Thinking Quickly, Caring Creatively

Nurses are a quick-thinking, quick-caring bunch who try to make life easier for their patients in an incredibly fast-paced environment. It’s time to take that on-the-ground know-how and scale it because Johns Hopkins School of Nursing (JHSON) is co-sponsoring a Patient Safety and Quality track this weekend at MedHacks, a medical hackathon. Follow along to see what these interprofessional teams—including JHSON students—come up with.

First things first, what’s a hackathon?

It’s a multi-day event where people come together, brainstorm, and work intensely on ideas and products. MedHacks is a student-run event that focuses on innovating at the crossroads of medical entrepreneurship and technological development. The event challenges student innovators (at the graduate and undergraduate levels) with engineering, medical, and entrepreneurial backgrounds to design solutions to the most pressing medical issues of our day.

Nurses are uniquely prepared to tackle patient safety and quality problems. Nurses are the primary point of contact with patients and their families; at an individual level nurses see what works, what doesn’t, and come up with new, creative solutions on the spot. So what irritates you every day? Did you notice a flow issue in a unit you precepted on? Do you see any glaring areas that need improvement? Make a note. You’re solving a critical need because medical errors and preventable patient infections and injuries make up the third-leading cause of death in the United States.

Area of Excellence: Quality & Safety / Health Systems Management

This year’s JHSON campus ambassador is Julia Bozarth, an MSN (Entry Into Nursing) student. Wish her and JHSON’s other participants luck as they strap on their thinking caps and bounce ideas off their neighbors in this 36-hour marathon thinking, creating, and changing session.