Innovation program helps nurses and frontline workers at Main Line Health bring medical inventions to market

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Registered nurse Colleen Rogers spent decades working with patients undergoing surgical operations or rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries.

Her job could be physically taxing, especially shifting patients around to redress wounds or take care of healing incisions.

“Most patients cannot hold that lower extremity while I do my dressing or do the care that I need to,” Rogers said. “I would always have to go get a second nurse to hold that limb while I did the dressing change. And the nursing shortage as it is, it was very hard to find another nurse who wasn’t busy.”

She began to think about ways to make the job easier.

“Every time I struggled with another nurse to get something accomplished, it was just always in the back of my mind,” Rogers said.

It wasn’t until she was working at Main Line Health in the Philadelphia suburbs that she had an opportunity to look for a solution.

Through a joint partnership with the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, Lankenau Ventures and other firms, the health system provides a pathway for frontline staff to invent devices that could improve the delivery of care.

The program has already brought various products to market, including Rogers’ limb support device, which is a lightweight stackable set of blocks that nurses or therapists can use to secure a patient’s leg or arm for treatment.

They may not be the flashiest inventions, but health care workers say these simple everyday solutions can go a long way in making the experience better for patients and providers.

“The fact that we can give them the opportunity to bring their ideas forward and then actually get to a full invention, it’s a super cool thing,” said Barbara Wadsworth, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Main Line Health.

Bringing devices from drawing to bedside

Identifying a problem and coming up with an idea on how to solve it can be the easy part, said Tanara Boursiquot, an advanced nurse clinician who manages home care teams in Chester and Montgomery counties.

For years, she saw home care nurses struggle to place Foley catheters in women, which involves inserting a flexible tube up into a patient’s bladder to drain urine.

The process requires a health provider to use one hand to sterilize and hold the patient in place while using the other hand to guide the tube in without assistance from another nurse or aide.

“And you have to get it right the first time,” Boursiquot said. “If you don’t, then that’s a problem because then you’re running the risk of compromising the sterile technique, the sterility of the Foley.”

Boursiquot had an idea for a small U-shaped device that could be used in the genital area to hold the patient in place and allow nurses to use both hands to insert the tube. She considered submitting a proposal for the invention program.

“I’m not an artist, but I started making drawings,” she said. “And I put the drawings aside for about six weeks because I thought, ‘This is stupid, no one’s going to take this seriously.’ But then I’m like, you know what, the worst thing that can happen is I submit my idea and they shoot it down. And at best, then they might say, ‘Oh, this is really interesting, tell me more.’”

It was the latter. Program researchers and engineers helped refine the drawings, obtain a patent and manufacture prototypes. The AccuCatheter Kit is currently undergoing clinical trials. So far, Boursiquot said the feedback has been positive.

“It’s one thing to have the prototype and to have samples and everything. It’s another thing to be able to speak to the fact that it actually works,” she said.

Creating a new class of health care inventors

The innovation pipeline at Main Line is unique, Wadsworth said, in that it includes practicing health care workers who have direct insight into the problems facing providers and patients.

Wadsworth herself recently got a patent for a device intended to reduce injuries that occur after falls, which are the leading cause of injury in people 65 and older. In hospitals, these falls most often occur in patient bathrooms, where there are many hard surfaces.

“I’ve had patients actually die from their fall in the hospital,” Wadsworth said. “That is heartbreaking and certainly not why people come to the hospital and trust us with their loved ones or with their own care.”

She developed a robot-like device that uses motion sensors to detect falls in real time. Then, it could deploy an inflatable cushion onto the floor, similar to an air bag in cars.

“So the patient will still fall, but they will fall onto the airbag and they will not hit their head or break their ribs or break their arm or their hip or anything else,” she said.

Lankenau Institute for Medical Research is now looking for partners to invest in the device and create prototypes.

“I did not know I was an inventor,” Wadsworth said and laughed. “But if we can keep patients safe, that’s what we’re going to do.”