Date
15 December 2022

On 15 December 2022, the Healthcare Transformation Lab (HTL) in collaboration with Center for Innovations in Care Delivery (CICD) and The Patient Experience Department at MGH celebrated the winner and 3 runner ups of the first Nursing and Patient Care Services Ether Dome Challenge.

The EDC program was launched by HTL in 2014 with support from the Laboratory of Innovation Science at the Harvard Business School (LISH) in recognition of the fact that frontline staff know best the pain points they face in their daily work with the goal to engage frontline staff to put forward their ideas and solutions to these pain points.  Ideas and solutions are submitted via an internally designed and developed secure, anonymous platform.  Staff are then invited to engage in the process of deciding which ideas move forward through a crowdsourced voting process via the platform.  Top voted idea submitters are then invited to prepare implementation plans, which are reviewed and evaluated by a panel of expert judges.  Winning ideas are granted implementation funding as well as project support from HTL.  The program has been run within clinical departments 5 times.  Many of the ideas that emerged from these challenges are directly related to patient care.  So, after a successful implementation of the EDC with Nursing and Patient Care services in 2021, HTL teamed up with the CICD to run a challenge with patients in collaboration with the Patient Experience Team. 

Members from all 8 of the MGH Patient and Family Advisory Council teams participated in this unique opportunity to gather innovative ideas from patients.  In July 2022, we launched our first EDC program with patients.  After receiving 26 ideas, the participants voted and the top 11 ideas were invited to submit an application.  We had 7 judges from Collaborative Governance and Quality and Safety, Process Improvement.   The results of the judges identified one winner and 3 runner ups who we celebrated in December 2022 during our EDC Awards and Recognition Ceremony.

A recording of the event is included here. Note that for best viewing, download the file.