Times of distress can either spawn tremendous creativity and innovation, or it can paralyze those impacted into inaction and withdrawal. No more so than when the catalyst is global in scale and impact, and lives are at stake. This is true for individuals and for organizations. I witnessed this firsthand as President of UH Ventures, the innovation and commercialization arm of University Hospitals (UH) in Cleveland, one of the largest health systems in Ohio. When the magnitude and projected impact of COVID-19 started to become clear, initiating an aligned and collective response was crucial to ensure that our healthcare system would be best positioned to react to a rapidly changing set of variables. This implied collaboration across traditional silos; suspension of ego and hierarchy, and a willingness to explore creative relationships to address a set of immediate and critical needs.
We learned some valuable innovation lessons along the way as well. Namely that innovation was not to be defined by staying in your lane and ideating a new product or process in your niche of expertise, but rather leveraging intellectual assets and non-traditional relationships to create something that was entirely new for your organization. Additionally, many took that opportunity to look at an existing product or technology and figure out a way to adapt it to an alternate use in response to a newly unmet need.
While other health systems may have idled their innovation teams, University Hospitals pressed the accelerator on its innovation engine, UH Ventures, to harness the team’s diverse skills and expertise in order to rapidly address a number of unmet needs associated with the COVID-19 crisis.
For example, the UH Ventures team deployed a strategy that utilized a three-pronged approach relative to addressing the issues associated with personal protective equipment (PPE): sourcing, procuring and preserving PPE; creating avenues for obtaining new PPE; and decontaminating and re-using existing PPE.
This effort brought together manufacturers and other industry participants to collaborate and co-create PPE solutions to address dire supply chain shortfalls.
One example: The Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network (MAGNET), Northeast Ohio’s premier non-profit provider of manufacturing expertise, teamed up with UH Ventures, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), and Eaton, one of the largest power management companies, to design and build a new face shield. MAGNET was able to secure emergency funding to source the raw materials and put the call out to its manufacturing alliance partners across the state to identify who had the capacity to fabricate the product. UH Ventures and CWRU’s public maker space, Sears think[box] partnered to provide feedback and clinical expertise on the design prototype, and Eaton leveraged its additive manufacturing team to make the face shields.
Additionally, Eaton and UH further collaborated on the design of non-contact door openers, which Eaton then manufactured. This hands-free tool reduces the potential for frontline healthcare providers to be exposed to the coronavirus, which can exist on public surfaces.
Engineers at Sears think[box] and physicians at UH joined forces to create two products to prevent the spread of Covid-19: Intubation Boxes, which shield a clinician from respiratory droplets while intubating a patient; and a face shield designed for ophthalmologists to use during eye exams that helps lessen the risk of exposure to the coronavirus. In the intubation box example, the clinicians partnered together to refine a prior model made in Taiwan, improving design for usability and better infection control. And with the face shield, they changed up the design to accommodate the unique needs of ophthalmologists in examining patients.
Preserving PPE comes in many forms, from sourcing washable face masks to deploying technologies that keep people safely at home or minimize the use of PPE.
Recently we launched the UH Remote Respiratory Monitoring System. In anticipation of the COVID-19 surge, UH proactively reached out to Masimo, a manufacturer of a device that helped monitor patients with opioid use disorder. With a few design modifications and collaborating to help them quickly obtain FDA approval, UH became one of the first in the nation to deploy this new disposable technology for home monitoring of patients deemed a low risk for clinical deterioration
Oxygen levels, heart rate and breathing rate data is pushed to an app on the patient’s cell phone and the app sends the data securely to a command center where physicians and nurses can monitor 50 to 80 patients.
There have been numerous other innovations UH has stood up along this COVID-19 journey through collaborative brainstorming -- from TempTraq’s continuous temperature monitoring to a new clinical trial for the protection of our frontline healthcare workers, to the co-design and fabrication of Testing Booths – the list goes on, all underscoring the Ventures team’s responsiveness and contribution throughout this crisis.
The UH Ventures team is now supporting the development and launch of UH’s Healthy Restart Playbook service line. This initiative was spawned from the self-evident need for all entities, from large corporates to K-12 schools, to understand and prepare for the safe reopening of their operations. There remains more unknowns than knowns at this stage, but the aim is to curate and provide continuously updated and actionable clinical insights for various community partners or organizations. UH is an acknowledged leader in the region when it comes to infectious disease research. Distilling and packaging this guidance and pairing it with technologies that we are able to validate through proof-of-concepts, pilots or trials, will strongly aid the pace & effectiveness with which our neighbors and businesses manage their recovery efforts.
There’s a new challenge every day. But with the innovation we’ve demonstrated is possible through partnerships and collaboration, I’m confident we can capitalize on what we’ve learned thus far. We will never revert back to all of the practices and processes pre-COVID-19, and neither should we. As an industry, we must continue to ensure that our contributions and innovations are meaningful and will have a lasting impact on the health of our patients and the resiliency of our organizations.
David Sylvan is President of UH Ventures, the innovation and commercialization arm of University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio.
