VA helps make nurse’s innovative idea a reality
National competition seeks ideas from staff to improve patient care
Cardiology nurse Lois Freeman calls the heart failure patients who are regulars at the Baltimore VA Medical Center “frequent fliers.”
They cycle in and out of the hospital because they can’t or won’t follow the strict diet and exercise regime required to keep their medical conditions in check.
Intent on breaking this cycle of repeat readmissions, Freeman came up with the concept of a smartphone app to track the diet, weight and exercise of cardiology patients. Her idea recently received development funding estimated at $1 million from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Freeman, a nurse practitioner, and 14 other VA employees won the funding through the VA’s 2016 Employee Innovation Competition, a national contest that brings private-sector technology to VA hospitals to improve quality of life for injured and sick veterans through inventions that do such things as allow paralyzed veterans to control TVs and lights with eye blinks and sip-and-puff straws.
The contest was open to every employee of the VA, and more than 4,000 employees submitted entries this year.
“There’s always a need to innovate and there’s always a need for frontline employees to have an outlet,” said Kristopher Teague, who manages grass-roots innovation for the VA. “These are the folks on the front lines that care for veterans every day. We should be asking them, ‘What can we do to help you do your job better?’ ”
The VA is promoting Freeman’s heart app as part of a larger effort to seek recognition and credit for the research it sponsors and products it develops.
The federal agency has a huge “research footprint,” a VA spokesman said, and funds a lot of university research that people aren’t aware of — and for which the universities, not the VA, usually get the credit.
The nicotine patch — now widely used for smoking cessation in the general population and taken for granted as a medical convenience — is one example. The VA’s Office of Research & Development funded the breakthroughs that led to the patch’s development in 1984.
And VA researchers worked with Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop the first electric motor-powered foot prothesis, unveiled in 2007.
VA innovators also developed algorithms to calculate the veterans’ suicide risk by simply scanning their medical records.
“We dabble in just about every element of health care,” Teague said.
The VA Maryland Health Care System spent $27 million on research projects last fiscal year, said Sandra Marshall, chief of staff for the system. The money funded 340 research projects. Each year, the Maryland system submits 15 to 20 applications for new patents. Robust research remains a core part of the mission to care for veterans, Marshall said.
“This is probably one of the best, hidden, wonderful things that we do,” she said.
The goal of the heart app is to help veterans improve their well-being, develop trust and partnerships with their clinicians, and to encourage them to become active in