St. Luke’s innovation lab ‘full steam ahead’

Background

It’s been about two-and-a-half years since UnityPoint Health-Cedar Rapids established an space for clinicians and other hospital staff to test their entrepreneurship.

In December 2019, the Cedar Rapids health system opened “generate,“ an innovation lab stocked with tools and equipment — including hand tools, a laser cutter, a 3D printer — as a place for hospital staff to build prototypes for their inventions.

It also has an operating system the technical skills needed to build their ideas and an on-site engineer to support makers.

Located on St. Luke’s Hospital’s first floor, the lab was established through a partnership with a Boston-based company called MakerHealth, a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Little Devices Lab.

St. Luke’s is the first hospital in the Midwest with the first nurse-run, hands-on fabrication lab, said Rose Hedges, St. Luke’s nursing research and innovation coordinator with the lab.

What’s happened since

Like the rest of the hospital, generate had to pivot to address COVID-19. But even then, productivity within the space was “full steam ahead,” Hedges said.

In the early days of the pandemic, it became the site where staff sewed cloth face masks for other clinicians. For months, its tools were used to create devices or reverse engineer supplies needed for day-to-day patient care as hospitals grappled with nationwide supply chain challenges.

In recent weeks, generate has pivoted to its “new normal” as hospitals recover from supply chain issues and turn a corner on the pandemic, Hedges said. Now, the lab is focusing on bringing more staff into the space to build their ideas.

“Health care is starting to bounce back from those initial challenges,” Hedges said. “ … I’m focused on making sure that nurses are aware of capabilities we have (at generate).”

Since generate opened at the end of 2019, it has had more than 1,300 visits, including about 180 repeat users of the space, Hedges said.

Hospital officials had hoped the lab would be a good retention tool for nurses and other staff, but so far they have only anecdotal evidence. Hedges said she is working to measure the lab’s impact based on user feedback.

Hedges said the lab also is seeing an increase in clinicians bringing patients into the space to build prototypes that would be helpful to their recovery.

She recounted an instance of an occupational therapist bringing a patient in so they could build something she could use to practice placing her 3-month-old baby into a crib.

Around 375 projects have been completed in the lab to date. Two of the inventions are on the path to obtaining intellectual property rights, Hedges said.

“Nothing is finalized yet. They’re still in the middle of the road, but it’s exciting,” she said.

The majority of the projects at the lab have been small creations used to aid day-to-day work at the hospital, or simple fixes to a problem identified by a staff member, Hedges said.

An example she pointed to was a nurse in the St. Luke’s nurse residency program who noticed many COVID-19 patients were experiencing a breakdown of the skin when placed long-term on a BiPap machine, which is a type of ventilator that provides oxygen through a mask that goes over the mouth and nose.

As a solution, the nurse created a way to place bandages around the edges of the mask to prevent that skin breakdown.

Inventions can be subject to open source sharing, meaning they can be shared with other health care institutions. One invention by a lab technician — to place custom LED light built into the iPads used by staff to scan patients’ ID wristbands — has been shared across the UnityPoint Health network for use in other hospitals.

“It’s something you can buy on the market for $100 or more, but we’re making it for a couple of dollars,” Hedges said.

Moving forward, Hedges said she hopes to establish community partnerships to bring groups from outside the hospital into the lab.

“We’re really excited to do this community outreach,” she said, “and hope we'll be continuing to grow bandwidth of internal makers.”

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