Nurse innovation: Transforming Healthcare with Rebecca Love, Principal of Clinical Innovation in OptimizeRX and the President of SONSIEL: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Nurse innovation: Transforming Healthcare with Rebecca Love, Principal of Clinical Innovation in OptimizeRX and the President of SONSIEL: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, everyone. Saul Marquez here. Today, I have the privilege of hosting Rebecca Love. She is a nurse, entrepreneur, inventor, author, Ted Speaker, and first nurse featured on Ted.com and part of the inaugural nursing panel featured at South by Southwest 2018. Rebecca was the first director of Nurse Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the United States at Northeastern School of Nursing, the founding initiative in the country designed to empower nurses as innovators and entrepreneurs, where she founded the Nurse Hackathon, the movement has led to transformational change in the nursing profession. In 2019, Rebecca, along with a group of leading nurses in the world, founded and as president of SONSIEL: The Society of Nurses, Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Leaders, a nonprofit that quickly attain recognition by the United Nations as an affiliate member to the UN. Rebecca is an experienced nurse entrepreneur, founding HireNurses.com in 2013, which is acquired in 2018 by Realto in the UK, where she served as the Managing Director of US markets until its acquisition in twenty nineteen. Currently, Rebecca serves as the principal of clinical innovation at OptimizeRx. She’s passionate about empowering nurses and creating communities to help nurses innovate, create and collaborate to start businesses and inventions to transform health care. Such a privilege to have you here, Rebecca. I’m really excited to touch on this very important topic of nurses.

Rebecca Love:
It’s just a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you for having me.

Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. And so, Rebecca, you’ve done some really neat things in your health care career. And, you know, before we jump into the actual details of what we’re going to talk about, I love to hear more about you and what keeps you inspired in your health care career.

Rebecca Love:
I think that being a background of being a nurse and watching what the front line is going for and doing on a daily basis, especially in the face of COVID, I think every day that I wake up, I’m inspired by those nurses to go out selflessly to transform and take care of those individuals that most of us would wonder if we would cross that threshold. And nursing was a second career choice for me in life. And it was inspired because my mom really encouraged me to pursue nursing because she said that although there’s a whole bunch of great leaders in other areas, we needed really strong nursing leadership to sort of transform the future of the profession. And I took it very seriously after becoming a nurse and watching certain challenges that were facing the profession. I don’t know if you know some of the statistics, but 50 percent of new nursing graduates leave the bedside within two years of practice, which is nearly the largest exodus of any profession out there. And we are facing a potential nursing shortage of over a million nurses in the United States. And I think what motivates me is how can we stop that and how can we secure this profession at the future of health care? And I think I’m constantly motivated by both that fear that there may not be nurses by the bedside in the future. As much as I’m inspired to transform what a career for nursing looks like so that we inspire the best to choose that profession.

Saul Marquez:
And, you know, I wasn’t aware. That’s a pretty big number of nurses leaving. And I also want to say thanks to all the nurses listening, or if you have somebody in your family, your friends that are nurses at the front line, as Rebecca mentioned, it’s tough, and especially during this pandemic, the importance of what you do is is critical. So, yeah. Let’s kick things off with a thank you and yes to Rebecca White. Why do so many people leave nursing?

Rebecca Love:
Yeah. So there are some interesting studies that are being collaborated on this entire thing. Like 30 to 50 percent of them are leaving the bedside within two years of practice. And my husband asked me this question and he that he’s a CFO. And I said, honey, when you graduated with your finance degree were you expected to carry the same level of responsibility as the CFO? And he laughed and he said, of course not. And he said, well, welcome to the world of nursing, where you graduate, you enter the profession. And not only are you carrying an incredible load of a patient upon you, but you’re expected to carry the same kind of patient and responsibility as nurses with 30 or 50 years of experience. So I think, one, it’s that incredible dichotomy of being put into a world where even if you have little training, you’re going to deal with the most acute patients. And then secondly, I think. The biggest factor is that the profession of nursing if you call it a profession, has not been cultivated among a career progression. And I think younger nurses that are entering the profession realize, and I don’t know if you know this, but over the course of a 20-year career, the average increase, the salary of a nurse is only one point five percent a year, which is half the cost of the increase in wages or salaries of the average American.

Rebecca Love:
But more importantly, there is no career development. So it’s not as though when you start out as financial assistance and you progress up to the eventual point of being the CFO. In nursing, the first day of your career can very much look like the last day of your career, 30 years later. And I think that’s because health care has focused a very long time that the roles of nurses are to be by the bedside and that job, that tax-driven position is enough in and of itself that they’ve never focused on. What are the career and the ambitions of the nurse by the bedside to move forward? So suddenly two years into a nurse’s career, they’re working a day, night, holiday weekend rotation. They’ve had an increase of salary of about three percent. In front of them are patients that are constantly dying or sick and they’re being called to work in and they don’t know where their career is going in comparison to the friends that they have who chose other careers, who are working Monday through Friday, have five weeks of vacation and are seeing the world where these nurses aren’t sure where life is going. So I think there’s a couple of downwards playing trends, but I think those are two of the largest.

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, yeah. Well, well said. And something for all of us to think about, you know. So talk to us a little bit about the work that you do, Rebecca. You know, you’re doing some great things at OptimizeRx optimize our acts. You’re also a nurse leader, you know, in the health care sphere. Talk to us a little bit about what you’re doing to add value to the health care ecosystem and what you’re seeing out there.

Rebecca Love:
So in my full-time capacity at OptimizeRx I feel very fortunate to be part of the team of health care leadership that recognizes the importance of bringing in front line clinicians and their viewpoints to establishing what is necessary to be solved to create better health care solutions for those that are dealing with patients on the front line. And so in my role at OptimizeRx, I oversee clinical innovation and discussions regarding technology and integration into complex technological systems and provide that perspective of what clinicians are doing and where their breakdown is, where their burnout exists, and where these tasks they’ve created. These technologies create actually more work for the front line as opposed to relieving this kind of work. So that’s what I do. And then my day-to-day capacitate OptimizeRx. In my spare time and with the support of my CEO Will Febbo, I run SONSIEL, which is an organization of one hundred percent volunteer led nurses. We have the chief nursing officer of Microsoft is a founding member, the chief nursing officer of Cleveland Clinic, the director of innovation over at Mass General Hospital is the first nurse ever appointed to oversee innovation at MGH. All its founding members of this organization, which was really why we came together with after I started building conversations around nurse led innovation, I had met all of these incredible nurses who had walked life differently. They had stayed by the bedside for a portion of their career, but they went out and they took the knowledge by which they had gained at the bedside and saw problems that they could not fix when they were by the bedside and created solutions as they went out to start companies or navigating with industry to create solutions that really saved patients lives.

Rebecca Love:
And some people came together really with the power or the vision to transform where nurses sat in health care so that we could create better solutions for health. And some of the successes that we did is when COVID hit and PPE was short and we started to see nurses post on Facebook that they couldn’t find masks, which was absolutely insane. I can tell you as a nurse how insane that is to think that you didn’t have access to N95 masks. We organized and collaborated with a dentist group by the name of Low Good Foundation, and we raised one hundred thousand dollars to move over three hundred thousand pieces of PPE from March until July across the country to over one hundred and eighty health care systems through donations because this is one of our board members, said Joan Novello. He said, you know, this is more than a match. It potentially is the life of a clinician. And so that was one of our successors. And we started to host meetings, monthly or weekly meeting right when COVID hit March.

Rebecca Love:
And nurses from around the world were calling in every Thursday night and heading into their shift or on their shift or leaving their shift and telling us what they were seeing. And what we learned was they were flipping patients under their stomach, which is such a crazy thing to turn a patient onto their stomach and respiratory against everything that we ever learned in nursing school but position changes are within our scope of practice. And it a nurse aide who found out that patients started to breathe better on their stomachs with COVID. So it was through these calls that we started to learn all these incredible innovations that nurses were sharing around the world. But it was then that I decided to call Johnson and Johnson and Microsoft, Would you guys support a virtual hackathon for nurses in the midst of it? Because if you joined these calls, you would be blown away by the knowledge that these nurses and these innovations were coming up at the bedside. And in an incredible, I don’t know how it happened, but in six weeks’ time, somehow we reached an agreement and had our first virtual hackathon with over a thousand nurses on the Microsoft teams platform supported by J&J in April of 2020. So these are the kind of things that we were focused on with COVID, but also empowering nurses to create solutions.

Saul Marquez:
Well, that’s so neat. And it’s exciting and I mean amazing that you guys were able to get it done so quickly, but you did it. And it’s the foundation for the future. Folks, if you are curious about SONSIEL, that’s Sonsiel,org, whether you want to participate, contribute. They’re doing some amazing things. It’s the society of nurse scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. And just amazing Rebecca, the vision that went into creating this.

Rebecca Love:
Thank you, Saul. I always say to people, it’s always when you look at anything in your life and you see that it can elevate so many others and you surround yourself with really amazing people the world changes. And I think that’s always been key and center from so many of the nurses that come forward. They didn’t become nurses because it was they were choosing a career that was in it for themselves. Do you know what I’m saying? They chose nursing because it’s always about giving to others. And I think that’s why we’ve had so much success with SONSIEL. We all work full-time jobs and other capacity and they all are incredible individuals. But somehow this working board and then the volunteers and the members, they just really feel that they can do it when surrounded by each other. And I think as you know, you’ve made this incredible podcast, mindset combined with the incredible hard work really leads to results.

Saul Marquez:
Totally. Totally. That’s awesome and inspiring. And so tell us, Rebecca, and maybe we talk about something a little bit more what makes what you guys do different or better than what’s available today?

Rebecca Love:
So I think most of the nursing associations of which there are eight hundred in the United States, all spoke internally back to nurses. And I think that what we recognize is that there was a general need for nursing to start speaking to the general public, although based on the Gallup poll that nurses have been ranked as the most trusted profession for 20 years, running minus year of two thousand and one with two firefighters. The reality is, is that I think the general public has a very poor understanding of the value of what nursing actually does. And I think that with covid, we recognize how valuable nurses are. But I still think if we ask the general public, why are they valuable, what do they do, what skill set do they have? What do they deliver in health care? I think the vast majority of the population still thinks of nurses as holding a patient’s hand or at this point holding an iPhone in front of a loved one can say goodbye. And the reality is, is there is so much more knowledge, insight, expertise, and skill sets that nursing delivery day-to-day at the forefront of health care that we have never vocalized, that has kept the profession in its sort of box and seen and is solely able to provide specific nursing skill sets are seen as being able to deliver tasks and these medications, change the wound dressings tests that are not something. They’re not seen for the value that they bring in, the knowledge that they have to devise strategies or innovations.

Rebecca Love:
The studies show that nurses do about twenty-seven work a shift and are in thirty-six different places in the course of one hour, which always says to me, nurses are innovating and in highly inefficient environments. But unlike most other organizations where you create that to work better, like tell me about it. Nurses are often slap on the wrist for not following protocol or doing things outside the box because protocol saves lives. Right. And I think it’s one of the things COVID showed us is that protocols actually didn’t work. And that’s challenging the status quo is what needed to happen to transform health care. But more importantly, most of that or a significant portion of that is being led by those nurses, those respiratory therapists who are on the front lines doing this. So some people came together to say what we need is an organization to save our profession. It’s finally validating and explaining to the world what nurses do, what their skill sets, Graig, what roles they have, who they are and externally say their innovation outward to connect with industry, to recognize the important roles nurses play in transforming health care, ultimately with the goal of elevating the profession to stop that mass exodus and driving the future to say if you want to be an innovator in health care, the profession you want to choose, is nursing.

Saul Marquez:
I love the passion that you have in this, Rebecca. And so as you reflect on some of the early wins, what would you say is a way that you guys have improved outcomes or made it better for nurses to stay in the game?

Rebecca Love:
You know, I wish I could connect you with some of the other individuals that participate in it because to get an organization like J&J or Microsoft to support what we would call a fledgling startup in nursing with their reputations behind us, I can only tell you the experience of this hackathon transformed the way nurses not only look at health care but at themselves. Have you ever done or familiar with what those are?

Saul Marquez:
Yeah, well, I’ve been to two one virtual one kind of live one, so everybody kind of gets together. There’s a problem right. and you come up with solutions in a really short period of time.

Rebecca Love:
You’ve got it. And you know, what’s interesting for nurses is that they go through this experience. And as I said before, we’re so restricted by policy and procedure and protocol that we’re never allowed to innovate. So suddenly when you give a nurse free rein to say what’s the problem you want to solve? In, for example, one of these hackathons, we had a nurse aide show up and she said, you know, the problem that I want to solve is that I don’t want to keep waking my patients up by turning on the lights. Otherwise, all of my shift, I said working in the dark. And over the course of this weekend, they came up with a portable light to be used on their stethoscope so they could actually go and do the vital signs and not work in the dark. And when you get these nurses the freedom to identify the problems that drive them insane, the problems when their IV pumps aren’t working or the technology doesn’t talk, the tubing that needs to work. Could we just have a system that does documentation this way? Suddenly and they start to connect with other individuals that are non-nurses, hear them and look at them and say, oh, my gosh, I never knew your stuff. Just brilliant the way you’re thinking. Suddenly the ability for them to believe in themselves transforms and inspires and empowers.

Rebecca Love:
And in fact, a group of these nurses at MIT reached out to us after our hackathon and we started to partner with MIT and sending nurses to their grand tax to support them through M.I.T. and the head of research reach out and said what we need to do. If you would think a hackathon would be exhausting, most of the professions come to the hackathon and after that, we can very exhausted. But what’s so revolutionary about it is when nurses leave hackathons, they are refilled. They’re inspired, energized because they were heard for the first time in their career and they were able to create real solutions to problems that most people never recognize were an issue for them. And I think these are some of the successes that we’ve had over 17 companies get started out of this hackathon. We’ve had Microsoft and J&J, grab on to some of these organizations and start to support them to move them forward. We’ve seen nurses go on and as opposed to quitting their jobs, they doubled down and actually move up in their careers and into their health system. It’s been remarkable how a three-day weekend can literally change the future for so many of these participants.

Saul Marquez:
I think that’s great. And it sounds like I mean, this is a society that a lot of provider executives should be supporting as well.

Rebecca Love:
We would love that. And I think that that’s what we had at our last event. A lot of these chief nursing officers, chief executives started to tune in and pay attention because I think a lot of people thought nursing is innovation was sort of a fad. Right. like, oh, that’s really nice. It’s cute. Nurses as innovators. And then they started to attend these events go, oh, It’s not only going to save the nurse. It’s going to save patients’ lives. It’s going to make money for the hospitals. And I think you hit the nail on the head. Like the more, we get engaged with this, the more beneficial it is. As I always say to everybody, nurses innovate not because they save money or dollars. They innovate because they see a patient is dying in front of them and they don’t have the resources and the things that they need to save that patient. They are the truest innovators you have ever met, their view of what they’re doing and what they’re trying to solve is really about taking chronic disease and massive disease and the systems that we have to create better ways to treat that disease and better outcomes for patients. And that’s what I think the most amazing about this.

Saul Marquez:
I love it. So what would you say is one of the biggest setbacks you’ve experienced and key learning that came out of it?

Rebecca Love:
Yeah, so I think I’ve had a personal setback in life that I think is not. I think I’m going to just share this publicly, which when I was in graduate school, I ended up failing a nursing research course, which was devastating to me at the time. And I think at that time when you have never really experienced failure or somebody else tells you you’re not good enough to succeed or go on, I remember that moment in time of failing a graduate school course and thinking to myself, man, I’m not sure that I should continue on with my career. And now looking back, it’s been a long time since then. I knew that it wasn’t a big deal at the time. It wasn’t something that just stuck to. I went on to teach for seven years in a community college, and I don’t know as well, but up to 30 percent of nursing students will fail out of nursing school and at a community college where I taught in Boston. Those students who attended that program, it was a career that would take them out of poverty. Nursing was I can tell you, it is the one career that you can go to school and one day you can be eating Robin noodles and your next job make sure that you constantly will have food on the table, electricity on in your house, and your kids will have a roof over their head when you become a nurse. It to me is the most powerful career to take men and women out of poverty. It’s something I fundamentally believe nursing to me is an economic value to so many thousands.

Rebecca Love:
So I started to teach the course that you would have to take when nurses failed out of school. They’d have to come back in. And I’d always start with tell me your dreams and your aspirations of why you wanted to be a nurse and so many of them tied back to the street, just a better life helping people and things from there. And I could always stop and say, I’ve been where you are. I’ve been where I feel like I’m a failure. And somebody else seemed to threaten the dream that I had because of this failure or that the life experience is dead. And it was always that moment of standing up there and being able to say I too have failed and don’t let failure define you because it’s what you learn in the process of failing and getting back up and dusting yourself off and overcoming odds. That really leads you to the next success. And I can honestly say, I don’t know if I would have ever been strong enough to do what I later did in life with starting a company and then starting to feel if I had it known before, that I had failed and made it through that I would feel that I could go forward. And so if there’s one thing that I share of setbacks is that to me, setbacks, they happen every day. I get no constantly. And I think what I learned early on is that, no, it’s just a different way of saying how can I get to a yes differently? And so never letting know or failure or setbacks define what the outcome will be, just simply thinking to myself, how else can I get to where we need to be?

Saul Marquez:
I love it. And obviously, with the work that you guys have done and the progress that you’re making and in nurse burnout, and keeping them inspired and coming up with innovations to help the patient, in the end, I think it’s really awesome. And so walk us through really what you’re most excited about today.

Rebecca Love:
So I think that there are a couple of things. If you look at it from my professional standpoint of where I sit at OptimizeRx and the work that we’re doing there in transforming health care and accessibility. And I know that you know, the world of EHR and the lack of accessibility by clinicians on the front lines of those health care innovators behind and creating new pathways of engagement for both patients and providers to engage with multiple players. I’m very excited that I think there’s going to be a revolution. I think if one thing COVID taught us is that one access point for all communication between clinicians and business and patients is a monopoly that is set to fail and that actually decreases innovation and it decreases the ability to transform health care. So I think we’re sitting at this cusp of a great awakening for accessibility that’s going to be greater validated in the future of health care. I’m very excited about that from some of the work we do professionally and optimize our access to change messaging and accessibility for those interactions to happen. But on the side of my passion for nursing speaks, I think what I’m very excited about is that what has happened is this is the year of the nurse. It’s about to end in the end of 2020. I hope dramatically that the rest of the world wakes up to see that nursing is a profession we must invest in. It is a profession that earns one-tenth of what an average physician makes in the United States. It’s a profession that has no direct career progression to elevate the best, the brightest, those that are most motivated to make those changes.

Rebecca Love:
And we need to create those pathways. And but more importantly, I think the rest of the world health care industry to look at how do we stabilize and reinvest in this profession where we have four million nurses in the United States, but we’re facing a one-point three million nursing shortage by 2030, which is being studied because we know that 2020 was actually the largest year of retirement ever on record for the nursing profession. The average age of a nurse in the US is over the age of 50. 70 percent of the workforce is over the age of 40. If we as a profession, if we as a country don’t invest in nursing, I strongly fear that we are not going to have the nurses at the bedside that we need. And we see that today in COVID. We see that you can make as many beds as you want. We just don’t have the caregivers to provide that care in this situation, if COVID hasn’t wakened back up to, say, our greatest asset at risk of being burnt out, not being supplemented, and more importantly, leaving a risk of pandemics in the future, that we have no way to manage that care. I think we fundamentally will have failed our nation and more importantly, reinvesting in a profession that so desperately is needed in the world. And I think that’s where we need to focus. But where there is that tremendous opportunity.

Saul Marquez:
Well, very, very inspiring. And I agree. And I think we do need to focus more on nurses. We need to invest in them. And I hope that today’s message resonates with everyone and helps you either think of how nurses could be part of your innovation process as the end-users of a lot of medical technologies, EHRs you name it, They’re using a lot of these things, their input matters. And then from a provider perspective, you know, keeping nurses inspired, helping them have some sort of career structure and growth that they look forward to is going to be critical for them to feel engaged and keep with it. So love all of this education that you’ve left us with. Rebecca, give us a closing thought. What should we be thinking about and what’s the best place that the listeners could get in touch with you if they want to collaborate, learn more, etc.

Rebecca Love:
Saul thank you so much for having me on this show. And if you would like to reach out to Sonsiel.org. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and I get back to as many people on a regular basis as possible. And if I could leave us with one thought. If you are a health care executive or a major influencer in one of your industries that are in the world of health care, look around your board, look around your positions and ask where is the nurse and start making a place for them and the profession. Invite them to sit at the table and engage with them. Because what you’re going to realize quickly is that nurses are out there and they want to make sure that you are successful. They never dally. And you said, oh, my gosh, you guys get a lot done. And I laughed because I thought to myself, the one thing nurses do is they just get things done because that’s what they’ve always been taught they have to do. And they don’t have the resources or the staff or the support that they do. They still figure out a way to get it done. So one final thought is this is the year of the nurse. Thank a nurse. You can do so by wearing a mask. But more importantly, you can thank and help by recognizing that there is an opening in your company or a position that you could transform or hire a nurse into or support or help support them in other ways. This could be a transformational year for the future of our profession. So thank you.

Saul Marquez:
Love it. Rebecca, thank you for that. And yeah, you know, the year of the nurse. Let’s continue recognizing all of these wonderful nurses for what you do. A big thank you and to leadership teams across the country and the world. Let’s listen and act on today’s message from Rebecca. I think the end will be very, very positive and inspiring for everyone involved. So, Rebecca, thanks again. Really appreciate you jumping on.

Rebecca Love:
It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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