Innovation seems like it is something complicated that really has to be created from hard work.
However, one of the most amazing inventions for healthcare that I’ve seen was taking an existing technology and just changing it slightly to meet a need. I learned about it five years ago and it was a huge improvement for the nurses. They were raving about how much easier it made their lives. Once they explained it, it immediately became clear that it was a huge time saver for them.
Let’s look at the process that the invention changed first and then we’ll talk about the invention. Once we get to the invention, you may think that it is barely an invention at all, but an obvious idea. However, the technology was around for many years before it was created, so it clearly wasn’t an obvious idea. This invention was a huge step forward for home wound care.
One of the major pieces of doing home wound care is documenting the wounds for treatment and reimbursement purposes by taking a picture. For these pictures, you needed to be able to see the relative size of the wound – which was done with a measuring ruler.
Before this invention, for each wound, the nurse would have to:
- Balance a ruler on the part of the body near the wound
- Ask the patient to stay still
- Take a picture with a camera quickly to document the wound (before the ruler fell off).
Inevitably, if you have a wound, it is likely to be even harder to remain still than the average person, and the ruler would fall off. Then the process would start over again with balancing the ruler. Many patient would have multiple wounds, so it really increased the time the patient had to try to remain still, which could be painful. Also it would increase the time of the visits, as well as the difficulty the visit caused the patient. So, the nurses dreaded the whole “taking the pictures” part of the visit
So, what was this amazing invention?
- A pad of post-it notes with rulers printed on each one.
What did it do for the nurses?
- It stayed in place
- It was disposable – you didn’t use the same one near multiple wounds – so that made it easier to avoid transmitting any infections (although that was unlikely as the rulers are not placed on the wound, but nearby).
- The patient did not feel guilty about the ruler falling off (which is almost impossible to control, anyway)
- It saved a lot of time for both the patients and nurses.
- It made the patients and nurses more comfortable by shortening the time the patient had to be uncomfortably still.
- It reduced the awkwardness of the visit by making the time the pictures would take more predictable
All these benefits for a post-it note with a ruler printed on it…
So, what concepts can you combine to invent something that revolutionary?
