A Leap of Faith: Navigating Health Care Innovation with Intuition and Open-Mindedness

Stephen Dameron, RN, HHS NDMS IMT

Cultivating an open mind empowers us to embrace unconventional ideas, cutting-edge technologies, and audacious approaches that can revolutionize health care. By challenging the status quo, we can discover inventive solutions that boost efficiency, accuracy, and patient outcomes. We must channel our inner curiosity, ask bold questions, and trust our instincts.

“Before mobilization and execution of the mission, responders must clearly understand these facts:

This is a contagion we have yet to fully understand.

This is a mission unlike, but similar in some ways, to anything we have been tasked with before.

There will be significant losses and burdens on everything that we know.”  - March 18, 2020

These words were not written by an alarmist, a politician, or a CDC official; They were written by me. Somehow, I found myself in the position of subject matter expert and medical group supervisor responsible for the quarantine and safety of a large group of Americans removed from their vacations-turned-nightmare at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fast forward to June of the same year when I was deployed to Gallup, NM, tasked with supporting the Navajo Nation. I was exposed to COVID and placed in mandatory quarantine. This was the beginning of the rest of my nursing career.

While quarantined in New Mexico, I found myself thinking a lot about health care inefficiencies and how the system could be optimized in ways that improve the lives of all stakeholders. Remember, to the best of our knowledge at the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was going to (and did) wreak absolute havoc on the health care system. Quickly I identified that the very bedrock of health care and the revenue cycle needed to be changed.

I co-founded EPL Innovative Solutions, a company that pushes the very limits of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our services are tailored toward new and established private practice owners in the efforts of re-establishing primary care and prevention as the leading solution to acute illness, not inpatient hospitalization, and revolving doors.

Our intuition, our nursing intuition, is a secret weapon as we plunge into the intricacies of health care innovation. Our instincts, sharpened by professional experience and expertise, steer us toward informed decisions, even amid uncertainty. Trusting our intuition helps us spot golden opportunities, anticipate challenges, and devise strategies that drive substantial improvements.

As my mind broke free from traditional care settings, and the ever-existent imposter of being “just a nurse” I began exploring the health care continuum. The question became how can embracing cutting-edge technologies to enrich patient experiences and streamline workflows reduce the obviously increasing burden of a post-pandemic existence? Spreadsheets aren't our savior, departments are chronically understaffed, patients are getting sicker, and fancy buttons or features do not equal more free time.

Instead, solutions created by engaging in fearless dialogues with colleagues and industry experts enable us to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and propel progress in the field. This practice manifested my involvement with Simbo.ai while finalizing and implementing their artificially intelligent medical scribe, SimboAlphus. This time, we are operationalizing conversational AI to generate complete medical records, in a natural workflow, so that clinicians can spend more time providing actual patient care. We are creating a life with reduced clicking!

By embracing these principles and taking a daring leap of faith, we can navigate the ever-changing world of health care with confidence, make a lasting impact across the health care continuum, and create a brighter future for us all.

Stephen Dameron, RN, HHS NDMS IMT, Co-Founder/CEO, Clinical Liaison, Innovator