months of the pandemic, consider how you may want to optimize your program now, knowing that greater flexibility and infrastructure is available to you and your patients. Are there roles that can contribute to the visit workflow, creating a better end-to-end visit experience? Are there additional nurse-led visit types that you want to implement?
Provisions within the American Rescue Plan supplement home and community based services that allow seniors and people with disabilities the opportunity to live independently at home; Community-based mobile crisis intervention services will receive 85% of federal matching funds for the first 3-years of the plan. Ensuring that your field-based nurse thought leaders have a voice as you plan new program development or program expansion will be critical to the successful design and resulting patient satisfaction of these efforts.
The ONC Cures Act Final Rule creates data exchange and transparency to promote patient-centered, innovative care across settings and institutions. Nurse Informaticists are well-positioned to lead the implementation of these changes – defining and driving safe and easy patient and provider-centered workflows.
One common theme should jump out in each of these recommendations. The hallmark of a well-crafted innovation solution is inclusion. Innovation is for everyone. Organizations can take intentional steps toward creating the environments that foster innovation by finding ways to allow diverse team members to share the best practices for serving an organization’s unique population. Giving nurses a seat at the table and supporting advanced nursing education to foster their ability to innovate will come back to the organization in multiple forms – loyalty and engagement, innovative solutions, advanced leadership, ideas, and ability to execute on an agenda.
Innovation does not just come from the current workforce, but from the future workforce as well. When possible, provide team-based learning scenarios so that the moment a new graduate walks into your institution is not their first exposure to working in collaboration with other care team members. Ensure that they have early exposure to EMRs and provide students insight into the numerous other apps you’ve chosen to deploy in your setting – who are they for, how and why were they selected, what workflows are associated with these tools. Finally, if your institution has a variety of settings such as mobile clinics, clinics in rural or low-income communities, if you are co-housed in a homeless shelter or other non-traditional setting, expose your student caregivers to these alternatives as early and often as possible and help them find their unique place and passion in healthcare. The more care moves into the community the more important it is for all of us to ensure we expose our future workforce to diverse settings.
Advancing Innovation Throughout the Organization
Building a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in any workplace takes time, intentionality, and should be grounded in both theory and practice. What is the institution’s vision for their culture of innovation and capturing a spirit of intrapreneurship/entrepreneurship within the workforce? Can the organization craft a mission and vision statement and make this information widely visible to all levels in the organization? A mission, vision, and roadmap are foundational artifacts to anchor this work. This may be paired with establishing an inclusive, centralized innovation center or hub to function as the stewards of innovation culture and be the vehicle for implementing the strategy. Elements of this center’s work may include:
Departmental trainings that teach teams about innovative processes within the department
Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship skill building to help all workforce members foster a sense of ownership, agency, and collaboration around ideas in their own department or in collaborative efforts across the organization
Event facilitator for innovation events such as pitch competitions or hackathons
Incubator for new solutions presented by any workforce member
Quality assurance resource for innovation, intrapreneur, and entrepreneur activities in the organization, ensuring that projects are inclusive and collaborative
Organizations that wish to survive and thrive in the future must take up a new mantle of embracing innovation and creating the environment for innovative ideas that will positively impact their workforce and patient success. Is your organization prepared to lead these new and innovative solutions?
Forum Solutions is a Seattle based Management Consulting firm that builds and implements effective strategies for transformative growth with sustainable results. We help leaders craft strategies and discover the most efficient path to success. With our help, clients become more agile, resilient and connected, bringing great ideas to fruition with brilliant results. From start-ups to the Fortune 50, business leaders rely on Forum Solutions to help them form and realize their strategies.