Boston, MA — Anna Young is the founder of Makernurse, a platform that taps into the innovation capabilities of a group of people that know the world of frontline patient care the best: nurses. It documents nurse-made fixes, hacks, and workarounds that make patient’s lives a little more bearable. Recent successes have included glow-in-the-dark pill bottles, bed-shower overlays, and a TV remote control for patients with tremors in their fingers.
Since its launch, Makernurse has published 50 how-to guides for nurses online and facilitated crowd-sourced iterations and ongoing conversation on how to improve them. They’ve launched two in-hospital “maker spaces”, and Anna was recently honored by Fast Company as one of their top 100 most creative people in business.
Why it matters:
Nurses are an increasingly important, but oft-forgotten, audience and the Makernurse platform is a prime example of how to engage with them by soliciting their knowledge and feedback and creating an open source community for them to build upon each other’s ideas. Anna Young is about to expand her innovation philosophy as well with the announcement of Maker Health, a new platform that will include more frontline workers and the patients themselves, so we expect you’ll be hearing about her even more very soon.
