INNOVATE: Preparing Nurses to Be Health Care Innovation Leaders.

A new certificate program has been designed that augments the traditional undergraduate nursing education with a curriculum of innovation and entrepreneurship. The goal of the Integrated Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate in Nursing Program (INNOVATE) is to empower nurses to collaboratively solve health care challenges and become thought leaders in health care products, technologies, and processes, as well as service and delivery methods, with a particular focus on the needs of vulnerable populations. Toward this goal, INNOVATE is built on an integrative, immersive curriculum, experiential learning, intentional cohort building, peer and faculty support, real-world connections, and the prioritization of diversity, inclusivity, and equity to build of a cohort of nursing students ready for careers in clinical and health care innovation. In this article, we provide the outline for the proposed curriculum, program strategies, anticipated outcomes, and evaluation criteria that we believe can serve as a national model for innovation and entrepreneurship in undergraduate nursing education.

An information model to support user-centered design of medical devices.

The process of engineering design requires the product development team to balance the needs and limitations of many stakeholders, including those of the user, regulatory organizations, and the designing institution. This is particularly true in medical device design, where additional consideration must be given for a much more complex user-base that can only be accessed on a limited basis. Given this inherent challenge, few projects exist that consider design domain concepts, such as aspects of a detailed design, a detailed view of various stakeholders and their capabilities, along with the user-needs simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel information model approach that combines a detailed model of design elements with a model of the design itself, customer requirements, and of the capabilities of the customer themselves. The information model is used to facilitate knowledge capture and automated reasoning across domains with a minimal set of rules by adopting a terminology that treats customer and design specific factors identically, thus enabling straightforward assessments. A uniqueness of this approach is that it systematically provides an integrated perspective on the key usability information that drive design decisions towards more universal or effective outcomes with the very design information impacted by the usability information. This can lead to cost-efficient optimal designs based on a direct inclusion of the needs of customers alongside those of business, marketing, and engineering requirements. Two case studies are presented to show the method's potential as a more effective knowledge management tool with built-in automated inferences that provide design insight, as well as its overall effectiveness as a platform to develop and execute medical device design from a holistic perspective.

3D finite element modeling of pelvic organ prolapse.

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study is to develop a validated 3D finite element model of the pelvic floor system which can offer insights into the mechanics of anterior vaginal wall prolapse and have the ability to assess biomedical device treatment methods. The finite element results should accurately mimic the clinical findings of prolapse due to intra-abdominal pressure (IAP) and soft tissues impairment conditions. METHODS: A 3D model of pelvic system was created in Creo Parametric 2.0 based on MRI Images, which included uterus, cervix, vagina, cardinal ligaments, uterosacral ligaments, and a simplified levator plate and rectum. The geometrical model was imported into ANSYS Workbench 14.5. Mechanical properties of soft tissues were based on experimental data of tensile test results from current literature. Studies were conducted for IAP loadings on the vaginal wall and uterus, increasing from lowest to extreme values. RESULTS: Anterior vaginal wall collapse occurred at an IAP value corresponding to maximal valsalva and showed similar collapsed shape as clinical findings. Prolapse conditions exhibited high sensitivity to vaginal wall stiffness, whereas healthy tissues was found to support the vagina against prolapse. Ligament impairment was found to have only a secondary effect on prolapse.

A concept ideation framework for medical device design.

Medical device design is a challenging process, often requiring collaboration between medical and engineering domain experts. This collaboration can be best institutionalized through systematic knowledge transfer between the two domains coupled with effective knowledge management throughout the design innovation process. Toward this goal, we present the development of a semantic framework for medical device design that unifies a large medical ontology with detailed engineering functional models along with the repository of design innovation information contained in the US Patent Database. As part of our development, existing medical, engineering, and patent document ontologies were modified and interlinked to create a comprehensive medical device innovation and design tool with appropriate properties and semantic relations to facilitate knowledge capture, enrich existing knowledge, and enable effective knowledge reuse for different scenarios. The result is a Concept Ideation Framework for Medical Device Design (CIFMeDD). Key features of the resulting framework include function-based searching and automated inter-domain reasoning to uniquely enable identification of functionally similar procedures, tools, and inventions from multiple domains based on simple semantic searches. The significance and usefulness of the resulting framework for aiding in conceptual design and innovation in the medical realm are explored via two case studies examining medical device design problems.