DiversityNursing Blog

By Sara Cheshire

Can we predict the future of medicine? Although designer babies and a disease-free world may or may not come to pass, you can get a glimpse of the most promising and upcoming medical innovations each year, via the Cleveland Clinic.

The clinic's Top 10 Medical Innovations list, which has been an annual undertaking since 2007, contains treatments and technologies that are expected to significantly change patient care and save lives.

To be considered, each innovation must have a good chance of being available to the public in the upcoming year, says Dr. Michael Roizen, chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic and chairman of the committee that decides the list. The committee must also expect it to have a significant impact on a large part of the population.

The process starts with a panel of Cleveland Clinic physicians and scientists who submit their ideas. These suggestions, which Roizen said totaled about 700 for the 2015 list, are then narrowed down and voted on by 40 physicians in a variety of health fields.

Here's what they selected for 2015:

1. Mobile stroke unit

Videoconferencing has made its way into ambulances, specifically for treating stroke victims on the go. Hospital stroke neurologists can interpret symptoms via a broadband video link and instruct an onboard paramedic, critical care nurse and CT technologist on treatment. This new technology should improve the speed of medical care, which is important as strokes quickly damage and kill brain cells.

2. Dengue fever vaccine

The World Health Organization reports that about half of the world's population is now at risk for dengue fever, which up until now was preventable only by avoiding mosquito bites. The disease is a leading cause of death and illness in children in some countries. A new vaccine has been developed and tested, and is expected to be available in 2015.

3. Painless blood testing

For those who hate large needles, a nearly painless way to sample blood will be a welcome relief. Plus, it will be cheaper and provide faster results than today's blood test. The new technology takes blood from your fingertip, and the Cleveland Clinic reports that over 100 tests can be performed on just one drop of blood.

4. New way to lower cholesterol

New self-injectable drugs called PCSK9 inhibitors have shown to be very effective in lowering cholesterol. These drugs may prove to be helpful for people with high LDL cholesterol who don't have good results with statins. The FDA is expected to approve the first PCSK9 in 2015.

5 ways to lower cholesterol

5. Cancer drug that doesn't harm healthy tissue

Although chemotherapy can save lives, it can be hard on the body and attack healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. A welcome breakthrough in the world of cancer treatment, antibody-drug conjugates can deliver targeted treatment without damaging healthy tissue.

6. Immune booster for cancer patients

Immune checkpoint inhibitors have been shown to prevent cancer cells from "hiding" from the immune system, allowing the body to more effectively fight these abnormal cells. Combined with chemotherapy and radiation treatment, the drugs have shown significant, long-term cancer remissions for patients with metastatic melanoma, one of the most deadly forms of cancer.

7. Wireless cardiac pacemaker

Until this point, wires have been a necessary component in pacemakers. A new wireless pacemaker about the size of a vitamin can now be implanted in the heart without surgery. Its lithium-ion battery is estimated to last about seven years.

8. New medications for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a life-threatening disease that causes scarring in the lungs, leading to breathing difficulties and a shortage of oxygen in the brain and other organs. Life expectancy is only three to five years after diagnosis, but those numbers may change now that the FDA has approved two experimental drugs that slow the disease: pirfenidone and nintedanib.

9. Single-dose radiation therapy for breast cancer

The National Cancer Institute estimates that 40,000 women in the United States will die from breast cancer in 2014. The Cleveland Clinic cites multiple chemotherapy appointments, sometimes requiring the patient to travel long distances, as a hindrance to successful treatment. Intraoperative radiation therapy is a new solution. It treats a breast cancer tumor during surgery in a single dose, reducing time and cost spent on treatment.

10. New drug for heart failure

About 5.1 million people in the United States suffer from heart failure, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It is managed with a combination of drugs, but a new drug, angiotensin-receptor neprilysin inhibitor, has been granted fast-track status by the FDA because of its ability to cut the risk of dying from heart failure more effectively than current treatments.

For more information on the annual medical innovations list, including descriptions and videos, download the "Innovations" app or visit the website. A "where is it now" feature also includes updates on innovations that made the top 10 list in prior years.

"We look in past to see what we voted on to improve the process," Roizen said. "With one exception, we've been pretty good."

Source: www.cnn.com

By Megan Murdock Krischke

“The nurses I work with are the smartest, funniest people I know. Our work causes us to problem-solve and to think critically about everything, and that leads us to coming up with solutions in every aspect of our lives.  It just fits that we would be inventors,” remarked Stacey Tatroe, RN, BSN, inventor of RN I.D. Scrubs.

Fellow nurse entrepreneur Sarah Mott, RN, agrees. “My colleagues and I were always making little inventions to provide patient care--like things to elevate a leg or to make an IV work. But we weren’t thinking about these as inventions. That is why I wanted to encourage other nurses to pursue their inventions and to bring their products to market.”

Mott has recently started her own company, Nurse Born. Her vision is to market products created by nurses that are inspired by practical experience.

“I want to encourage nurses to think about the needs of their colleagues and patients and then to pursue their ideas,” said Mott. “As the company grow, I would like to hire nurses who, because of an injury, can no longer tolerate long hours on the floor.”

Mott’s own work-related injury is part of the story of how she became a nurse inventor and a business owner.

“It has been a very long road. It started when I was working as a staff nurse on a post-op ortho floor. My neck was bothering me and I was uncomfortable with the stethoscope hanging on my neck. It also bothered me to keep an item that carried so many germs so close to my face. I was looking for an alternative way to carry it and I couldn’t find anything, and I thought someone should invent something,” she explained.

A few months later, her injury had progressed to the point that she had to take some time off work. At home and bored, she started experimenting with household items to create a stethoscope clip. Once she assembled a workable clip, she began pursuing a patent and was accepted into a free program where a local university student helped her apply for it. An engineer acquaintance of hers was willing to create a prototype.

In due time, her Stethoscope Holster became a reality, and is now the first product to be marketed through Nurse Born.

Mott says her biggest challenge so far is just getting the word out about her product.

“My experience as a nurse has helped me in my new career as an entrepreneur. I learned to be more confident and to trust my own judgment,” she stated. “Nursing helps you develop good instincts about people because you are constantly interacting with different kinds of people and personalities.”

Along the path of bringing her product to market, Mott was mentored by members of a local small business association as well as other nurse inventors she found through online research. She would love to provide that same kind of support to other nurse inventors and encourages them to contact her.

Tatroe is one of the inventors who mentored Mott.

Tatroe works as an ER nurse at Wellstar Health Systems in Atlanta, Ga., and fell into the role of nurse entrepreneur through a different route.

After working as an LPN for six years, she had completed her RN licensure and wanted to celebrate.

“For work that day, I hand-made scrubs that said RN and wore a sash and a crown!” she said. “What was so interesting was that colleagues I had worked with for years were surprised to find out that I wasn’t already an RN. Even though our licensure is written on our IDs, clearly no one was reading that. But they saw it when it was written on my scrubs.”

“It is frustrating for patients when they don’t know who is walking into your room.  Some hospitals use a color-coding system, and that can be helpful for the staff, but the code often remains unclear to patients, family members and providers who don’t work at the facility. I.D. Scrubs communicate to the patient, ‘I am your nurse. I am the one who is here to take care of you and answer your questions.’”

Tatroe pursued a patent and contacted her favorite scrub manufacturer, Cherokee Uniforms, to pitch her idea. They are now marketing her line as RN I.D. Scrubs.

Tatroe agrees with Mott that marketing can be the most challenging part of inventing a product and getting it off the ground.

“Every time I am at a trade show or show another nurse these scrubs, they love them and they ‘get it’ immediately. The challenge is getting the word out and letting nurses know that I.D. Scrubs are available,” she remarked. “I hope we will be able to expand the line to include IDs for all scrub-wearing clinicians and staff.”

Tatroe urges other nurses to pursue their ideas.

“Go for it!” she said. “You will never know unless you try. Think of all the innovations in history--what if those inventors hadn’t given it a go? You have to put yourself out there and work for it. Nothing comes easy or free.”

Source: TravelNursing.com

As a health care giver, you have a responsibility to ensure that they have adequate knowledge in order to provide competent nursing care. Malcolm Gladwell wrote about “rapid cognition,” or our innate sense of “knowing” in his 2005 book, “Blink.” If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it; it is a fascinating read for all nurses. Of it, Gladwell says:

“You could also say that it’s a book about intuition, except that I don’t like that word. In fact, it never appears in ‘Blink.’ Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings -- thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It’s thinking -- it’s just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with ‘thinking.’ In ‘Blink’ I’m trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?”

Within professional nursing, we call this concept “tacit knowledge.” It is not easily shared through lectures or books, but it comes with experience and knowing through repetitive, almost unaware situations and critical thinking. I explicitly learned about tacit knowledge (what an oxymoron) in my undergraduate nursing studies. However, I actually learned tacit knowledge while working with patients alongside more experienced nurses.

I picked it up from colleagues such as the night shift nurse, a LVN with 30 years of experience, who walked back to the desk after assessing a certain patient she’d cared for during the last three days saying, “I’m going to keep my eye on Mr. Second-Door-on-the-Left. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m going to watch him.” As the oh-so-terribly-young charge nurse, I’d walk in and assess him, too, especially because I knew he was scheduled for discharge some time the next day. Not seeing what my colleague saw nor anything in the chart to cause alarm, I brushed it off only to think, What the…???, as we called a code in the wee hours of the morning -- in between patient rounds because my colleague increased her routine patient checks, “just because.” Similar situations have happened to me numerous times, and I have learned to trust members of the nursing community when they sense something going awry with a patient.

Tacit knowledge is one way to improve patient care, though it’s hard to explain when you know it as well as when you learn it. What a mysterious and fascinating concept and feeling.

Source: NurseTogether

BY TAMMIE SMITH Richmond Times-Dispatch