December 27, 2021 | View Archived Issues
SUSAN AHERN
Vice President
of Innovation

A Note from...
Susan Ahern, Vice President of Innovation, MaineHealth
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

The MaineHealth Innovation team and I wish you a
warm and peaceful holiday season. Thank you for all you do
to foster the culture of innovation at MaineHealth.

We look forward to continuing to innovate with you in 2022!

With kind regards,
Susan
CONNECT | Events

Brewing Ideas Coffee Corner
1st + 3rd Tuesdays* of each month
January 4, 2022 | 8:30-9:30am
January 18, 2022 | 8:30-9:30am

Intellectual Property
Information Session
2nd Wednesdays of each month
January 12, 2022 | 7:30-8:00am

*Please note that the bi-monthly Coffee Corner hour has been changed in order to accommodate the new meeting time for Andy’s Open Door.
EDUCATE | Learn + Discover

Check out the upcoming event series from the Maine Technology Institute (MTI), a strategic partner of MaineHealth Innovation:

Part I National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTR Proposal Preparation
January 11, 2022 | 10am

Part II: Writing the Specific Aims Page for NIH SBIR/STTR Applications
January 18, 2022 | 10am

Part III: Understanding the NIH SBIR/STTR Peer Review Process
January 25, 2022 | 10am

Introduction to SBIR/STTR Opportunities
January 18, 2022 | 11am
FUND | Support Opportunities

Maine Technology Institute Information Session
January 20, 2022 | 12pm

MTI offers the potential for matching fund opportunities
INNOVATION SPOTLIGHT
Transforming Rural Diabetes Care in Maine through Innovation 
Kiran Gujral, MD, and Irwin Brodsky, MD, received an award from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust for a $2.4M grant entitled, “Transforming Rural Diabetes Care in Maine through Innovation.” Sparked by a connection made by MaineHealth Chief Information Officer Dr. Dan Nigrin, clinical leaders from Maine Medical Partners Endocrinology & Diabetes Center and MaineHealth Innovation collaborated on this grant submission.

Principal investigator Dr. Kiran Gujral, who is mentored by Dr. Irwin Brodsky, and the study team outlined a novel clinical intervention using DreaMed Diabetes, an AI technology for optimizing the care of patients with diabetes who need insulin and live in rural communities. This 3-year grant will be used to create The MaineHealth Virtual Diabetes Clinic (MVDC), a collaborative partnership among subspecialists in Endocrinology and Diabetes and primary care clinicians that employs state-of-the-art diabetes management technology. The goal of the MVDC is to establish a novel collaborative clinical model for managing insulin therapy in people with diabetes living in rural communities, and to study how continuous glucose monitoring technology and an artificial intelligence driven decision tool (DreaMed Advisor®) changes clinically relevant diabetes outcomes.

The development of this funded submission was an incredibly collaborative effort which engaged stakeholders from local health system primary care leaders, information technology, government affairs, Maine Medical Center Research Institute (MMCRI), MaineHealth Accountable Care Organization (ACO), and MMC Philanthropy. With only four weeks from initial invitation to submission, this effort represented the collaboration and ingenuity that is reflective of the MaineHealth values of excellence and innovation. 
PROGRAM UPDATES
Innovation Cohort | Innovation Elective | Innovation Fund | Innovation Blender | Brewing Ideas Coffee Corner
Upcoming Program Opportunities

Next Program Cycle: Spring 2022
Stay tuned for application details coming January 2022!

Next Program Cycle: Spring 2022
Stay tuned for application details coming January 2022!

This event will return in February 2022.
Interested in being a MaineHealth Innovation Blender Speaker? Apply here.
Thinking Differently: Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) and MaineHealth Innovation Elective for Medical Students

"This course helps me think about the innovation process in a systematic way that I can bring into my future practice.” — James Kwan, TUSM medical student

James Kwan, a Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) MaineHealth Innovation Elective student for Fall 2021, is learning to “think differently.” As a fourth year TUSM student applying to ophthalmology residency programs, James is investigating innovative ideas related to patient access and infection prevention. James is engaging in experiential learning activities to help him explore specific innovation areas of interests.
 
The TUSM MaineHealth Innovation Elective is a 4-week course designed for medical students that uses an experiential learning approach to develop an individual's idea generation capabilities and explore potential innovation projects. Learners explore opportunities of interest, engage in user discovery, search for existing or novel models, develop a prototype, define stakeholders, run short experiments, and map a process for future deployment of their innovative solution.
 
INNOVATION 101
Over the next several months, our MaineHealth Innovation newsletter will feature tips for developing skills to “think differently” and to adopt a more innovative mindset. In each issue, we will present a new Discovery Skill based on the work of Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and
Clayton Christensen, leaders in disruptive innovation. Last month we covered questioning. You can check out that Innovation tip here from our October newsletter. Using the skills may inspire and challenge you to create new innovative insights.

Discovery Skill: Networking for Ideas

“What a person does on his own, without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of others, is even in the best of cases rather paltry and monotonous” — Albert Einstein
 
When we have an idea for an innovation or have identified a problem we want to investigate, networking, or talking to people, can often help us come up with new insights about the problem we are trying to solve or the innovation we want to test out. Talking with people from different backgrounds or different industries helps us see the world differently, which ultimately helps us “think differently”. Learn more about the power of networking in this short video from Hal Gregersen, co-author of the Innovator’s DNA, here. 
Theresa Roelke, APRN's innovation "Pocket Nodules-Lung"
Skills in Action: MaineHealth Innovator, Theresa Roelke, APRN, a Nurse Practitioner and creator of Pocket Nodules, has shared her innovation in several settings, including at the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) where she received a national innovation award. Through networking at the ACCC conference she made a connection with the Lung Ambition Alliance and is now working on defining how she can co-brand her Pocket Nodules innovation in order to get her innovative patient education tool into the hands of thousands across the globe.
Taking the Next Step: Two great ways to network through MaineHealth Innovation are to join the Coffee Corner and the Innovation Blender!

The bi-weekly Brewing Ideas Coffee Corner is an opportunity to meet with other care team members across MaineHealth who are interested in innovation! Join this interactive hour every 1st and 3rd Tuesdays at 8:30am via Zoom.

The Innovation Blender, is designed to bring together practitioners, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators from a variety of backgrounds together to ideate and brainstorm around innovator challenges and proposed breakthrough technologies.
Help us celebrate innovation!


Help us celebrate innovation and create a resource for sharing
innovation across MaineHealth by submitting your innovation story!
Discover MaineHealth Innovation stories here.

Let us know how we can help support innovation:

The MaineHealth Innovation Team
Susan Ahern - Vice President of Innovation
Elena Brondolo, MPH, MBA - Manager of Innovation
Kim Harvey, MSOL - Program Manager, Innovation
Todd Keiller, MBA - Director of Intellectual Property & Tech Transfer
Savannah Young - Executive Assistant I