OSU‘s Tim Raderstorf: Planting the Seeds to Grow a Culture of Health Care Innovation

BY KOREN THOMAS

Founded in 2017, The Ohio State University Innovation Studio is run by the OSU College of Nursing and Center for Health Care Innovation and Wellness. In normal times, the Innovation Studio travels the country, encouraging students to create health care solutions, and helping them to use technology to develop their ideas into marketable new products. How did the pandemic affect the innovation program? DailyNurse spoke to Tim Raderstorf, MSN, RN, the co-founder of the Innovation Studio and Chief Innovation Officer (as well as Clinical Instructor of Practice) at the OSU School of Nursing. Dr. Raderstorf has conducted neurosurgical research on Tethered Spinal Cord Syndrome, but his passion is health care innovation.

When he isn’t teaching, Raderstorf travels the country with OSU’s mobile Innovation Studio. He is also an expert on the role of innovation in nurse leadership and an award-winning textbook author. EvidenceBased Leadership, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in Nursing and Health care, the textbook Raderstorf co-wrote with OSU School of Nursing Dean Bernadette Melnyk was an American Journal of Nursing (AJN) Book of the Year for 2020, winning first place honors in its category.

At the December pitch day, one of the nurses on the unit came by on her 15-minute break to pitch her idea to us. And she was wearing PPE, that— unknown to her—we had printed.

When the first wave of the pandemic hit, the Studio was of course locked down. Raderstorf shut down the traveling innovation studio and moved all operations to the permanent location on the OSU central campus.

Being innovators, though, they quickly adapted. Raderstorf says, “For the first six months of COVID, because we didn’t open our doors until the students came on campus in September (2020), we ran a virtual makerspace.” With support from the OSU College of Engineering and public-private partnerships, Innovation Studio shop manager Josh Wooten created a sort of computer-run PPE factory. During the lockdowns of the initial spring 2020 COVID-19 surge, Raderstorf notes that “We wanted to keep Josh as safe as we possibly could, so we set up a makerspace in his house. He had five 3D printers and was printing PPE around the clock with mostly faceshield frames, so that we could hook transparencies or plastic to them. It’d be running day and night, doing work for us while we slept.”

The Studio also reached out to students before OSU reopened that fall. In May 2020, Tim’s team launched a COVID Campus Safety challenge, encouraging students to submit their ideas. After the students returned for classes, a second virtual challenge encouraged them to suggest practical ideas that would promote safety on campus. At that time (September 2020), public health initiatives were not yet regarded as suspect moves designed to advance a sinister authoritarian plot, so the initiative inspired a variety of submissions aimed at improving mask adherence, social distancing, and mental health of the student population. Raderstorf recalls that they held student pitch days in October and December, and that, “At the December pitch day, one of the nurses on the unit came by on her 15-minute break to pitch her idea to us. And she was wearing PPE, that—unknown to her—we had printed” on those 3D printers in Josh Wooten’s makerspace bubble.

The OSU Innovation Studio team. At center, Tim Raderstorf, MSN, RN.

Raderstorf believes that “The acclaim and attention and interest has prompted more nurses to raise their voices in terms of public health and policy,” and has encouraged more of them “to innovate and come up with solutions for the various pain points that they’ve encountered during the pandemic. And I think that’s going to build. I’m very bullish on that. I’m big on systems of innovation and building a structure of innovation, to have a proper culture of innovation that thrives.”

Our health care system still needs to implement a structure or establish a culture that encourages nurses, physicians, and other frontline health workers to bring their ideas for innovation to their organizations. Tim posits, “I do think clinicians have never been more willing and engaged in changing the system. The question is, can systems become engaged and willing and set their clinicians up for success so that they can appropriately drive the changes that need to occur? Particularly as we become cash strapped and health care is going through a massive transformation. There’s going to be a very challenging component to the future of health care once the pandemic is over. We have to decide what we refuse to go back to and what we will continue to make changes on.”

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Raderstorf reflects, “I do think that the exceptional [nursing] leadership that’s occurring throughout health systems now needs to be the norm. Those things about celebrating our wins, focusing on what’s important today.

There’s going to be a very challenging component to the future of healthcare once the pandemic is over. We have to decide what we refuse to go back to and what we will continue to make changes on.

‘What’s important now’ — you know, that’s an acronym for ‘win’. How do we win today? What are we going to focus on?

More Nurses are Tossing their Stethoscopes into the Pitching Ring

Campus pitch events were a growing phenomenon across US schools even before Covid. At the OSU Innovation Studio, Raderstorf says that over 1,000 people made pitches between 2018 and December 2020. About 60% of the pitches are presented by students, but the remaining 40% tend to come from faculty or other staff, which he describes as “A nice healthy mix. We are seeing an increase in faculty and staff, but the students are increasing at a much faster rate.”

But Raderstorf is not wild about buzz-phrases like “Nurse Innovators.” In fact, he says, “You know, one of my least favorite terms is ‘nursing innovation’. Because there’s no such thing as physician innovation, there’s no such thing as dentist innovation, there’s no such thing as pharmacist innovation. So why do we label ourselves other than just being innovators and really showcasing that we are indeed equals with our peers?”

One aspect of maker-innovator culture that should come naturally to nurses is the necessity to work with a multidisciplinary team – and to be a success, an innovation must have feedback from the people who will be using it. As Raderstorf puts it, “If you don’t have an interprofessional team, that disqualifies you from being eligible for funding. So, if two physicians come up with a great idea, we say, ‘awesome, who are you going to use this on’? And they usually say, ‘well, it’d be an operating room or height’. ‘Well, who preps your trays? That person needs to be on your team! You need to be getting insights from the people who are going to be interacting with this tool.’”

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

While he notes that “A lot of people are interested in developing a new business, a new tool, something along those lines,” Raderstorf says that he also sees “a lot of people interested in policy change and awareness campaigns.” However, he observed that a nurse-led innovation that combined these strands was the Studio’s “most successful commercial effort.” An OSU nurse wanted to find a way to prevent hospitalized addicts from injecting drugs into their system through their IVs and make such “offlabel” use of an IV impossible or at least extremely difficult. So, Raderstorf continues, this nurse sought a way “to stop people from being able to access the lines without us knowing about it and created a tape that would go over IV ports…. And, you know, it’s now on the market. Her idea has gone from something she drew on a napkin to a tool that is now being used worldwide to help patients.”

Building a culture of innovation is “A long game, you have to be patient, and you have to be willing to continue to water the seeds until they’re able to sprout.

The entrepreneurial aspect helps spur change because, as Tim remarks, “there’s nothing that’s free in our health system. That makes it really challenging to scale your ideas without going the commercialization route. If you can’t sell it, it’s really hard to have that mass impact. But really, the key goal of the Innovation Studio is to build a culture of innovation. That’s a long game, you have to be patient, and you have to be willing to continue to water the seeds until they’re able to sprout.”

Building a “Culture of Ambition”

Congratulating Raderstorf on the AJN recognition for his and Bernadette Melnyk’s textbook, we shared the judge’s comment that “What I loved about this book is that the authors made complex leadership and business topics accessible and interesting by sharing leaders’ personal stories…”

He was delighted. “I have never heard anyone say ‘I love a textbook’ before. One thing that I think is missing from academia is storytelling.” As an educator, Raderstorf teaches in the OSU Master of Health care Innovation program, which “is fully founded on innovation leadership, which adopts what we like to refer to as the entrepreneurial mindset. One new favorite term that I have is building a culture of ambition. And I mean ambition in a way that you’re striving for excellence. So, what we teach our team—and what’s in the book—is teaching people to find out what stories resonate most effectively with their coworkers and teammates in the population they engage in, and have that be the driving force that your team unifies around to make significant and substantial change. So by building this culture of ambition, you’re taking on ownership for your actions, you’re taking on ownership for the things that surround you, and the system that you work in.”

The key, he stresses, is to “focus on what’s important, to develop a ‘yes, and’ culture, that empowers people to bring their ideas forward, incentivizes them, provides them the permission to be innovative, and validates them when they engage in those behaviors. And you build a structure of innovation that lasts beyond your tenure within the organization.”

Koren Thomas is the Associate Editor of DailyNurse.