ANA Innovation Awards
The ANA Innovation Awards—sponsored by Stryker—highlight, recognize, and celebrate nurse-led innovation that improves patient safety outcomes. Awards are presented to a nurse and a nurse-led team whose product, program, project, or practice best exemplify nurse-led innovation in patient safety and/or outcomes.
What impact can winning have on your innovation work? A lot according to our past winners. So why not take a chance on your ideas?
"Winning the ANA Innovation Award affirms the value of nursing ideas. It changed the way I thought about myself and nursing." Kathleen Puri, MS, RN, Co-Founder, Fitsi Health
"The ANA Innovation Award gave us the confidence and the funding to start Lavender, a nurse-led and operated psychiatry and therapy practice." Brighid Gannon, DNP, PMHNP-BC & Pritma Dhillon-Chatta, DNP, MHA, RN, Co-Founders, Lavender
2025 ANA Innovation Award Winners
Winner of the Individual Nurse Award
Amany Farag, PhD, RN
Associate Professor, University of Iowa College of Nursing
Co-Director, VA Quality Scholars Program
Amany Farag, PhD, RN’s technology innovation, the electronic school medication administration record (eSMAR), addresses the critical issues of medication errors in K-12 schools. 27% of the approximately 50 million K-12 school-age children in the U.S. have at least one chronic medical condition requiring them to receive medication during the school day. Adherence to and safety with this medication administration is paramount yet widespread lack of funding in schools have resulted in at least 18% of schools across the nation not having a designated school nurse. The overwhelming majority of meds are administered by unlicensed personnel, who are associated with 3x the rate of medication errors compared to a school nurse. The eSMAR system uses fingerprint scanning and barcoding to verify both students and medication, alerts the administering professional of a discrepancy, and notifies the administering professional if the student misses the medication dose to facilitate prompt follow-up and communication. This innovation paves the way to improve the quality and safety of medication administration in our nation’s schools, support pediatric chronic care management, and illustrates the powerful and transformative application of technology to improve health and access to safe, quality care in an area that doesn’t often get a lot of funding or attention- children in our school system!
Winner of the Nurse-Led Team Award
Sheridan Miyamoto, PhD, RN, FAAN
Founder and Director, Sexual Assault Forensic Examination Telehealth System
Sheridan Miyamoto, PhD, RN, FAAN and her team at Penn State have designed the SAFE-T System, a care delivery model using a telehealth-enabled forensic system bringing expert sexual assault care and evidence collection to survivors in rural and underserved suburban areas where medical, legal, and emotional resources are often limited or non-existent. Using proprietary forensic telehealth technology, this team is 1) ensuring that safe, dignified, evidence-based, and person-centered sexual assault care is accessible to all survivors regardless of where they live, 2) upskilling health care teams especially nurses with expert SANE (sexual assault nurse examiner) training, mentorship, and quality assurance, 3) empowering health care leadership and administrators to enhance their workforce capacity in caring for this vulnerable population without increasing workforce burden, 4) strengthening partnership between health professionals and law enforcement to improve evidence collection, provide expert testimony, and ultimately strengthen prosecution rates, and 5) advocating for legislative leaders to create new standards of SA care regionally and nationally.
2025 Honoroable Mentions
Category: Care Delivery Models
Michelle Camicia, Managing Partner, PhD, RN CRRN CCM NEA-BC FAHA FARN FAAN
Path2Caregiving
Category: Product or Device
Karen Giuliano, Professor & Co-Director, Elaine Marieb Center for Nursing and Engineering Innovation. PhD, RN, MBA, FAAN
RIVIE IV Pole
Category: Technology
Mandy Kirkpatrick, Associate Dean for Research & Innovation, PhD, RN, FAAN, FNAP
CommonSpirit Health's Virtually Integrated CareSM Model
Category: Business, Programs, or Services
Ecoee Rooney, Chief Nursing Officer, DNP, RN, AFN-C, NPD-BC, DF-AFN
CareEffects
Category: Educational Intervention
Anna Schwartz, CEO and Chief Innovator PhD, FNP-BC, FAAN
Cancer Exercise App
Need inspiration? Check out the videos of all winners here.
Thank you to our sponsor Stryker for their support of nursing innovation!