Nurses: The Everyday Innovators

The label of "innovator" isn't frequently applied to the nursing field, yet nurses are the daily trailblazers, seamlessly merging the realms of compassionate care, clinical workflows, and technology. Nurses work in virtually all fields of clinical acuity, complexity, and specialty, assuming challenging roles to deliver care. Their skills of triage and assessment, critical thinking, and problem-solving are essential for excellent care delivery. Nurses must provide continual physical assessment surveillance combined with our knowledge and interpretation derived from various types of medical technology devices that helps guide our care sometimes literally minute to minute, second to second.

Nurses are constant innovators at the forefront of patient care while simultaneously creating innovative solutions for the clinical challenges we encounter while providing care. Our insights to patient care make our contributions to the development of health technology instrumental. We are the connections between patient care and technology and have the critical problem solving skills to refine the technology being utilized for patient care. Our unique perspectives derived from hands-on patient care serve as our inspiration to create meaningful solutions to drive better outcomes, more efficient workflows, and streamline clinical processes. 

Nurse leaders cannot remain in obscurity within the healthcare technology industry, as our voices represent over half of the healthcare workforce. Nurses hold the potential to wield substantial influence in the healthcare technology sector. It's imperative to position them in decision-making capacities to spearhead success and innovation. So often we are the actual end users of technology solutions, thus it would be only natural to seek out our clinical expertise to ensure these clinical solutions are indeed user-friendly, intuitive and clearly aligns with clinical workflows, which in turn increases adoptions rates and usability. Nurses are the voices of the patients we care for and we can be the key to ensuring that developing technology solutions prioritize all patients’ safety, privacy, and dignity at all times. It is our patient advocacy and clinical expertise that helps to always protect the well-being of patients when designing, implementing, and optimizing healthcare technology solutions.

The nursing profession is confronting a multitude of crises unlike any seen before. We are facing shortages, burnout, unsafe patient ratios, heavy workloads while trying to navigate the ever changing technology and policy changes. Nurses simply want to take great care of their patients without intrusive and useless technology and administrative tasks. I am so proud to be a clinical leader at IKS Health and a part of a team and to work for leaders that understand the importance of having clinicians as a part of their team.  Working at IKS Health fills me with pride, as I have the opportunity to collaborate with nurses globally, empowering them to rediscover the joy of nursing by leveraging the combination of  technology while still maintaining a human touch in every solution we develop.  IKS Health is dedicated to ensuring nurses are given more time for hands-on care while also providing the safest, efficient, compassionate, and effective care for all of our patients. 

About the author

Lesley J. Mathis is a nurse innovator and has emerged as a clinical expert in healthcare technology specializing in solutions and protocol development for complex/critical patient populations. Prior to entering the healthcare technology industry, Lesley worked as a bedside nurse in CCU/CVICU and then became the Nurse Practitioner for the Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Lesley then shifted her career and became the clinical director of one of the most successful RPM programs for one of the largest payers in the United States. Under her leadership and clinical guidance, this program reduced Congestive Heart Failure readmissions by 40% and reduced medical costs by 2.8 million. After several years, Lesley went to work for Care Innovations, where she played a key role in developing solutioning strategies for large payers, providers, and pharma. Lesley continues to be very passionate about the importance of healthcare technology/digital health. Lesley earned her MSSW from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and her Master’s in Nursing from Vanderbilt University. She is an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.