Acceleration of Clinical Innovation: a Collaboration Between Biomedical Engineering, Nursing, and Honors Undergraduates

: At the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a partnership formed between faculty in the School of Nursing, the School of Engineering, the Honors College, and UAB Hospital to facilitate interaction between students of biomedical engineering and clinicians. Clinicians needed a way to address their unsolved problems in delivery of health care and students needed a way to engage in meaningful real-world clinical experiences. The authors identified barriers to clinical innovation, created formal freshman and sophomore level courses to lower those barriers, and created a web-based tool to facilitate bringing together domains of expertise. The courses provide a formal mechanism for students to engage in clinical innovation. The web tool creates a collaborative innovation hub that provides a pathway for clinicians at UAB Hospital to enter their problems into a viewable database. The web tool also allows users to form project teams and use built-in functionality to enhance the possibility that they will successfully solve significant problems. Results to date have demonstrated that clinicians are invested in students' efforts to improve approaches to patient care, students are empowered to seek challenging clinical innovation opportunities, and interacting in a digital space represents a viable way to improve collaboration.