Hackensack Meridian Health Backs Staff Ideas to Humanize Patient Care

The Bear’s Den Innovation challenge produces three winners as iPads for voiceless, safari hunts for kids, and conversation boards move toward piloting and funding.

Three groundbreaking ideas are winners at the “Bear's Den Internal Challenge: Making Patient Care More Personal” innovation challenge.

The three new clinical strategies could work in concert to greatly improve network-wide patient care at Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) in the near future.

A panel of evaluators—including CEO Robert C. Garrett, FACHE, HMH senior executives, HMH board members, and outside investors—heard three finalist presentations, ultimately deciding all three were winners.

The three winning concepts were narrowed down from a pool of nearly 70 submissions and will be further developed and piloted at HMH locations to determine their effectiveness in enhancing patient-centered care.

“Our yearly Bear’s Den challenge draws from the experience of more than 30,000 team members in real-world health care practice,” said Garrett, the CEO. “Steadily coming together with new ideas for improvements great and small is how we make our biggest strides as an organization.”

The Bear's Den Innovation Program is Hackensack Meridian Health’s unique change accelerator, designed to turn promising health-care concepts into reality. The program convenes a panel of experts—from venture capitalists and industry leaders, to HMH’s own team members—to vet new ideas and provide strategic partnerships for resources needed to launch.

Through thought-provoking quarterly meetings, the Bear's Den challenges the status quo to set higher standards of care for New Jersey, and beyond.

“We are grateful each year, not only to those whose proposals win on the day, but to all who submit,” said Ihor Sawczuk, M.D., FACS, Hackensack Meridian Health's president of Academics, Research and Innovation, founding chair of the Hackensack Meridian Health Research Institute, and also associate dean of Clinical Integration and professor and chair emeritus of Urology at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine. “We get better with each innovative effort that’s made and conveyed across HMH.”

The three winners are:

• The Silent Struggle – A modern solution that provides iPads equipped with speech-generating applications to patients who are unable to communicate verbally. This gives a voice to the voiceless, empowering them to express their needs and reducing the anxiety and frustration associated with communication barriers. This project is led by Josi Shimkus and Joy Schiro from Jersey Shore University Medical Center.
• Get to Know Me: Humanizing Patient Care – An initiative centered on a bedside “Get to Know Me” board that allows patients to share personal information, such as their hobbies, values, and what makes them feel comfortable. This tool fosters deeper, more meaningful connections between care teams and patients, ensuring every patient is seen as a person first. This project was initiated by a team of nurses at Old Bridge Medical Center.
• Increasing Pediatric Mobility, an initiative by the H.E.A.R.T.S. Project – A creative “Pediatric Safari Adventure” scavenger hunt designed to motivate and encourage hospitalized children to ambulate. By turning a clinical necessity into a fun activity, this project aims to reduce fear, increase compliance, and make the hospital feel less medical and more fun for the network's youngest patients. This project is led by Ashley Sbarra, R.N., Marissa Samaan, and Kelsey Parodi of Joseph M. Sanzari Children's Hospital.

All three ideas will be implemented in pilot programs to test their effectiveness, and prepared for network-wide implementation upon completion.

“The greatest thing about these ideas lies our knowledge that they were formed to directly improve the processes of those team members who devised them," said Sandra Elliott, vice president and chief innovation and commercialization officer at Hackensack Meridian Health. “We think the organic nature of this innovation will make all the difference as they are implemented at scale.”

Since its launch in 2017, the Bear's Den has served as the health network's novel incubator, bringing together HMH executive leadership, domain experts, health care providers, patent attorneys, and venture capitalists to invest in promising innovations. The program has successfully advanced numerous internal strategies and external companies focused on streamlining care delivery, reducing hospital readmissions, and empowering patients to partner with their physicians.