Healthcare has always been a hotbed of innovation, though it seems today to be moving forward at light speed, with a wide range of advancements to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, safety, accessibility, and quality of healthcare services at the bedside and behind the scenes.
We’re talking healthcare innovation today with two national experts whom we met up with at HLTH 2023, including Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Chief Innovation Officer, and nurse futurist Bonnie Clipper, RN.
Guests:
Bonnie Clipper, DNP, MA, MBA, RN, CENP, FACHE, FAAN, Founder & CEO, Innovation Advantage
Eric V. Jackson, Jr., MD, MBA, Chief Innovation Officer, Nemours Children’s Health
Producer, Host: Carol Vassar
EPISODE 42 TRANSCRIPT
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the Nemours Children’s Health Podcast.
Each week, we’ll explore anything and everything related to the 80% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar, and now that you are here, let’s go.
Music:
Let’s go. Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
To innovate is to make change in something that’s already established by introducing new methods or ideas, or products. Healthcare has always been a hotbed of innovation, though it seems today to be moving forward at light speed with a wide range of advancements to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, safety, accessibility, and quality of healthcare services at the bedside and behind the scenes. We’re talking healthcare innovation today with two national experts who we met up with at Health 2023, including Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours’ Chief Innovation Officer, who we’ll hear from shortly.
Joining us first is Bonnie Clipper. Bonnie has been a nurse for over 30 years, serving in leadership positions for much of that time. A Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellow class of 2014, Bonnie served as the first-ever vice president of innovation for the American Nurses Association. Today, she heads up her own consultancy, Innovation Advantage, which helps hospitals and healthcare systems create the vision, strategy, outcomes, and structure to build an inpatient virtual nursing model.
An active national voice advocating for all nurses, Bonnie recently authored a book entitled The Innovation Handbook, A Nurse Leader’s Guide to Transforming Nursing. We began our conversation by learning more about her take on the state of nursing in the U.S. today. By the way, early in our interview, Bonnie uses the acronym VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Here’s Bonnie Clipper.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
It’s a little bit of a tough spot, right? And I am trying to walk the line on that. It’s very chaotic. It is what we would call a VUCA environment. We are seeing numbers continue to increase in terms of turnover. It is extremely difficult, not impossible, but extremely difficult to retain our younger nurses. So if you cannot imagine all of this like a workforce pipeline, we have the supply and demand as we’re putting the input into the supply side from nurses coming out of nursing school, we’re burning them out and churning them out. So it’s really not helping us provide stability to the nursing workforce pipeline.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
You contend that there’s a need to transform the whole way we do nursing. Talk about that.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
Yeah, it’s a clown show, so we no longer have time to keep tweaking around the edges, right? We are in a major state of transformation or disruption, sorry, and we have to lean very, very heavily into doing things completely different. That means transforming the health system. Everything from how we staff, how we create roles, how we train, how we deliver care, how we document, everything has to be transformed. And if we don’t do that, we’re going to lose our young nurses because they have no patience with us. We remain as a profession, very, very tangled up, and it’s difficult for us all to be on the same page with things.
What happens is that younger nurses, they have a lot of audacity, more than many of us had throughout our profession. So when they get ticked off, they vote with their feet, and I love that about them because I never would’ve had the guts to do that. So I think we have to listen to them, we have to include them, we have to involve them. Everything isn’t about money, but we do have to compensate nurses fairly. Everything isn’t about workload, but their job cannot be undoable.
We use these archaic systems that we call workload and productivity and ratio, which is the worst word ever for our profession. So we talk about it like we’re making mufflers. How many nurses per how many patients? That’s antiquated. It no longer flies. Patients are much more complex. There’s an intensity to the workload that we’ve not seen in the past. Families are very dysfunctional and very dynamic, and when you put nurses in the mix that only have a couple of years experience at the bedside, we are seeing the gap widen between the complexity of patients and the experience of nurses.
So the experience complexity gap continues to widen, and in that gap, what we’re seeing is poor patient experience, poor nurse experience, also, we’re seeing untoward events, more of them. So, falls, errors, we’re seeing documentation issues. We are seeing a lot of negatives that are happening out of what we continue to try to push as this ratio a very, very rigid system. So we have to change it. We have no choice.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What are the young nurses telling you, especially the ones perhaps that you’ve talked with who have walked away, that could be brought to bear to make the system a little bit better? I’m thinking maybe digital technology.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. So young nurses, I mean, I have the good fortune to be in a fair amount of hospitals around the country, and young nurses, I mean, I’ve had them tell me that they would rather work at Starbucks and share an apartment with a friend than go out on their own, rent a nice apartment and have a job that’s just crushing them, burying them. The workload is so hard and the complexity is so hard. So I think we’re at this very, very pivotal time where, as a profession, we have five generations right now. Literally, we are seeing our traditionalists, our Boomers, our Xers, our Millennials, our Zers, and everyone has different needs. Everyone communicates very, very differently. And if we can’t figure out how to speak everyone’s language, we will continue to repel and to lose nurses. So I think we’re going to have to figure out how to come to grips with the fact that if there just are not enough humans, we have no choice but to adopt technology.
We still can’t wrap our brains around that. We have a lot of these underlying and very long-standing kind of inferior thoughts about ourselves as a profession. Perhaps it’s because we’re 90% female. I don’t know. What I do know is that if we don’t get a grip and shake that off, we’re going to be in serious trouble. I think we have the likelihood of being replaced and start to break into two or three pieces as a profession. We’ll have very educated nurse people that are maybe leaders, problem solvers, strategists. When we will have a very heavy cadre of people that are laying hands on patients and providing patient care.
So I think we’re going to have to figure out what this looks like. There’s a lot of very, very good technology out there that can assist us if we allow it. In order to do that, though, we actually have to be involved in the design and development, and quite often, as we see, even here at health, if you walk around to 10 or 20 booths and ask them, “Have you had nurses provide you insight or feedback or how have you gotten the voice of the nurse in these workflows?” They haven’t. They don’t go out and do that. So it continues.
It drives us mad in nursing because we know that our voice needs to be amplified and needs to be shared, and I think that more and more over time if we don’t find ways to do that in these technology solutions, the solutions may not even solve a real problem that we have. And certainly they may not work in an optimal way because of the workload, the workflows, the workforce. I mean, we’re all very, very different, but first, we have to be at the table.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It sounds like you feel unheard as an industry.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
I think that’s probably a really good way to put it. So, I think that we are generally unheard. Now, the question is have we done that to ourselves, or is that just very traditional and kind of a legacy problem that continues to perpetuate? So from my perspective, I mean my superpower I think, is that I am a malcontent that can create change. So when you use that as a jumping-off point, it means nothing is ever going to be good enough. And I think right now, if you ask nurses if they feel heard and if their voice comes through in the technology, I think the answer is going to be no. So there’s tremendous opportunity in doing that.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It sounds like culture needs to change. One of your chapters is actually called culture is the foundation of innovation.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
Culture is absolutely the foundation. And you know, having been in healthcare, you know that we continue to eat our young. We continue to bully our new grads, our young nurses, even nurses that have been around for a while. So if we can’t figure out how to actually treat each other well, how can we expect anyone else to treat us well?
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
We’ve laid out a very dire situation here. Give me some words of hope, Bonnie.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
Yeah, so here’s what I think is going to be positive. I think young people, they’re chomping at the bit, they want to get involved, and that’s actually what gives me hope is they have brilliant and amazing ideas. I think we need to unleash them. I think we need to let them get out there and do their thing; work their magic. These are tech natives, right? They’re not afraid of technology. So let them go. Let us figure out how to create better systems, whether it’s around documentation, whether it’s around how we’re going to use our EHRs, whether it’s around how we’re going to use predictive staffing. We have to stop fighting the systems and instead make them better so we can trust them and adopt them. We’re running out of excuses.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Talk about what it takes to create a future-facing care model, which is another chapter in your book.
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
Yeah, absolutely. So in my opinion, to be future-facing, it means that we really have to take a step back and think about what is the care that we want to deliver to a patient? Are we seeing the patients in the right location? Right now, we still are very, very heavy on fee-for-service, putting patients in hospital beds and treating them there. As we continue to work towards value-based care, we’ll begin to make more sense to us to put patients in the most cost-effective place to render care. And in many ways, that’s their home. So hospital-at-home continues to grow. We still have the CMS waiver that is paying for hospital-at-home visits at the same rate that you are paid for an inpatient visit. So financially, that’s worthwhile to hospitals that deploy that methodology of care delivery. I think we also have to start to think about not only where’s the right place for patients to receive that care, who’s the right person to deliver it.
So, in nursing, because we have navigated through the system that we’ve created, we still use nurses to do a lot of functions that we do not need nurses to do. So, about thirty-six percent of our time is actually spent on non-value-added tasks and documentation. Imagine what it looks like if you have a service robot on every patient care team that does the hunting and gathering, and fetching. So I’m no longer running down and getting my central line tray or my Foley kit, but rather, I’m having a robot go get it and bring it to my room. Imagine what it looks like if we change up the care teams and make sure that the nurses are operating at the top of their license instead of doing a lot of things that they don’t necessarily have to do. Now, I also don’t want to negate the value in that, right?
So, nurses shouldn’t be giving baths. We really shouldn’t be getting patients up in chairs. We really shouldn’t be feeding patients. However, there’s a lot that happens during those interactions. It’s very valuable. We’re doing an assessment. We’re doing skin assessments. We’re trying to see is the patient capable of eating? How well are they doing? What’s their mobility? So a lot of those pieces are intertwined, and it’s not just as simple as don’t get patients out of bed anymore, right? It’s much more complex than that.
So, I think we have to figure out how do we get the right people at the bedside doing the right thing. We also know that the documentation burden, we call that administrative burden now. Documentation burden, it’s ruthless. So, we are spending thirty-six percent of our time on non-value-added tasks and documentation. It’s very difficult for physicians and for other disciplines as well.
Why aren’t we moving faster into a system that allows us to do voice-activated documentation, right? We’re using ambient computer vision and ambient computer sound in patient rooms to detect falls and to assist us with virtual nursing. Why aren’t we using that technology, like Siri or Alexa, to document repositioning a patient, emptying a catheter bag, feeding a patient, changing a dressing? It feels as though that should happen much quicker than it is. And we’ve had technology around for probably 15 years for physicians to do voice-to-text documentation. We’ve had nuance. We’ve had drag and dictation around for a very long time. The reason that we didn’t use that for nurses predominantly was the cost.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
But wouldn’t it be worth it in the end?
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
It would be absolutely worth it because those are among the pain points. So those are some of the reasons, and if you put yourself in the brain of young people and you’re thinking it’s an entirely different world today than it was, I graduated 30 plus years ago, it’s an entirely different world. So you think about what nurses are doing at the bedside, and it’s sort of just one more pebble in that bucket, and literally, eventually, that bucket’s going to tip over.
So my meds are not all here when I need to give them. All of a sudden I got a call because imaging is coming faster than they said they were, and my patient’s not yet been fed and had their meds and up in a chair. I have to get my other patient ready to go to surgery. I have a discharge that’s antsy and wants to get out the door. I have to complete all my documentation, and I got to get all this done within a certain timeframe because I also have to pay attention to all of the quality and safety metrics and the documentation that we do. It’s just like we keep giving them reasons to make the job undoable.
Instead, I would say, let’s rebuild the job and make them successful. Let’s figure out how to do that instead of giving them just one more reason to leave. And like we talked about a minute ago, young people, these guys, they got no patience. So when we do stupid things, they’re gone, and it’s because we’ve given them the reason to leave.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Where do you see nursing in 10 years, 20 years, when the new nurses who came out in May are the nurse leaders? Where would you like to see the industry?
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
I think we’re going to look entirely different. I really hope that we’re much more interdisciplinary on the floors. I don’t have a crystal ball, but assuming that all of the value-based purchasing kinds of things and value-based care happens the way that we believe it will, I think we’re going to see the sickest patients in the hospital. And what that means is that we’re actually going to have to dial up on our home health processes because we’ve kind of gutted those. So we’re going to have to dial up on that. And if you think about it, it’s the same workforce, right? Nurses. So we’re going to have to figure out how do we create that shift? Do we shift them from acute care inpatient to home care? Do we shift them from acute care inpatient to post-acute or long-term acute care or other things? So, we have a finite supply. We are going to have to figure out how we shift them.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What are the barriers to getting to that future state?
Bonnie Clipper, RN, CEO of Innovation Solutions:
I think, with all due respect, I think it’s often us. I think it’s difficult for us to think about things differently and to move fast enough to get there. I really would love to see hospitals and organizations around the country move quicker through a small test of change through rapid cycle change processes. Whether you adopt a Six Sigma or a Lean methodology or a human-centered design approach, I think we’re going to have to get much faster at testing what works.
And the biggest issue with change is honestly hard-wiring it because it’s very difficult to change. And right now, we are at a point that there is so much change that you might, if you were a nurse and you take a week vacation or a two-week vacation, you might come back and literally not know, am I supposed to document here today? Or is there a different flow sheet, or am I supposed to call this number if somebody’s late? So much changes. So I think we’re going to have to do a much better job at change management and hard-wiring things, and then let’s automate everything we can.
Med reconciliation takes a tremendous amount of time. We do it on admission and discharge. Why are we not automating that? Why are we not using pharmacy techs to do that? Why is it nurses that are doing that? So I think that this is where we’re going to have the opportunity to literally just continue to push hard on all of the disruptions and try to put things back together very, very differently.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Bonnie Clipper is the founder and CEO of Innovation Advantage and the author of “The Innovation Handbook, A Nurse Leader’s Guide to Transforming Nursing.”
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According to the American Hospital Association, Hospital at Home is an innovation that enables some patients who need acute-level care to receive that care in their homes rather than in a hospital. This care delivery model has been shown to reduce costs, improve outcomes, and enhance the patient experience. It’s just one of the many ideas that Dr. Eric Jackson wants to bring to Nemours Children’s Health as Chief Innovation Officer. What is a Chief Innovation Officer within a healthcare system such as Nemours? Here’s Dr. Eric Jackson.
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
For the purposes of Nemours Children’s Health, we think of the Chief Innovation Officer in several ways. One is we think about the role in terms of bringing innovation toward enhancing care delivery. It’s not so much as a research position because research is a form of innovation also, although we interact and we understand that process. So we partner when we see strategic moments to take whatever research-based activities ongoing, and to bring it in a more full way to the entire system.
The other area would be programs. So, for example, Hospital at Home is an example of an innovation where we’re also thinking about. Another domain of interest includes that of strategic partnerships with startups and various commercial entities that advance the care of children and align with our core values and the things that we’re working on. So we’re always paying attention to that, and some of those activities may include investment opportunities. So, that’s part of the portfolio of actions that I have so far.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I want to go back to the panel that you did here at Health, and the panel was called an Introduction to the Technology and Human Aspects of the “New Children’s Healthcare”. What is changing technologically that’s going to take Nemours and Children’s Health in general to that next level where we can really, truly serve kids better and raise the healthiest generation of children ever?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
There are several things. One is we have economy-of-scale when it comes to highly reliable monitoring systems and patients. So now a patient can be in the home, and the hospital, at a very low cost, can monitor their heart rates with wearables and all kinds of devices accurately. Video conferencing as a result of COVID is ubiquitous now. Families are using it. It’s not cumbersome technology. It’s very easy technology to use. So, there are tremendous healthcare advances with that. And then lastly, the ability to process large data sets and draw conclusions from them.
So when we talk about artificial intelligence, machine learning and all of those things, what we’re talking about is how do we learn about trends? How are we able to engage in risk prediction? How are we able to make care more efficient? So for example, optimizing patient scheduling, taking into account geography. How do you optimize treatment plans or personalized treatment plans for various patients, acknowledging social determinants of health factors? There are a lot of things that can be done right now.
And so I think for Nemours, we have 30 years of electronic medical record data. We have ten years of digital images. The algorithm is way more effective, generally speaking, when it comes to looking at lesions on an image than the human eye. And so having an algorithm be able to train on pediatric data sets can really make care much more efficient, effective, and safe for our patients.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Do we have enough data in that area of children’s health?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
I believe we do.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
You do? Okay.
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
I haven’t done the actual eval, but based on what I’ve been told, I think we have plenty of data. Where we need to strengthen ourselves is the ability to process that data. So we have the information, so basically signal-to-noise ratio, managing data to insight. That’s really what the work is. We have to be careful with how we analyze data. I’ll give an example.
From the lens of social determinants of health, one of the things we have to be careful of is there are certain formulas that are used where ethnicities and race variables are introduced. Often, those variables can create unintended negative consequences on populations. An example, so there’s a calculator for vaginal birth after C-section, and if you add the variable of race, Black, it actually increases the risk assessment and promotes C-section for women of color.
However, the authors or the inventors of that algorithm, when you weigh other variables such as marital status or insurance status, it’s almost equally potent, but they’re not included in the formulation. So then the question became, why did we use race to do that? Especially when we find that a lot of women are receiving unnecessary C-sections. So if I have an AI algorithm where the engineer put that in there, not knowing that nuance, you can see how it can drive a conclusion and lead to an unintended imbalance of care.
So we would want to have the expertise to query that algorithm prior to purchasing it, and then we’d want to test it on our own internal data set prior because we want to have the expertise to do that.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Here at Health, you are talking to a lot of people, visiting a lot of booths. What excites you about what you’re seeing technologically?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
Technologically, what’s interesting is there is a consensus along the work that we want to do at Nemours. So, you could use this meeting as a form of external validation. In terms of one of our initiatives in terms of bringing health to children everywhere, there’s a lot of technology here, a lot of startups, that are creating products that allow patients to be monitored from the home in other places. And along the lines of Hospital at Home, there are many companies here engaging in remote patient monitoring and so forth. And also of interest, there are companies here that work with healthcare systems to set up their venture processes. And so there’s tremendous alignment.
So I think it’s very refreshing to show that Nemours Children’s is on the forefront and that we, because this is a bleeding edge type of meeting, and that the things that we’re having internal discussions about, we’re right at home here in terms of what’s going on.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What do you see as potential for Nemours to innovate?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
I think in the short run, I see us leveraging our investments in our logistics center. One of the things I saw when I first arrived during my listening, learning, and sharing tour, I was introduced by one of our leaders, Mike Erhart, at the time, to the Logistics Center, which I thought was amazing. It looks like NORAD, where you have all these amazing screens with patient data in confidential ways, HIPAA-respected, where not only are they monitoring patients in Florida, but they’re monitoring patients in Delaware. That is an impressive thing to do. And they’re using a lot of modalities.
So they have the electronic medical record, they have the data feeds from the monitors, and they have video surveillance. All done appropriately. But it allows protection for our patients. It allows even the ability to assist when there are emergencies, and sometimes having an objective individual looking at the whole process as opposed to the person at the bedside. You can manage time to event type things. So that in and of itself is an amazing opportunity that not only we can offer our hospitals, our system, but we could potentially offer that to other systems.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And that’s based in Florida, right?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
That’s based in Florida.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And they are seeing and monitoring children in your hospital in Delaware?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
That’s correct.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
That’s amazing.
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
That’s amazing. Paramedics staff it, and also, our virtual nursing program is participating as well. So one way to, in terms of provider well-being, as well as patient well-being, is that our virtual nursing program, our performing task that decreases the burden on nurses at the bedside. So you have the nursing expertise in place, you have that being another fortifier of care or a force multiplier, you could say, with our frontline in-person care model. So, I think these are all novel concepts that are just pretty exciting.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I want to ask…I want to pull on that AI thread again. How much AI is Nemours involved with right now, and how much AI do you anticipate as things move forward? Because AI seems to be all the rage and moving forward very quickly.
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
There are two major domains in terms of how I think about AI from a healthcare system lens. There’s the operational AI and operational means, revenue cycle management, patient demand management, patient scheduling, those types of processes. Call center, a lot of that support, chatbots, all of that sort of thing. And then there’s the domain of disease detection, disease treatment, the things you would find glean out of the electronic medical record from a health delivery, specific health delivery disease stamp.
In terms of revenue cycle management, we’re doing some of that. And we just completed a system review looking at our digital health footprint. And so what we’re trying to create is a digital front door. Bernie Rice’s team, our Chief Information Officer’s leading that work. I don’t want to mention brands, but we’re engaging with strategic partners to help us with that right now. And then we, in terms of future use, we see a very, very robust deployment. But we’re going to be careful. We’re going to be careful.
And let me give you an example, yet another. I talked about the social determinants of health piece, but I’ll give you a more generic consideration from the lens of a healthcare system. When a manufacturer or developer creates an algorithm to detect, let’s say a disease or a condition, and they’re seeking FDA clearance. They will submit a data set and included in that data set will be a prevalence rate, the amount of disease detected. Well, one of the things that we would want to reassure ourselves prior to purchasing such a tool is how does it match with the actual prevalence rates in that disease that we have?
So if the prevalence rate, for example, and not to get too techy, but just to give an example. Let’s say it’s 20 or 30%, but in our system, it’s only 5%. That impacts what we call positive predictive value and negative predictive value of that test. So, we would want to make sure we understand how it performs in our universe because that’ll impact the efficiency and accuracy of that test. So a little geek moment there. But we think that those are the kinds of things we want to make sure we hard-wire in our process to make sure we understand those things.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
What’s the future of innovation?
Dr. Eric Jackson, Nemours Children’s Health:
I think the future is bright. Let me just put some generic numbers on the table just to highlight a point that is often overlooked. There was an amazing study done by the Kellogg Foundation on the business case for health equity, done by serious economists in the United States. And one of the findings that I just want to share and they looked at several domains. They looked at health, education, criminal justice, housing, and entrepreneurial type activity. If you just look at the health category alone, and by parity, we mean taking the health of, let’s say, Blacks and making it on par to Whites, just that alone, you would add an additional a hundred and thirty-five, somewhere in that range, billion dollars a year. A year. To the U.S. economy. And this was done by serious economists.
If you were to actually extrapolate to 2050 for all those categories that I mentioned, parity, you would add $8 trillion to the GDP. Now, when people hear numbers like that, they think this is really not possible. This is a fanciful type of thinking. But it turns out in the state of Delaware, a little-known study was performed. It was published until 2013, but it was data from 2009 and at ChristianaCare and on adults, but it’s relevant. They were looking at colorectal cancer, and they noticed that Black patients were experiencing higher degrees of cancer and mortality. This is before the Affordable Care Act.
So the state of Delaware provided insurance coverage and free screening, excuse me, support for screening and treatment up to two years for anyone that was found to have a positive colonoscopy. What they found was something very interesting. Once they targeted the African-American population, where there was a gap with the White population, both groups improved in their screening. Not only did they improve, but they came together at the same rate of screening. Both groups experienced a left shift in tumor burden. Why colorectal cancer? If you catch it early, it’s curable. And then the mortality rate for both groups improved.
So it demonstrated at a state level that targeting a vulnerable population actually helped everyone. You didn’t take anything away from anybody else. You actually made the system more efficient. There’s potential and major upside for this. And so in pediatrics, when we’re talking about disparate care for our kiddos, tremendous opportunity. Tremendous opportunity. And I’m an optimist. I’m an optimist. So I think that the future is very bright. A lot of these innovative tools are possible. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step, and I’m very proud to be a part of Nemours because we’ve already taken the first step.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. Eric Jackson is the Chief Innovation Officer for Nemours Children’s Health.
Music:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nemours Well Beyond Medicine Podcast with me, Carol Vassar, and our guests, nurse futurist Bonnie Clipper and Dr. Eric Jackson.
What innovations are you seeing in your corner of the healthcare world? Leave us a voicemail about it at nemourswellbeyond.org. That’s nemourswellbeyond.org, the very same place where you can find all of our previous episodes of this podcast and subscribe so you never miss a future episode. Our stellar production team for this episode includes Cheryl Munn, Che Parker, Susan Masucci, and our on-site engineer, Adonis Vera, from Clarity Productions. Join us next time as we explore an innovative way of getting food to children who might otherwise go hungry. It’s called Blessings in a Backpack. Until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good, well beyond medicine.
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Let’s go. Well Beyond Medicine.
