Internal Innovation Challenge Encourages a Culture of Hospital Ingenuity

What defines a health care innovator?

You might picture someone tinkering with shiny technology inside a Silicon Valley industrial park—but leaders at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Innovation Studio assert that the best health care pioneers are often those embedded in day-to-day hospital operations. Doctors, nurses, researchers, and program coordinators know their specialty’s pain points intimately, and might even encounter multiple challenges that are ripe for innovation throughout their daily routines.

That’s why the Innovation Studio created the Better, Faster, Cheaper Innovation Challenge, which empowers CHLA team members to present these real-world problems within the hospital and identify potential solutions—either original or readily available in the market.

“This initiative aims to empower and support team members with a forum and pathway to voice innovative ideas, and to establish a structured process for these ideas to be collected, evaluated, prioritized, and resourced,” says Omkar Kulkarni, Vice President and Chief Transformation and Digital Officer. “The program also teaches tools from Design Thinking and Lean Startup methodologies and provides innovators with access to positive and constructive feedback about their ideas.”

The challenge

More than 40 team members submitted their ideas in the fall of 2024. Submissions were ultimately narrowed down to five finalist teams who worked with Innovation Studio leaders to refine their proposals, pressure-test their solutions, and identify resource and timeline needs.

The program culminated in a final pitch day where participants delivered 7-minute presentations to a panel of experts from across the organization:

• Jennifer Baird, PhD, MPH, MSW, Director, Patient Care Services Education and Research
• Conrad Band, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
• Steven Chin, Director of Digital Innovation, Division of Neonatology
• Kelly Johnson, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer
• Crystal Jack, Vice President and Chief Clinical Services Officer
• Omkar Kulkarni, Vice President and Chief Transformation and Digital Officer  
• Ben Sykes, Executive Director, Chief Administrative Officer
• Susan Wu, MD, Chief Medical Director, Quality and Clinical Effectiveness 

The panel selected three finalists: Matthew Deardorff, MD, PhD, FACMG, Christine Uddin, MSN-Ed, RN, NPD-BC, CPHON, OCN, and a team of three medical-surgical nurses. Finalists will work with Innovation Studio and Technology Commercialization teams to explore the potential for their solution to be implemented long-term.  

Dr. Matthew Deardorff: Streamlining authorization forms for insurance

Dr. Deardorff is the Director of Translational Genomics in the Center for Personalized Medicine. He explains that for patients and families in search of answers for an unidentified health condition, especially a rare disease, the Center for Personalized Medicine might be one of their first stops at the hospital—and provide lifesaving insight.

“Whole-genome sequencing is now becoming a first-line test,” explains Dr. Deardorff. “While these tests accelerate the diagnostic process, bottlenecks like waiting on insurance authorization can lead to delays in diagnosis and access to care for kids.”

Dr. Deardorff explains that insurance authorizations for genetic testing are rarely straightforward. Insurance companies will often request additional information, and responses to these requests can take days or weeks, and can sometimes even lead to cancellations, denials, or non-payment.

As a potential solution, Dr. Deardorff proposed automating web-based insurance authorizations using a robotic process automation tool. He explains that ideally, the tool would save precious team member time by automatically checking the status of insurance authorizations, identifying the actions needed, and relaying the latest information to the team.

“Investing in a solution like this could result in patients getting testing, diagnosis, and treatment sooner, reduced frustration from patients, parents, and team members, as well as an increase our lab’s capacity to provide tests to patients,” Dr. Deardorff shares.

Christine Uddin: Preventing pressure injuries, protecting clinicians

Christine Uddin’s journey at CHLA has taken her from oncology nursing at the bedside, to becoming a nursing professional development specialist, to her current role as the Program Manager for Hospital-Acquired Conditions (HAC Nurse). HACs include things like pressure injuries and falls, and Uddin leads several hospital workgroups focusing on creating systems for safe patient handling to both prevent patient injuries and prioritize employee safety.

“When this challenge was initially announced, I read about the previous winner, Carol Taketomo, PharmD, and Moxi,” Uddin recalls. “Moxi is such a routine part of our workflow now. The possibility of making an impact on team members’ daily work sounded so cool.” 

One of the biggest opportunities Uddin saw within her area of expertise was to streamline and increase access to turning and repositioning technology: “In our busy ICU setting, nurses are managing lifesaving measures,” Uddin says. “Turning or repositioning a patient every two hours requires a lot of peoplepower, time, and resources—things that may not always be accessible. The reality is, in our fast-paced inpatient environment, team members tend to not utilize assistive equipment if it isn’t immediately available to them or easy to use.”

Uddin recommended the hospital invest in a multi-purpose turning and repositioning technology that would allow individual staff members to perform proactive interventions with ease, which could help prevent pressure injuries and keep staff members safe from overexertion injuries. 

Duque 5 med-surg nursing team: Wireless vital signs monitoring

A finalist team of three nurses from the hospital’s Duque 5 medical-surgical unit—Meghan Drastal, MSN, MBA, RN, CPN, Katherine Herrera, BSN, RN, and Kellan Burgess-Alm, RN, BSN—set out to solve a common challenge in inpatient settings: The number of wires required to continuously monitor patient vital signs.

“We really saw the problem as multifaceted,” Drastal says. “There are so many different things that impact quality of care when a baby or child is attached to a wired monitor.” She explains that patients connected to wired monitors might have an increased risk of falls, limited mobility, pressure injuries, hygiene concerns, and even risk of self-harm.

“These are challenges we deal with every day,” Drastal adds. “We came up with the idea of suggesting wireless monitoring solutions, and surveyed staff and caregivers in the unit to understand subtle nuances and see how wired monitoring currently impacts them.”

“You walk into a room and see a kid who has a pulse oximeter, a cardiorespiratory monitor, maybe a gastronomy tube, and an IV line. That’s a lot of things,” says Burgess-Alm. “It really impacts kids’ ability to be kids as they heal.”

The team also noted how wireless monitoring could help patient and parent satisfaction, from simple things like no longer having to wait to get unhooked from the monitor before using the bathroom, to increasing parents’ confidence in picking up their babies without fear of detaching wires. Herrera explains that wireless monitoring could also help conserve valuable staff resources, noting that in their staff survey, team members reported needing to visit rooms around 6 times per shift simply to replace or fix vital sign monitors.

“Innovation studio really gave us a great pathway to follow, to investigate what solutions are out there, understand the risks and benefits, and see if the idea is really viable,” says Drastal. 

Learners leading transformation 

Dr. Deardorff points out the value of being embedded within an organization to understand its unique needs and challenges: “There are no two hospitals that do things the same way. While it’s important to see what others have learned in their innovation process, we also have unique perspective into how these systems work within our own institution.” 

“We’re looking to invest in ideas that will stay at CHLA,” says Marguerite Tucker, Innovation Studio’s Product Manager for Operational Transformation and Innovation, and a key collaborator and advisor to challenge finalists and winners. Marguerite explains that the relationships Innovation Studio has fostered with staff innovators during the challenge are intended to be long-term partnerships. “Continuous discovery is a big part of our department—making ideas better after they launch, and helping them stand the test of time.” 

“I see internal innovation as living the value of continuous improvement and really striving to align with the mission and values of CHLA,” says Drastal. “Having the platform to bring forth ideas like this ensures we’re all achieving our best together and truly are learners leading transformation.”