Entrepreneurs and healthcare experts come together to create medical solutions

Improving the emergency room experience. Revolutionizing blood collection. A more flexible SurgiSlinky that would replace bone.

These are just some of the ideas that emerged from the eight-day Arizona Solutions for Global Health workshop presented by ASU Health on behalf of the Plus Alliance.

The workshop, which ended on August 14, was intended to find solutions to complex medical problems.

Twenty-one participants, including entrepreneurs, ASU faculty and graduate students, and healthcare professionals, were divided into five teams. Team members spent two days observing the clinical environment at the Barrow Neurological Institute and HonorHealth facilities, identifying a problem, and then spending several days developing a solution.

The teams then presented their ideas to the jury in three minutes in PBC Building 850 on the ASU campus in downtown Phoenix.

“This is important because it allows us to develop or design an innovative product or system that can improve patients’ lives,” said Michael Collins, executive director and clinical assistant professor at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and one of the participants.

The workshop is being held in collaboration with Kings College London. Genevieve Bautista Young, vice president and chief operating officer of ASU Health, said they hope to select some workshop participants to travel to Kings College at a later date to participate in a week-long immersion program with Professor Prashant Jha, the director of affordable medical technologies at Kings College, to further develop their ideas.

“We call it the Innovation Fellow experience,” Young said. “They work with mentors, talk about their ideas, and see if they can be transferred to different health systems. From there, they develop their idea further into viable solutions.”

“The workshop really focuses on the ideation process. How do you go from identifying a problem to an idea that could potentially be made into something?”

One team included Collins, Errold Glen Elad, an ASU graduate who founded the healthcare consulting firm Ethical Health Solutions, Ben Gifford, an internist at Honor Health, and Providencia Morales, a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Phoenix Health System.

On the second day of their clinic visits, team members spoke with doctors and nurses in the emergency department at Honor Health Scottsdale Thompson Peak Medical Center. Their goal: to generate an idea for how to improve a patient’s experience in the emergency department.

“How can we alleviate their fears and support the process?” asked Morales. “It’s about improving patient satisfaction.”

Gifford said one benefit of the workshop is that it provides a “fresh look” at a hospital’s processes and products.

“It’s extremely important to know what the problems are, where the frustration points are and where the blockages are,” he said. “Sometimes when you work in the health system, you become numb to these things because they are generally accepted. But the writing is on the wall, it’s quite obvious where the problems are, what they are, and it seems like there are obvious solutions.”

“Even if we can make a small difference, it could make a huge difference because these systems and processes could be implemented and adopted by other health systems in the coming years. So this could touch millions of lives.”

The team eventually came up with an idea called “Waypoints,” which they say will improve the patient experience and operational efficiency across Arizona’s 318 hospitals and reduce the 4.6% of patients who come to the emergency room without being seen.

Waypoints emphasizes better communication with patients once they walk through the door and offers video tutorials to help patients understand the emergency room process and the next steps in their care. Collins said the goal of Waypoints is to reduce patient anxiety.

“The problem is that going to the emergency room is annoying,” he said. “Can we follow the patient throughout their life so that they are not only more satisfied with the treatment but also more informed about what is going on?”

The team that developed Lab Cow, essentially a computer-controlled blood collection cart designed to speed up results and reduce errors in blood collection, received the highest overall score from the judges.

Young said the workshop “exceeded expectations in every way.”

“The observational expertise of our two clinical partners, Honor Health and Barrow Neurological Institute, the consistent engagement of our workshop participants throughout the eight days, the incredible support of our Edson E&I team, and the expertise of Prashant Jha… all of these things contributed to the overall success,” said Young. “Each team left the workshop with so much enthusiasm. We look forward to continuing to work with them to advance their ideas.”