For the third year in a row, the Health Information and Management System Society (HIMSS) in collaboration with the American Nurses Association, hosted NursePitch at the annual HIMSS Conference. NursePitch is a competition designed to increase the voice, opportunity, and visibility of nurse-led innovation that showcases the innovation and creativity that nurses develop to solve creative solutions in healthcare.
Four finalists from across the country pitched their innovative products to a team of judges comprised of nurse leaders and a live audience at HIMSS21 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Judges scored the finalists on the competitiveness of the solution, potential growth of the product, and strength of the pitch. One of this year's judges was Joyce Sensmeier, Senior Advisor, Informatics at HIMSS. The most rewarding part of NursePitch for her is "learning about how these nurses were inspired to develop their idea, and to see those ideas crystalize into viable solutions." All four finalists were able to present and share these viable solutions and fielded questions from judges on their target market and costs of launching their products. All finalists presented were inspiring and creative. The winners were awarded monetary scholarships to assist them in continuing to grow and develop their ideas.
Nurses are continually innovating in their various roles as they work to develop creative solutions for real-world problems. NursePitch has created an opportunity for nurses to be recognized for their valuable contributions to the healthcare innovation space.
The HIMSS and American Nurses Association are pleased to announce the first place winner, Sigalit Marmorstein, MSN, PHN, FNP, founder of BabyLiveAdvice.
BabyLiveAdvice is a social enterprise that was meant to empower mothers and parents in hope to reduce maternal-child morbidity and mortality through education and support. BabyLiveAdvice's mission is to reduce costly complications and close gaps in maternal and infant care by using tech-enabled professional care providers in collaboration with health organizations, employers, and insurers to provide remote education, monitoring, and support to expectant mothers and new parents from preconception to early childhood.
The second place winner is Dr Carol Rosenberg, ND, DNP, founder of Ready.Sim.Go.
Ready.Sim.Go is dedicated to improving patient/caregiver education through simulation. There are 14 million parents or extended family caregivers of children ages 0 to 17 in the United States who have chronic or complex medical conditions. One in five pediatric patients experience an adverse event after hospital discharge, resulting in increased healthcare costs related to emergency department visits and readmissions. Ready.Sim.Go alleviates a significant burden on patients and families by using clinical simulation technology, providing home-based caregivers with the best possible education, training, and preparation for their often-daunting caregiving responsibilities.
The third place winners are Jodi Traver, PhD, RN, NE-BC, and Ayelet Ruppin-Pham, MN, RN, PHNA-BC, the team and founders of An e-Platform to Support Social Justice in Nursing.
An e-Platform to Support Social Justice in Nursing aims to highlight the need for an innovative approach to leverage technology in meeting social justice needs in healthcare with the use of a digital platform to support nurses' participation in a program of diversity, equity, and inclusion activities aimed at dismantling structural racism in at a large academic medical center in Southern California. The addition of a cloud-based e-program platform will exemplify how the organizational tenets of unifying and connecting are aligned with proactive inclusion efforts by bringing more transparency and accessibility to staff across the system and our community partners.
NursePitch is a vital platform for nursing innovation and the future of healthcare. Sensmeier added, "Many healthcare organizations don't have a formal process to encourage or recognize nurse-led design and innovation. The contribution that HIMSS and ANA are making, along with our sponsor BD, is to create that public opportunity for nurses to share their innovation with our audience - which is their target audience - the health IT ecosystem. Through the broad reach of HIMSS and ANA, nurse innovators are able to gain visibility for their product and reach a larger audience to advance their solution."