Northwell Health holds $100,000 voting contest to fund three new medical innovations
Starting Tuesday, public voting will decide which of the three initiatives will receive $100,000 in additional research support, system says.
Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling
Employees at Northwell Health have developed three distinct medical innovations that will take center stage in a new contest: Starting Tuesday, public voting will decide which of the three initiatives will receive $100,000 in additional research support.
Through April 18, voters can go to www.northwell.edu/vote to learn more about each idea, and vote for the one in which they think Northwell should invest.
The three innovations are being explored by Northwell Ventures, which develops and finances new spin-off companies based on ideas that originate with Northwell physicians, researchers and other employees within the organization.
Northwell President and CEO Michael Dowling said in a statement that the organization is unique in that it provides an avenue for employees' ideas to come to life.
"We identify and celebrate pioneering, out-of-the-box thinkers who are passionate about advancing medicine and changing lives -- and have potential solutions to make that happen," he said.
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The first innovation is an alternative to patient identification wristbands. Noting that they've been the only reliable method of identifying patients in a healthcare setting for over half a century, Dr. Peter Constantino, executive director and senior vice president of Northwell's Head and Neck Surgery Service Line and chair of otolaryngology at Lenox Hill Hospital, devised an alternative -- The Patient Identification Shield. It's a temporary stamp that's non-transferable and easily removable, and promises to be a more cost-effective alternative to the traditional wristbands.
The patent-pending device allows medical information to be extracted from an electronic health record affixed directly to the surface of the skin. The system can be applied to different parts of the body and is color-coded to reduce medical errors, as well as being larger compared to typical hospital wristbands.
The second innovation seeks to manage the risk of bleeding in surgery. Fifty million inpatient surgeries are performed each year in the United States, according to a statement from Northwell, and while technologies like anesthesia and antibiotics can manage pain and infection, managing bleeding can be more of a challenge.
To that end, researchers at Northwell's Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have developed what they call a "blood loss manager," which stimulates the vagus nerve through the skin; it claims to reduce the amount of blood lost and the time a wound bleeds by 50 percent.
Feinstein Institute researchers were also behind the contest's third innovation: They modified an existing 3-D printer to create a bioprinter, a device engineered to produce living, functional tissue replacement.
With the potential to replace many different parts of the human body, custom tissue replacement can be printed using a patient's own cells. Northwell researchers are already working with clinicians across the health system using 3-D bioprinting to develop alternatives to traditional medical treatments, including researching ways to create living tissue made of bone or cartilage.
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To promote the contest, Northwell is running advertisements during this month's NCAA college basketball tournament, part of a broader marketing campaign aimed at introducing the health system's new name, tagline ("Look North"), and logo to consumers throughout the New York metropolitan area.
Twitter: @JELagasse
