The Iowa Nurse Innovator Program within the Office of Innovation is empowering a statewide community of nurse inventors to create solutions improving patient safety, workflow efficiencies and effectiveness in hospitals across the state.

Nurses are forced to create workarounds with existing materials and personal grit to overcome issues that the healthcare industry has failed to recognize or address. They have been defining solutions to daily challenges for as long as they have been called nurses, but rarely do they get credit or receive agency to explore scalable solutions that could be commercialized. The Office of Innovation set out to change this.

The Iowa Nurse Innovator Program provides nurses with guidance, tools, motivation, support, and access to resources to translate ideas for new devices or practices from concepts into tangible products.