Ask Yourself, “Why Not Me?”

As part of our larger commitment to elevating and empowering underrepresented voices throughout the nursing profession, and in alignment with Our Race to Health Equity, which aspires to eradicate racial and social injustice as a public health threat by eliminated health inequities for people of color, and in celebration of Black History Month, it was an honor to give our Johnson & Johnson Nurse Innovation Fellow, Lydel Wright, MS, MSN, BSN, the opportunity to share his journey to nursing and entrepreneurship in the below guest-authored article. As inequities and discrimination continue to affect areas of patient care and healthcare, I hope nurses everywhere can take inspiration from Lydel, who continues to make waves in innovation despite any challenges that have been in his path.

When you trust the vision given to you, you’ll find everything else will coalesce to move you forward.

Growing up from a humble beginning– reliant on a single mother of four, who worked three jobs while putting herself through nursing school– innovation wasn’t an option. It was a necessity for survival.

At the young age of ten, I knew I wanted to be in healthcare. I remember laying at the foot of my mother’s bed as she studied for her nursing school assessments and shared some of the things she learned until my siblings and I fell asleep.

Inspired by strong Black women in my life, I was driven to start my healthcare journey early. I applied and was accepted to the only high school in Florida with a Licensed Practical Nursing (LPN) program, Blanche Ely High School. The program was rigorous and required us to complete our entire high school curriculum by our junior year. With the requirements so demanding, we sacrificed our summers to education. And out of a program of just 25 accepted students, only 11 of us graduated.

Although I graduated at the top of my LPN program and passed the exit exam with one of the highest scores in our program, the first time I took the NCLEX-PN exam, I failed. I was crushed and figured maybe nursing wasn’t for me. I moved on to college, and in my first year, I explored law, medicine, business–anything other than nursing. But after my first year of college, I found myself living in my car because my scholarship disbursements weren’t released, and I had no money for a place to stay. Once I had graduated high school, I promised myself I would never ask my mother for money again as she had given so much already. I was familiar with need and struggle, but this felt different. It was an isolated pain that verbally I couldn’t explain.

One day, a woman from church came to me and said, “Something told me you need a place to stay, and I am going to provide that for you.” I had only been in my car for about two weeks, but I felt rescued. During that two-week period in my car, I realized that while failing the NCLEX-PN had temporarily broken something in me, it was something I could overcome. I felt a new energy inside me, and armed with that energy, I decided to take the exam again. This time I passed.

My trust in my abilities to make a difference in healthcare returned. My nursing career had officially begun. And after being quickly given new responsibilities in my first job working as an LPN, I decided to continue my education and pursue an LPN-RN transition at Tallahassee Community College, and later a BSN and MSN at University of Texas at Arlington.

As I spent more time providing patient care as a nurse, I started to pick up on many of the inefficiencies in healthcare. I found myself muttering, “Somebody needs to design a…” and “Who came up with this useless…”, and I began to ideate, write down and design concepts as they came to me. As a Horatio Alger National Scholar, a national scholarship that assists high school students who have faced and overcome great obstacles in their young lives, I was exposed to some of the greatest leaders in business which inspired me to one day own my own business. I was also inspired by my mother, who started her own business that allowed her to successfully take control of her life and her schedule. This led me to want to create a business of my own to bring my ideas to life.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to share some of my healthcare concepts when I participated in a hackathon event for healthcare workers, engineers and software developers. But when I looked around the room, not only was I the only nurse in the room, I was also the only Black participant. I remember other participants asking me, “You’re a physician, right?” When I responded, “No, I’m a nurse,” they would smile but then move on to look for other potential team members. I knew my background as a nurse was an asset. As nurses, we get an intimate look at the patient and caregiver experience, often being the link between all service areas. Armed with my experience of caring through the lens of the patient, I leveraged my networking skills to put a team together. I was the only clinician in our group, but our comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach enabled us to win first place at the event.

My hackathon success reignited a fire within me to not just think about healthcare solutions but to develop and drive them. Instead of waiting for others to innovate the ideas, I began asking myself, “Why not me?”

One of my first innovative ideas I decided to pursue as a business was SafeWatch, a solution focused on healthy aging in place and clinical workflow redesign. Over the past few years, I’ve developed additional innovation ideas and have embarked on new learning opportunities including:

• Working with Sparrow.ai software, a collaborative, healthcare-oriented technology partner to effectively recognize the scalable and flexible requirements of SafeWatch’s medication module. In utilizing this AI automation technology, we are easily addressing evolving regulatory requirements. This technology will allow SafeWatch to achieve a rapid, complete and fully functioning product build at less than half of traditional technology costs- allowing us to enter the Johnson & Johnson Innovation’s Pill Protect QuickFire Challenge with added confidence.
• Redesigning the 100-year-old hospital gown for Function, Form, & Fashion; to better meet patient and clinician needs by partnering with a manufacturer, the Kendra Scott “Kendra Cares” organization, and the Charley Harper Art Studio. This has also afforded me a chance to give back, as 10% of revenue from gown sales will be used to help socioeconomically disadvantaged high school students access better paying jobs through clinical and technical certifications.
• Being chosen as the first Black male Fellow in the inaugural cohort of twelve dynamic Johnson & Johnson Nurse Innovation Fellows, connecting me to an incredible network of nurse innovation leaders who are passionate about transforming healthcare.

My innovation and nursing journey continues to be an incredible ride filled with challenges, successes and readjustments. It’s been an honor to emerge as a leader in healthcare innovation, and a representation of what nurses can accomplish both in healthcare and for communities of color. This is particularly important to me, as calls for voices of color to lead and champion solutions for healthcare disparities has become more prevalent and necessary. I’m still learning a lot myself, but if I can share any words of wisdom about this journey, I would say:

• Fail forward: Give yourself space to fail and fail fast. Learning from failure can help you go further.
• Build a network, then let your net work: Don’t be afraid to make connections, and then ask for any support they can give to push you closer to your vision.
• Go after progression, not perfection: As nurses and healthcare professionals, we often want to only bring “the perfected” forward, but small, incremental, imperfect wins can bring major success. Start with what you have.
• The pressure that you feel is not meant to defeat you, but to refine you: You are stronger than you may think.
• Ask yourself, “Why not me?” Your vision has value. Pay attention to pain points and inefficiencies around you. They are opportunities for transformation in product, policy, process and patient care.