Innovative Nursing: Enhancing Care Through Empowerment

Health care might not traditionally be associated with innovation, but it is indeed the driving force behind transforming patient care, streamlining processes, and ultimately saving lives. The creation and adoption of new ideas are often hindered by health care's traditional mindsets and outdated systems. This is where a new program from Johnson & Johnson, Penn Nursing, and the Wharton School steps in. 
 
The Nurse Innovation Fellowship Program aims to advance healthcare through a one-year team-based initiative for chief nursing officers (CNOs), nurse executives, and senior nurse leaders. The goal is to equip them with the knowledge, tools, and guidance they need to effect change within health systems. As frontline workers in patient care, these nurses have unique insights into both patients' needs as well as operational nuances. 
 
Jill Wegener of Blythedale Children's Hospital was part of this program’s first cohort. She explains how invaluable it was for her small hospital team to connect with other industry leaders nationwide while learning from top academic advisors at Penn Nursing and the Wharton School. 
 
"Nurses typically enter the profession to heal," she says. "We often don't recognize our potential impact on designing health-care systems, policies that optimize patient care, or creating an innovative work environment." According to Wegener, future nurse leaders must be influential at all levels: within their hospitals’ leadership teams, governance boards, and even politically. 
 
This fellowship helped participants like Wegener expand their typical training regimen beyond just medical education, providing business knowledge that complements existing skills when advocating for healthcare reform at various levels. 
 
During the application process, prospective teams were asked about current challenges they wanted to tackle using innovations learned during the fellowship year. For the Blythedale Children’s Hospital team, this challenge was improving transitions of medically complex children from hospital facilities into home communities—something that had been a focus area internally for eight years yet remained fraught with barriers to ensuring a successful transition home. 
 
Through extensive discussions with stakeholders during the course of the fellowship, the team was able to better understand the complexities and inefficiencies of the community system where patients were being transferred. This led to the design of an innovative app that would help support medically complex patients and their families after discharge. 
 
"We designed a HIPAA-compliant application that keeps us connected with our families post-discharge," says Wegener. The program provided resources and mentorship for this process, including business-related topics such as scaling opportunities, market influence, and return on investment analysis, among others. 
 
Beyond just working on the app, Blythedale Children’s Hospital is exploring partnerships with other hospitals for the next phase—creating a safety net at the state level through legislative changes supporting access to competent community healthcare providers across New York State. "This isn't just a New York problem but also a national one," says Wegener, adding that even after graduation from the fellowship program, collaboration continues, with instructors expressing interest in ongoing advocacy efforts if they go national. 
 
In conclusion, Wegener extols the transformative nature of the Nurse Innovation Fellowship Program, saying it exceeded all expectations in terms of professional enhancement and career change potential. She emphasizes how networking within the course framework has had substantial benefits beyond formal study components, equipping her with theories, skills, and processes now applicable back at her organization while navigating the innovation design process instilled by the Penn Nursing Wharton School team during the fellowship year.