TA4 -- Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive Innovation

If a patient has skin breakdown or ulcers, then nurses will put in an order for a specialty mattress. Before the nurses can do this though, they must ask for a consult from wound care. Sometimes, there are only two people from wound care working, and if they have to handle patients all over the whole hospital and sometimes a consult won’t be able to happen for hours. This can be extremely frustrating because the patient is in pain and unfortunately the nurse can’t order the mattress until wound care comes. This is a huge disruption because nurses are very busy and have many patients, so when wound care finally comes, whether that be minutes or hours later, the nurse must drop everything she is doing and go in the room with them.

Based on the process model that we have designed, this is a good disruptive idea. In order to get tasks done and patients taken care of in a timely manner, wound care must be available. Finding this disruptive idea gives us something to think about with our process model and data models. What if there was no one from wound care available to help our patients? This problem threatens our process model. Addressing this problem enables us to perfect the process model and tweak it when necessary. Improving our business model to have backups, such as an application to address these wounds would be a start. If there was an application that could be used on the nurse's phones that could, in real-time, send photos of these wounds to wound care team members then that would speed up the mattress ordering process. These applications could be used within a hospital network, such as UPMC. Anyone who works in this hospital network and works on the wound care team would be able to help if necessary.