Innovation

Ahrin Mishan is the executive director of the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropies focused on Nursing and the role it plays in improving the health of patients, families and communities.  He oversees the Foundation's grant-making efforts which focus primarily on the education of nurse innovators and on the advancement of leading edge, nursing-driven models of care that target the needs of vulnerable populations.

Ahrin serves on the Board of Directors of the American Nurse Foundation; was a member of the steering committee of the National Nurse Funder’s Collaborative; and served as co-lead of the New York Future of Nursing Action Coalition. He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California, as well as a Masters degree in Nonprofit Management from New York University/Wagner.

Brian works with startups from all over the world and U.S. based healthcare health organizations to accelerate innovation. Begun with a grant from the Kauffman Foundation, Energizing Health solves the problem of how to connect early-stage health startups with large, established healthcare organizations. Brian has worked with some of the biggest healthcare organizations, with highly recognized thought-leaders, and some of the most successful health startups.

Marion Leary is the Director of Innovation and an Instructor at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing. Ms. Leary has established herself as a nursing leader in the field of resuscitation science, as well as nursing innovation. As the incoming Director of Innovation at Penn Nursing she creates curriculums focused on nursing innovation and the foundation of design thinking.

Ms. Leary's research focuses on cardiac arrest and CPR quality with the current goal of developing innovative strategies to improve bystander response and CPR training. Ms. Leary is an international Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA) and has participated in the 2010 and 2015 resuscitation guidelines. She also coordinates the social media campaign for the American Heart Association (AHA)’s Resuscitation Science Symposium. Ms. Leary is on the program committee for the Citizen CPR Foundation’s Emergency Cardiovascular Care Updates conference focusing on innovation, social media outreach, and engagement.

Ms. Leary is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at Penn. Ms. Leary completed her master's degree in nursing at Penn, in health leadership and a master's degree in public health at Penn. Ms. Leary began a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.

Previously, Ms. Leary was an Instructor in the Penn Master of Public Health program where she taught methods implementation and public health communication.

Ms. Leary founded the Penn UPstart companies ImmERge, LLC and Resuscor, LLC. Immerge Labs focused on using virtual reality and augmented reality to reimagine how the world prepares for emergencies. Resuscor, LLC focused on using digital strategies to improve post-cardiac arrest training and education.

Chris McCarthy is the VP of Strategy & Design at Hopelab and the Executive Director and Founder of the Innovation Learning Network.  At Hopelab his main focus is at the intersection of design and science in the service of young people’s health. Currently he is guiding work with young cancer survivors, teen moms, and emotional well-being of young people. In his previous role at Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, he tackled safer medication administration for patients, more robust shift changes for nurses, exploring the social space of elders, and the care experience of transgender people.

His work has been featured with CNN ( Dec 2017), Harvard Business Review (Sept 2010), Bisognano’s “Pursuing the Triple Aim” (2012), FastCompany, the New York Times and many more.   As an author, he collaborated with Lyle Berkowitz, MD on “Innovation with Information Technologies in Healthcare” (2012). You can find his quirky design blog at McCarthyChris.com.

He was named the 2015 H.I.T. Innovator and the 2011 Ellerbe Beckett Lecturer. And is an international speaker on innovation and design.

Chris has a master’s in business administration from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / Copenhagen Business School, and a master’s in public health in Health Policy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his spare time, he obsesses about fitness, movies and home remodels.

With a clinical background in critical care and 25+ years of global experience in the development of new medical products, Karen has a passion for improving healthcare through innovation. In 2012, Karen was the recipient of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation Professional Achievement Award for excellence in medical product innovation.  Her expertise includes human-centered design, clinical outcomes research, customer-driven medical product development using clinical data, and voice of the customer analytics.

Karen’s work has been widely disseminated with over 80 publications in more than 20 different journals.  Karen is also a frequent national and international presenter at professional healthcare conferences, with specific interests focused on the intersection of clinical needs and medical technology use, development and innovation. 

Karen’s current interdisciplinary program of research is focused in two main areas: non-ventilator hospital-acquired pneumonia and IV infusion safety using IV Smart Pumps. 

Karen is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing (FAAN), a six-sigma green belt, and holds a BSN and PhD in nursing from Boston College, nurse practitioner from the University of Massachusetts, an MBA (Global Management Concentration) from Babson College and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on IV infusion device safety at Yale University.

Dr. Dan Weberg is a nurse leader and expert in human-centered patient design and simulation and healthcare innovation with extensive clinical experience in the emergency department, acute in-patient hospital settings, and academia over past 12 years. Dan is an author, scholar, positive deviant and is the Senior Director of Innovation and Leadership for Kaiser Permanente’s National Nursing Leadership and Strategy Team.  Dan is also a core team member and a founding Clinical Assistant Professor focused on technology, leadership and inter-professional curriculum for the new Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine.

Dan has held a variety of leadership roles, including nursing director, clinical faculty director, consultant, and direct care in emergency departments, academic medical centers, large colleges of nursing, and private educational firms.

He earned his Bachelors in Nursing, and was in the first cohort to graduate from the Masters in Healthcare Innovation program at Arizona State University.  Dan was also the first ever graduate of the PhD in Healthcare Innovation Leadership program at ASU under the mentorship of Dr. Kathy Malloch and Dr. Tim Porter-O’Grady. Dan’s clinical background is in Emergency and Trauma nursing at level 1 trauma centers in California and Arizona.  Dan is also faculty at The Ohio State University College of Nursing and taught and at Arizona State University in the subject of Innovation, and Leadership. 

He recently authored a first of its kind book titled “Evidence Based Innovation Leadership for Health Professions” which describes the leadership and collaboration skills needed to lead the future of healthcare delivery. 

Dr. Katherine (Kathy) Kenny, DNP, RN, ANP-BC is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation where she holds the rank of Clinical Professor. She is also a Board Certified Adult Nurse Practitioner. She joined the faculty at CONHI in 2004, previously serving as the DNP Program Director. Past leadership positions include Chief of Advanced Practice Nursing at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, Arizona; Director of Medicine Services at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center; and Director of Nurses, and CVICU Manager.

Clinical specialties include critical care, cardiology, neurosciences, pain management, palliative care, and pre-operative preparation. Her research interests include patient education, leadership, integrative therapies, palliative care, pain management, inter-professional practice with a specific interest in mentoring relationships, and innovative approaches to healthcare delivery. She is published in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and is an invited presenter at regional, national, and international conferences. She serves on a number of Boards. She was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners in 2013 and as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2015.  

Dr. Rachel Walker, Ph.D., RN, is a nurse inventor, activist, and Assistant Professor in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst College of Nursing whose scholarship is grounded in her experiences as a rural emergency medical and disaster relief worker, U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, and oncology nurse. She is the first nurse to be named an AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador. 

Dr. Walker is currently a Susan G. Komen Foundation for Breast Cancer Research CCR Scholar and an Associate Director for the UMASS Institute for Applied Life Science’s Center for Personalized Health Monitoring. She completed her doctorate at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Johns Hopkins Center for Innovative Care in Aging. Her team focuses on person-directed and participatory approaches to promoting dignity, capability, and health equity over the life course.

Dr. Walker works collaboratively with patient advocates and community leaders, clinicians, industry partners, and scholars from a wide variety of disciplines to develop technology, models of care, and other innovations that support symptom self-management and patients’ ability to engage in the roles and activities that are most important to them and their families. Most recently, her team’s proposal for a self-contained portable system to generate critical IV fluids during disasters earned runner-up in the 2018 $200K M2D2 Medical Device challenge.

Dr. Tami Wyatt is the Associate Dean of Research and Torchbearer Professorship of Nursing at the University of Tennessee, College of Nursing.  Dr. Wyatt is a Co-Director of the Health Innovation Technology & Simulation Lab along with her research partner. Dr. Wyatt has served as a district President for the Virginia Nurses Association and President of Gamma Chi, a chapter of Sigma Theta Tau. She is currently a co-owner and President of Academic Technology Innovations.

Dr. Wyatt has received grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and from private corporations for her work related to innovative technology to improve consumer and professional health education. She is a Fellow in the Academy of Nursing,  the Academy of Nursing Education, the Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Program, a Scholar of the Harvard Macy Institute and a Scholar of the Mobile Health Training Institutes of the National Institutes of Health.   She is an active member in several professional simulation and healthcare informatics organizations. Dr. Wyatt also serves as a reviewer for several peer reviewed journals in her area of expertise and serves as a grant reviewer for the National League for Nursing.

Tim Raderstorf is the Chief Innovation Officer at The Ohio State University College of Nursing.  As the first nurse to hold this academic title in the United States, he takes great pride in educating the nation on the role of the nurse as an innovator and entrepreneur. In 2017, he founded The Innovation Studio, a makerspace/incubator that provides interprofessional healthcare teams with the tools and mentorship needed to turn ideas into actions.

Outside of Ohio State, Tim is the founder of Quality Health Communications, a digital Clinical Decision Support System that communicates real-time patient quality and safety metrics to the healthcare team. He is also the co-author of Evidence-Based Leadership, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Nursing and Healthcare: A Practical Guide for Success, which will be published by Springer Publishing Company in 2019.

With over 24 years of nursing and healthcare experience Troy Garland has been a bedside nurse, hospital executive, Medicare, Medicaid, Marketplace, and ACO executive as well as a clinical consultant.  Troy has experience in inpatient, outpatient, and ambulatory areas within commercial and governmental organizations (VA and DOD).  Within these roles, Troy has expertise in operations, process development, group facilitation, speaking, patient engagement, and clinical application of technology. 

Troy is currently the Chief Nursing Officer and VP of Clinical Innovation for Sensely, a healthcare technology company focused on deep member engagement powered by a conversational Avatar.  Within this area, he is responsible for clinical strategic direction, clinical design, client engagement and consulting to assist with process design with specific attention to development that will achieve meaningful clinical and fiscal outcomes.    Sensely is a mobile first, empathy leading, artificial intelligence based patient engagement solution.