Innovate!

November 12, 2015 -- Today I toured Kaiser's Garfield Innovation Center where they simulate hospital and home environments for testing new technologies and refining caregiver workflows.

As with the military, Kaiser's processes for evaluating, selecting, testing and rolling out new tools and technologies are ponderous and lengthy. Often, by the time all the maintenance and support procedures are implemented, impacted work processes are updated, and staff are trained, the tool or tech is old news. But there are no short cuts. When you are steering a battleship, you must turn the wheel five miles before the ship responds.

One such innovative change touted at Garfield that is already old hat to us nurses is the don't-interrupt-me-while-I give-meds yellow sash. Simple as it is, it does work. Uninterrupted, the nurse is less likely to make a medication administration error. Yet it had to be tested in a safe environment, and the Garfield Center served this purpose well. Today, most nurses in hospitals use these sashes (or something similar) and error rates have gone down.

Another new technology -- this one dear to me as a proponent of mobile solutions for nurses (such as my NurseMind app) -- is smartphones. Kaiser is evaluating various ruggedized versions and deploying them for a variety of purposes such as secure messaging. I hope they will also consider checklists such as the nursing one I have built... And deploy it at the Garfield Center!

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