Anna Young will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans to live longer to understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector.
Nurses have been at the forefront of healthcare innovation for hundreds of years, but they need help. Anna Young is working to speed up that process with MakerNurse and MakerHealth, a pair of projects which are giving healthcare professionals the tools to quickly and cheaply improve patient care.
Young, who will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016, began her career building solar-powered sterilisation tools for use in developing countries. "I was always intrigued by medical devices and inspired by the role of healthcare providers," she explains. "I knew I could never be a doctor or nurse but wanted to just really be a part of 'how do we make that system work better?'".
Her 'Solarclave', which came out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Little Devices group, is made out of a bucket, a pressure cooker and a handful of pocket-sized mirrors. Despite its Macgyver-like appearance, it can sterilise medical instruments in rural clinics that may be off-grid using nothing but sunlight and locally-available materials. It's small enough to be easily transportable and can be set up by one person.
Rolling the Solarclave out across Latin America, Young says, not only taught her the fundamentals of the design process but also opened her eyes to the innovation taking place in clinics around the world. "We would find these artefacts of things that had been fabricated all across the hospitals and then once we started to ask 'Where did these come from? Who made these?', we found out that it was the nurses inside of the hospital who were creating them."
It was a discovery that led directly to the beginnings of MakerNurse, which supports hospital staff in building their own medical devices. "I connect with the nurses, understand what they want to prototype and hand off the tools to them," she explains. "My job is not to make the devices for them but to figure out what are the tools that I can hand off to a nurse so that they can very quickly realise their idea."
Young quickly realised that innovation doesn't just happen among nurses -- doctors, surgeons and even patients come up with solutions too. That's when MakerHealth was born. "We realised healthcare doesn't need more silos," she says. "If anything we need a better way to exchange information, to exchange prototypes and to build up the capacity of all healthcare professionals and patients so that they can be better makers and better peers in evaluating the solutions."
And there's been no shortage of innovations. At the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), staff are prototyping templates that show where to connect the 12 different leads that come out of an electrocardiogram unit, making the setup process more intuitive. At Drischol Children's Hospital, one nurse had been making diapers that work with catheters for newborn patients. The MakerNurse program was able to help refine the design, suggesting that tubes be fed through slits rather than circles to let them lie flatter and reduce irritation.
Some of the prototypes have proven particularly effective. In one burn unit, staff developed a PVC shell with four embedded medical-grade shower heads that sits over a patient's bed to irrigate their wounds. "Critical care nurses typically spend seven hours a day over the top of the patient to rinse them off after they come in with a burn," Young explains. "Now they can just position these four shower heads over the top of the patient in the bed and go about taking care of them while their hands aren't tied up holding the shower head."
Dealing with bureaucracy such as billing codes and payment structures can be a challenge, but so far, Young says, the hospitals working with MakerHealth are those most willing to move quickly. "Every single hospital that we're working with was able to execute the protocol for an institutional review board in four to five weeks," she explains. "For us, that's tremendous. It means that if our team can come in and design this study in four to five weeks, then hospital staff who want to design studies are going to come up against a similar timeline. That's really important when you're building a culture of experimentation."
She recognises, however, that this may prove a challenge in the coming years: "I think that is the thing that we're going to come up against the most. This notion of experimentation and tinkering. How do healthcare workers internalise this and weave it into their practice?" Both MakerHealth and MakerNurse only operate in the Americas, but Young says she would like to support healthcare workers worldwide. "We have heard from a lot of nurses over in Europe," she says. "A few of them sent pictures of things that they had made, or modified, or wanted to make. So I know that there is at least a stealth community, and we would love to figure out ways to support that making at an institution level as well."
Meanwhile, in the US, staff at UTMB's makerspace are set to partner with Nasa for a series of brainstorming sessions. "Staff from the hospital makerspace are going to be working alongside astronauts to prototype around what a medical device design looks like in extreme environments," she says. "It's really, really exciting for us to think that now these connections are being made in ways that everybody is going to benefit from and that are really going to possibly even change how devices get prototyped in space. That's really cool."
Ultimately, Young says, her goal is to show others that prototyping new devices isn't scary or difficult. "It's not so complicated that you need to have all sorts of training on how to do this," she says. "As much as I love to tinker, I get more excited when I get an email or phone call from occupational therapists or nurses or even patients who say 'Look what I made. I made this.' To me that's the most gratifying part."
Anna Young will be speaking at WIRED Health 2016 on 29 April in London. From helping humans to live longer and hacking our performance, to repairing the body and understanding the brain, WIRED Health will hear from the innovators transforming this critical sector.
Now in its third year, tickets are still available for this incredibly popular one-day event. Discounts are available for NHS and government employees and for people working for health sector startups.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
