We need innovators in a crisis, and during the pandemic, the nursing community has been bursting with new ideas and creative solutions to improve patient care and public health. One of the biggest boosters of nurses’ role in healthcare innovation is the American Nurses Association (ANA), which has just announced the winners of its 2021 fourth annual Innovation Awards.
Individual Innovation Winner
Awards are nothing new for RN Rebecca Cherney. The Michigan Medicine Intermediate Care Nurse won the hospital’s Nurse Hero award last year for an above-and-beyond 3D printing project she organized to counter the state’s PPE shortage last spring.
Cherney really stepped up her innovation game, though, when she developed her breakthrough TrachTrail ™ program, the ANA’s 2021 Individual Innovation Award winner. Michigan Medicine describes it as “the first comprehensive, standardized adult tracheostomy care education program of its kind, focusing on combined nurse, patient and caregiver training.” The ANA Innovation team noted that Covid-19 has increased the need for adult tracheostomies by 15-20%. Cherney’s bright idea fills an important gap at a vital time, the ANA explained: “There were few standardized training programs available for adults in the self-care of tracheostomies before discharge, leaving nurses unable to effectively instruct patients and caregivers in the skills needed to care for their tracheostomy at-home.”
Cherney’s accessible multimedia guide has already been road-tested, and the data suggest that it can help to improve new tracheostomy patients’ quality of life. While testing TrachTrail™ on a progressive care unit in 2017, the length of hospital stays on the unit dropped from an average of 64.8 days to an average of 16.6 days, and a wider hospital implementation is planned for 2021-2022. (For a detailed study on the TrachTrail™, see this May 2020 study co-authored by Cherney).
Nurse-Led Team Innovation Winners
This year’s nurse-led team award is being presented to a pair of entrepreneurial DNPs. Dr. Pritma Dhillon-Chattha, DNP, MHA, RN and Dr. Brighid A. Gannon DNP, PMHNP-BC met at Yale when they both enrolled in the Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program. After receiving their DNPs in 2018, Dhillon-Chattha returned to Canada to open a cosmetics injectables company, while Gannon founded a nursing home consulting group in New York with 14 psychiatric nurse practitioners. The pair had talked about possible joint business ventures before, but when the pandemic arrived, they engaged in serious brainstorming. The result? Lavender, an online psychotherapy service.
Both DNPs agreed that they had to work fast, and they had to work smart. Gannon, a New Yorker, told the Yale School of Nursing News, “We recognized that there was a time-sensitive need. New York was literally in crisis. Part of our mission was that we wanted to help people as soon as possible. We wanted to launch quickly, even if things weren’t perfect.” As Gannon started recruiting psychiatric NPs, Dhillon-Chattha employed her clinical informatics expertise and focused on the technology. They opened Lavender in May 2020.
Unlike brick-and-mortar psychotherapy offices—many of which had to hastily adjust their systems to accommodate virtual appointments, Gannon and Dhillon-Chattha designed their practice to specifically address the needs of online therapy. This helped them to avoid the common pitfalls encountered by office-based practices. Gannon recounted some of the key pain points: “So many of my colleagues are fully booked and have no more referrals. [And as] many providers don’t offer email as a method of contact, getting a hold of them by phone is near impossible. There’s no pricing transparency, and no one will tell you how much these services actually cost. What a shame that when you’re already feeling down and struggling that the process of accessing mental health services is re-traumatizing.”
Dillon-Chattha told the Yale School of Nursing, “Telehealth has been a viable option for many years, and now the system is being forced to embrace it. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of telehealth by at least five years. This will help seniors, rural patients, and those with different abilities safely access the care they need.”
The individual nurse and nurse-led team winners will be awarded $25,000 and $50,000, respectively, to support the development and implementation of their products over the next year. Award winners have a year to further develop their projects and will share their outcomes and findings in 2022.
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