speaker, Rebecca Love. Rebecca is a thought leader on nurse innovation and entrepreneurship. She's a TED Talk speaker. Listen to some of them, they're really awesome. And she asks the question that we all need to think about. Why are nurses rarely involved in the design of healthcare products and workflows? In this passionate plenary talk, Rebecca will show why the collective wisdom of nurses needs to be incorporated into every stage of healthcare design, including wellness in the workplace. So it is my pleasure to introduce Rebecca Love. Thank you guys. I know this is the last session of the day and I know I have a short amount of time. So we're gonna go fast. Everything that I would do in 50 minutes, I'm gonna do in about 20 and you guys are gonna feel great. So we're all gonna leave here hopefully excited. Unfortunately, as I was sitting at the airport yesterday and I was reviewing what Maria had sent to me, I recognized that my typical speeches need to be transformed for this one. So this morning after getting off the airplane from San Francisco last night, I redid this because I realized the story you wanted to hear was one about failure in my experience and overcoming it. So for all of you, I remember nursing school as being the most challenging thing that I had ever done. Not only did I feel incredibly overwhelmed by the workload, but I felt incredibly disempowered. I felt like I was treated like a child with no ability to have a life outside of school or any reason to be able to negotiate why anything would be wrong or have any flexibility in schedule. And that was very weird because nursing was a second career choice for me. I entered it after I had already decided that I was supposed to go to law school and reconsidered and entered nursing school. So like any other program, I entered the direct entry program, which I know we have a couple of those students here, to become a nurse practitioner. And after being in school two and a half years, my now husband and I decided to have a wedding. And as you guys know, there was no time off in our programs. How many of you guys see that right now, right? You're in two and a half years, you're having no time off. And I said, look, it's Labor Day weekend, I'm gonna take a week off from the first fall semester and come back. And so I walked into my nursing research class and the professor looked at me and said, everything's online. I turned in my paper at the end of the semester and I received a message that I had failed. And I walked into the professor's classroom, and this is a story I've never shared publicly before. And I was in graduate school and I walked into the room and I looked at her and I said, you know, I'm really sorry, I'm completely shocked. How did I fail? And you're telling me that I have to take this semester over again? There's no chance to do this. And she looked me straight in the eye and she said, not only did you fail, but I don't believe you are what nursing needs today and you don't have a future in nursing research. And I remembered at that moment, I thought to myself, I should have gone to law school. And at that time, I didn't know this statement. I didn't know that that failure, that incredible embarrassment, look at all of my colleagues who we'd started school with and say, guys, next semester, I'm gonna be taking nursing research again while you guys go on and still try to graduate with you guys on time. Because I was the only one that had failed in our cohort. And I had never failed anything before when it had come to the academic session. So later in life, if I stood here today and I looked back, if I had known what was going to happen in my life at that moment, where I had thought about pulling out of nursing school, when I had thought that, you know what, I really am not supposed to be a nurse, I don't think I would have ever have known that today I stand on the stage that I do in the world of nursing. So there's a statement that I want you guys to recognize, that when things get really hard, you can't control what other people are going to do to you. You can't control if you fail a nursing class. You can't control if you're going to have people who are angry at you. The only thing that you can control is your response to that situation. If somebody cuts you off in traffic, yeah, you can go ahead and respond negatively to that person, or you can say, you know what, this isn't something I'm going to hold on to. And in my life, that's how I've gone about things. I went on that next semester. I got a research internship here at Northeastern, published that. I then went on and worked incredibly hard and thought to myself, one day, I'm going to lead the change in nursing that I hope to see in our profession. How a hackathon changed my life. So a few years after I graduated nursing school, I was a community college professor at Bunker Hill Community College. At the same time, I was a hospice nurse practitioner. One morning, I went out and I saw a patient of mine who wanted to die at home, but we could not find affordable care at home. So he was being sent to a nursing home, which had happened numerous times in the course of me being a hospice nurse practitioner. I was meeting a group of students of mine that afternoon. It was March 2013, who had graduated with me in December 2012 at the community college. And we had told them, if you become a nurse, you're going to have a job. At that time, not one of them had an interview. I went in my office, and there was desperation among all seven of them. I was working with them to rewrite their resumes. I turned to the computer and said, there has to be a website that helps you find nursing jobs. And at that time, in 2013, there was none. And I remember my experience of sitting there thinking, ow, the amount of black holes that I sent my resume to, you guys experienced that, I'm sure, before, that nobody ever got back to me. I went to bed that night, woke up, looked at my husband, and I said, I know what I got to do. I got to create a website that helps nurses find jobs and people find nurses. Long story short, he rolled back over and went to sleep. So I got out of bed. I picked up the phone. I called my favorite nurse, who at the time still is my mother. And I said, mom, we got to create this platform. She's like, this is great. Could you call me back in the morning? And I said, well, I guess so. You guys hope I sleep off one of these crazy ideas. And that was the start of my journey. At that time, we decided to build a platform called HireNurses.com. That was my first company that I built. And it was incredibly hard, because I thought every night I worked a full-time job. I had three little kids under the age of four. I'd come home at night from the hours of 9 to 2 in the morning, every night for a year, with a company in India to build our first platform. I launched the website. I email every nurse that I've ever known. And it's radio silence. Nobody goes to the website. I go, oh my gosh. My father, who looked at me, who I had asked for financial support to support this, and had said to me along the way, if this was such a great idea, why hadn't somebody else thought of it? And for that moment, I thought, you know what? He might be right. Lucky for me, I connected with a fellow young entrepreneur at the time who said, Rebecca, you got to go to a hackathon. And I said, Nick, what is a hackathon? He said, well, it's a three-day event where people come together, pose problems, form teams, and over the course of 56 hours, they create solutions to those problems. There's going to be a medical hackathon down at Tufts Medical Center. You got to go. And I thought, I got to go. Blizzard hits. Three kids at home. I look at my husband Friday evening, and adios. I'm going to a hackathon. I show up in the room. There are the CEO of the hospital, every leading physician, medical students, entrepreneurs. Everybody is sitting in that room. And I'm walking around, and I'm like, where's my nurses? And I realize I am the only nurse in the room. And I think, oh, I'm not supposed to be here. This is an event for the nurses. This is the event for the people that make the decisions at the hospital, like not me. But I didn't get asked to leave, so I joined a team. And over the course of those 56 hours, we had a separate room. The door would open, and in would walk the CEO of the hospital, a major company, a health care startup, and they'd sit down right at our table. And as we discussed the problem and the solution, I would say, well, you know what? That doesn't make sense. That's not how we would do it on the floor. And the CEO would look at me, turn from my physician colleague. Why wouldn't that work? Why wouldn't that work? And I said, well, because that's not how we do it as nurses. Well, why isn't that how you do it? You mean that's not how it's done in nursing? That's not how it's done in the hospital? Well, no, we already have this technology. It does that X, Y, and Z. And there's no interoperability. There's no ability to change that. They're like, I don't understand. In the course of those 56 hours, I had more positive interactions with those that made decisions at hospitals than I had ever had in my nursing career. Our team went on to win second place. But over the course of that weekend, I felt more empowered than I had ever felt as a nurse. I learned more about the business of health care in those 56 hours to understand why finance and implications of understanding how you make a statement regarding operation strategies and finance are more important than saying to somebody, I think, I feel, or believe, which is what I taught in nursing school, was that I understood that there had to be a greater expectation for health care to involve nurses. So I started to study the environment of health care hackathons around Boston. And what I realized is a very small percentage of nurses even attended those medical hackathons. But if you looked at the teams that won, the vast majority of those teams had nurses on them. And that's when I hypothesized that nurses had the critical skill set to create real, winning health care solutions. I don't know if you know this, but on average, nurses are doing 27 workarounds per shift and are in 36 different places over the course of an hour. That means that we are constantly innovating in a highly inefficient health care system. However, in the world of nursing, unlike places like Google or Amazon, workarounds are not considered good things. What are they considered? Dangerous. Danger. We were taught two things in nursing school to do things very well. We were taught one thing. What should we never do? We never want to what to a patient? We never want to harm. And then worse, we don't want to kill a patient. We don't want to do those things. So instead, we follow protocol, policy, and procedure to keep people alive. We do not challenge the status quo to make things different. But the reality is that we are constantly innovating in systems that do not work well for us. And that's when I knew there had to be a health care hackathon or a nurse hackathon. Lucky for me, I called two nursing schools and I was shot down by the idea of holding a nurse hackathon until I connected with, at the time, Dr. Nancy Hanrahan, who is the new dean of the School of Nursing here at Northeastern. And I said, let me tell you about my experience. And I explained this hackathon. And I said, Northeastern should really host a nurse hackathon. She said, well, I'm going to host this summit next year on innovation and entrepreneurship. Why don't you host a hackathon? And I said, well, I've been to a hackathon. Sure, I'll run a hackathon. No problem, right? No problem, OK. But I joined this incredible team of volunteers that came together because that was June 2015. And at the time, if you guys look in research, there was not even a handful of articles that mentioned nurse, innovator, and entrepreneur in the same article. Not one that mentioned it in the same sentence, God forbid. But anyway, we were not seen that way. June 2015, not one article. When it happened, so we're aiming to July 2016 to host our first event. We had no idea if anyone is going to come because no one's talking about nurses as innovators or entrepreneurs in the United States. Two weeks before the event, we're sold out. Every major hospital in Boston is sending a team of nurses to attend. People are flying in from around the world. And some of the biggest executives from major health care systems are showing up at this event. They run the summit on Friday. Nancy calls me right before the event. And she said, hey, I want you to come on as the director of innovation and entrepreneurship. And I said, me? And she said, yes. And I said, what program are we going to model? And she goes, there is none. We'll fly the plane as we build it. And I'm sitting there like two days before the event going, is this for real kind of plan? And so we go through this summit. Suddenly, we're sitting at the summit. And the head of the American Nurses Association, former leader of Massachusetts, walks up. And she says, Rebecca, people are tired. They want to go home. Keep this short tonight as I kick off into our hackathon. We start the event. She comes up to me four hours later. And she says, I can't believe it. I have never seen them so invigorated. At the end of the weekend, she came up to me. And she said, Rebecca, I am fundamentally wrong. And I don't say that I'm wrong. But you have something here that inspires and empowers nurses in ways that I have never experienced it before. We led that hackathon. Nurses spun out of it. We had great ideas. Great companies came from it. And we ran that event. We ran that program from June 2016 to July 2018, when Dr. Hanrahan and I transitioned on. During that time, we participated and hosted over 36 different innovation events and had over 18 publications, everything from the leading newspapers and articles in the world on innovation, talking about health care, to major newspapers writing about the work we were doing. But more inspiring than that, we actually saw that the American Nurses Association, within one year of us starting this program, appointed the first vice president of innovation in the history of the American Nurses Association. And Johnson & Johnson changed their 15-year campaign of thanking nurses to recognizing nurse innovation as the future of their campaign going forward. Leaving Northeastern was hard. At the time, I had a company. I was lucky it became acquired in March 2018. I was able to pay my mom back her nursing retirement, who had funded that first company. I became the managing director for the US markets for them. And we are now going through another acquisition. However, I missed the nurses that we had met. In the course of those two years, I had met the most incredible nurses that I had met in my career. Nurses that had walked against the mainstream. The chief nursing officer at Microsoft. How many of you guys knew that Microsoft even had a chief nursing officer? How many of you knew that there's a chief nursing officer at IBM? How many of you know that the largest nurse practitioner exit was over $40 million based out of Pennsylvania by the name of Mike Lawler? How many of you know that one of the largest companies in the United States is run by a nurse, that Partners Health is run by a nurse? These nurses are the ones that we put up on the platform. Because this movement wasn't about us. It was about elevating the expertise, knowledge, and power of nursing in the world. Because the statistics in the study showed that Johnson & Johnson did a study. Although that people really respect us, the Gallup poll says we're the most trusted, the reality is nobody actually understands what nursing does. So we have a very bad PR image to the world. They think we hold a lot of people's hands, which I like to hold hands. But I don't think that's what you guys are doing out there on the floor. So I'm lost. All of a sudden, I'm going for a walk. I'm getting phone calls, emails, messages, LinkedIn from around the world of nurses saying, what do we do next? Where can I go to a nurse hackathon? So January this year comes to a halt. I'm going for a walk for my New Year's resolution. I'm feeling lost. And all of a sudden, I get this image in my head, SONCL, the Society of Nurse Scientists, Innovators, Entrepreneurs, and Leaders. I call Nancy. I call a buddy of mine, Noah Hendler, nurse practitioner. I said, I know you guys want me to start a consulting business with you, but I want to start a nonprofit. And they said, Rebecca, we have 800 nursing associations in the country. Nobody is going to give you another nursing association. I said, OK, well, let me just email a couple people, see what they say. So I send a message. I'm like, look at you guys. We've met before. I want to start a nursing association that rebrands nursing to the world. I need your name, your reputation, and your support to put this out there, because we are going to come under a large scrutiny. Lucky for me, it caught wildfire. Of the 24 nurses that we brought together, we had over 100 founding members. The former president of both the ANA, the former president of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, the director of innovation at UPenn, incredible nurses, the chief nursing research officer at Cleveland Clinic, the director of innovation at Mass General Hospital. I said, Rebecca, I'll give you our name. I'll give you our profile. Go out there and change what we can do to the world. So this is what we came up with. March 24, we convened our first meeting in Canyon Ranch. It's an all-inclusive resort. I suggest you guys all go. I said, we have to do things differently. If we want to accomplish great things, we're going to start off with a bang. We're going all out. I'm bringing you to the best place in the world that I can be, and we're going to build this. 24 nurses flew in from the US, UK, and Canada, and this is what we formed. SONCIEL is driven with a mission to magnify, network, and elevate the expertise of nurse innovators as transformation agents that contribute to the reform of health care. More importantly, our mission is to magnify, network, and elevate the expertise of nurse innovators. Sorry, guys, our vision. A world where nurses are significant leaders recognized for transforming health care in our society. March 24, we have that meeting. April 24, we host our first conference, THINK, the Health Care Innovation Conference. It's sold out. The day after that conference, I get an email from a nursing representative of the United Nations who said, Rebecca, I'm old. I want to see more nurses at the UN. Can I meet you for dinner? We have our first day at the United Nations on June 6. We bring 40 nurses from across the United States, Canada, and the UK to convene the first day of the United Nations of nurses that they have seen in generations. At that point, we are encouraged to apply for associate member status to the United Nations. And that is granted. I received the letter as of June 27, 2019 this summer that we, as an organization, are now able to be an associate member to the coalition of NGOs to the United Nations, which means at this point, I can place nurses on committees and attend days at the United Nations. Our next day that we're going back is October 10 for World Health Day. That was June. I received my nonprofit status in July. Springer Publishing reached out asking me to write a book. And I said, I don't want a book about me. I want a book about our founders. So then Springer Publishing has agreed to publish our first book called The Rebel Nurse Handbook that's coming out in advance of Johnson & Johnson, who's asked us to host the first nationwide nurse hackathon in the country, which they're hosting at their nursing headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, November 15 through the 17th to bring nurses together to innovate over the course of that weekend. The goal and the if ands of what we're doing here is that if I had known years ago that if I had stood on the cusp and expected that if a single nursing school failure would have stopped me from going on and stopping and preventing and proving my own company, then starting a nonprofit to try to empower and change the profession of nursing. Because the truth is, I know you guys are all so incredible. The truth is, if we're going to solve health care's greatest challenges, we need to be engaging with nurses because they end user of nearly every medical product on the market. They also are closest to the patient. Who you are is going to make the best of what health care is going to become. And the truth is, the statistics are against us. The average age of a nurse in this country is 50%, 70% of the workforce is over age of 40. 57% of our new grads are leaving the bedside within two years of practice. The largest exodus of any profession that no one is talking about. If we do not rebrand ourselves to the world, I am concerned there will be no nurses left at the bedside. So my life's mission is to redefine that and make that happen. Who is this person? Florence Nightingale. If you guys were like me when I was in nursing school, I was like, there had to be somebody better in the last 200 years that possibly could redefine and be more relatable to who we are as nurses. But the reality is, is when I came across a book with my daughter and started to read it, I realized Florence Nightingale challenged conventional medical practice. She challenged the status quo to found modern day nursing. And we need to go back to the fundamental principles that Florence Nightingale instilled in the practice of nursing, which is we are there to protect the patients, to be their drive forward health care, and that the true heart of nursing is in innovating, challenging the status quo, and making things happen. And to prove that point, how do I show this video, Josh? So as we said, I had a lot of fortune that I work closely with Johnson & Johnson on most of their innovation initiatives in the country right now in regards to the nursing space. And I want you guys to watch this video, which I'm going to leave it on, because this is something that I hope one day these will be one of you will be in this video. And let me show you the power of what nursing has been to health care, and what it can be in the future. We got it. Thank you, Josh. And then we're good. Thank you. I'll watch it up here. Oh! During the Crimean War, more soldiers died from infection than in battle, until a nurse introduced sanitary practices still in use today. When the scourge of polio hit the world, it was standard practice to strap down and immobilize patients, until a nurse discovered that movement and physical therapy had far better results. In the 1950s, jaundice was a leading cause of infant death. Until a nurse found that a few hours of sunlight could actually cure the condition. At the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, no one knew how the disease spread. So patients were kept quarantined and alone, until nurses defied convention and embraced them with compassion. During the Ebola outbreak, the disease was thought by many to be too contagious to treat, until a student nurse used what she had on hand, garbage bags and duct tape, to cover up the disease. During the Ebola outbreak, the disease was thought by many to be too contagious to treat, until a student nurse used what she had on hand, garbage bags and duct tape, to protect herself, so she could care for others. And cerebral palsy robbed many patients of their ability to speak, until a nurse gave them back their ability to speak. And I will always be grateful to her. That is the power of nursing. So, for all of you guys, don't let failure define you. Let it shape you. Oops, I'll stumble this. Don't let it define you, let it shape you. Those who fail and get back up are those who are going to change the world. Don't ever let something's response or a thing that happened to you change your response and what you're capable of. One day I hope that this is nursing, you are nursing. We together are going to save the future of healthcare and change the future of our profession. Thank you.

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