NurseHack4Health? Innovation Sprint @ AONL — Part 1

By Rachael Acker

On April 8, 2024 on a warm humid day in downtown New Orleans, Hiyam , Mary Lou , Onike and myself led 100+ nurse leaders in a pre-conference workshop at AONL 2024, a full day of experiential learning and co-designing solutions by applying design methods to learn how to “do” design thinking.

The event was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, and in partnership with SONSIEL , Healthero created the Innovation Collaborator (IC GPT) for facilitators to guide teams.

Sixteen teams were spread across these three challenge areas:

This article is a behind-the-scenes look at this pre-conference event.

Setting the Stage

Hiyam kicked us off by inspiring us that we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect the same results. She set us up with these grounding principles:

1. Collaborate to develop shared language. Create from diverse perspectives, an inclusive vision, the North Star. What if…
2. All ideas are seeds towards a good solution. It doesn’t matter where ideas come from or how crazy they may seem. Yes, and…
3. Scan the future. Old models don’t always work. Change emerges from collective needs. Look at adjacent industries for metaphors and inspiration. It works like…
4. Everything you see, touch, feel & experience is designed. Design the future you want to live in. Imagine if … then …
5. Make space for critical thinking. Consider unintended consequences early. Fail forward fast…

Then a reminder to take a holistic, systems level view. Recognizing that to design a future-ready, resilient healthcare system means solving beyond individual needs, imagining solutions within contexts that span over a longer period of time and thinking critically about mitigating unintended consequences.

Team Formation

Each facilitator supported 5–6 tables, where each table had 4–6 team members. Team members were instructed to take on a specific role as a way of injecting diversity of thought and for all voices to be heard, with a touch of humor from the WellBeans :

1. The Presenter: The one who would represent the team’s voice. A good presenter listens more than talks.
2. The Contrarian: Critical thinking is a key role to help the team remember to critically assess ideas similar to a Red Team .
3. The Optimist: Representing the Blue Team, this role builds on ideas to take it farther into the future.
4. The Clinician: To add a medical, evidence based lens to the solution
5. The Empathizer: Reminding the team of needs and wants across the ecosystem.
6. The Organizer: To keep discussions flowing, the organizer efficiently moves the conversation towards an outcome within the timebox, sometimes acting as a scribe.

iPromptly cards

Teams were also given an iPromptly deck, conversation cards to inspire out-of-box thinking and prompt critical thinking for creative problem solving. Based on design fiction and speculative design methods, iPromptly was co-designed with chatGPT 4 and validated by nurse leaders for topic relevance. The cards are organized around these four categories:

WHO represents the challenge or unmet need WHERE care is delivered and corresponding health moments WHAT artifacts or emerging tech might change the game HOW we might reshape systems with new business strategies

Here’s a sample combination:

Sensing Needs

In the morning, each of the 16 teams generated Empathy Maps and Ecosystem maps within the first couple of hours. The Empathy Map include psychosocial phenotypic characteristics:

1. Think, Say, Do, See, Hear & Feel
2. Lifestyle Values & Beliefs
3. Relationships & Influencers
4. Social Structures & Cultural Norms
5. Pains & Gains: What motivates and strengths do they rely on to achieve their goals in the format of “Need X so that Y” or “If this then that”

Empathy Mapping — Human vs. GPT

The teams picked the WHO and WHERE to frame the problem from the iPromptly card deck. In parallel, we ran IC GPT to generate a PESTLE analysis and the persona below after we gave it a brief description of the Hope’s problem:

Compare IC GPT’s output to the Empathy map generated by the team:

How would you rate how well IC GPT empathizes with Hope, compared to the empathy map of Hope generated by the team?

Ecosystem Mapping

Teams then zoomed out to understand underlying structures, paradigms and mental models to highlight inter-relationships and boundaries. This work helps uncover leverage points for small changes that could have have transformative impact, across immediate influencers to policies and regulations at the outer circle.

Here’s what IC GPT generated:

Problem Statement

The teams summarized their morning exercises into a problem statement while IC GPT was instructed to produce a biomimicry perspective to the problem, then summarize into a short statement:

Crowdsourcing feedback, World Cafe style

Teams moved around to other tables, gathering feedback from other teams, and updated their maps based on that feedback.

Meanwhile, we took a picture of empathy maps and asked IC GPT to summarize into key themes. Here’s an example of what it produc

I was curious about how well it might generate the problem statement in the format of an elevator pitch. It’s very good at listening to instructions as long as you can give it an example of what you’re looking for. Remember, it can’t reason, it only mimics from patterns.

The maps were then taped to the walls and it was time for lunch!

Based on some initial feedback, it’s not very accurate at transcribing the content of each post-it, but the initial output, and we wouldn’t suggest using GenAI, in its current state, April 2024, to analyze research accurately. But it has got us thinking about different ways to frame problems and develop critical thinking skills.

Stay tuned for Part 2!