NursePitch™
Pitching is a compelling way to inform or persuade and it is part of our natural conversation, even though people may not think of it this way. We pitch our ideas to other people daily because your ideas have value and are worth developing.
2023 Virtual NursePitch™
What you need to know about nurses pitching their business and innovation ideas!
This interactive event will feature nurses who want to share their creative solutions and innovations around: a medical device or technology; an organizational or process improvement; a care delivery model; a business, program, service; research; or an educational intervention. If you are interested in participating in the future - more events are being planned!
Submissions are now closed.
Want to learn more - read our blog on: How to Pitch: Leave Them Wanting More
NursePitch™ Prizes
- First place - $10,000 (Elizabeth Johnson, PhD, RN, MS-CRM)
- Second place - $7,000 (Pamela Z. Cacchione, PhD, CRNP, BC, FGSA, FAAN)
- Third place - $5,000 (Noel “Ryan” Speidel, RN)
- Honorable mention - $2,500 (Amy Felix, MSN, RN, CRNP)
- Judges gave notable mention to (Eleonor Pusey-Reid, DNP, RN, M.Ed)
The American Nurses Association and HIMSS are pleased to showcase NursePitch™. Together, we are working to support nurses who want to take their ideas to the next level through mentorship, prize money, business development, and/or investment.
2022 NursePitch™ Finalists
Elizabeth Johnson, PhD, RN, MS-CRM is an Assistant Professor at Montana State University Mark & Robyn Jones College of Nursing in Bozeman, Montana. Her background includes ten years of adult and pediatric clinical research management as a research nurse, community/regional trial manager, and global trial manager. Her research explores use of wearable technologies for patient safety in clinical trials, expanding the research nurse role in clinical trials, and methods of creating provider awareness of clinical trial patients they seek care in their communities. She is a member of the Research Committee for the International Association of Clinical Research Nurses, a member of the Education Committee for the American Medical Informatics Association- Nursing Informatics Working Group, and an academic partner with the Nursing Institute of Healthcare Design.
Pamela Z. Cacchione, PhD, CRNP, BC, FGSA, FAAN is the Ralston House Term Chair in Gerontological Nursing and Professor of Geropsychiatric Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is a Gerontological Nurse Practitioner who has practiced for over 30 years across the care continuum. She is a nurse scientist and innovator. Her research is in social robots for older adults. She is passionate about improving lives of older adults and persons with chronic illnesses, particularly heart failure. She developed her Heart Failure Monitoring Socks following her younger brother’s struggle with heart failure. As a nurse and nurse practitioner it was incredibly challenging to assist her brother from a distance. Dr. Cacchione is a Fellow in the Gerontological Society of American and the American Academy of Nursing.
Noel “Ryan” Speidel, RN invented the Sequential Automated Turning System in May 2021 with the goal of developing an innovative and creative solution to reduce pressure injury development in debilitated and/or immobile patients while also reducing caregiver burden and workload. As a nurse of almost 20 years, Ryan is committed to improving patient and caregiver safety. His other clinical and leadership experiences include critical care and medical/surgical bedside and management, inpatient rehab management, service line development, hospital resource management, and staff education, training, and professional development facilitation. Currently Ryan is working as a Travel Nurse, traveling across the country with his wife of over 10 years and his 3 sons.
Amy Felix, MSN, RN, CRNP the co-founder of TrackCE, the digital wallet for doctors and nurses. With over 18 years of pediatric nursing experience in critical care, gastroenterology, and emergency medicine, Amy has always been passionate about providing the best care to patients and innovation in healthcare. In her most recent role, she worked as a pediatric nurse practitioner and the Manager of the Advanced Practice Providers in an Emergency Department. Her work has been recognized by the American Organization of Nurse Leaders, “Young Professional Voices,” which is a group of 20 leaders under the age of 40 who demonstrate exemplary nursing leadership. Last Fall, Amy left her leadership role to take a nurse sabbatical and focus full time on her startup tech company, TrackCe.
Eleonor Pusey-Reid, DNP, RN, M.Ed is an Associate Professor at MGH Institute of Health Professions School of Nursing and has served primarily in a faculty/academic leadership role for more than 27 years and as a clinician in Critical Care Nursing for 30 years. She has extensive experience in curriculum development and instructions, innovative teaching methodology, and evaluation of students learning. Her scholarship and life work interest focus on working with untapped potential students, addressing racial microaggression, and making invisible labor visible for minoritized faculty. Dr. Pusey-Reid’s current research focuses on Black students’ experiences with microaggressions and how to increase the representation of dark skin tones in nursing literature.
Kelly Kester, DNP, RN, NE-BC, CCRN-K is a Clinical Operations Director for Heart Services at Duke University Hospital in Durham, NC. She is responsible for over 400 full-time equivalents and leads 8 departments, including critical care, intermediate/stepdown, cardiac invasive labs, and the patient response program. Kelly’s specific leadership interests are focused on proactive registered nurse hiring and healthy work environments. She co-created HealthForceRx, which is a cloud-based application to provide nurse leaders with tools to understand their local workforces and accurately determine RN hiring needs. She earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice with a specialty in executive leadership from Duke University School of Nursing and is an active volunteer with the American Association of Critical Care Nurses.
Natasha Latta, BSN, RN - My training grounds for nursing and entrepreneurship growing up were running wild through the forests and mountains of Alaska followed by a decade of ski bum diva living. It’s where I learned to be prepared for anything, know, and conserve my resources, focus on solving the problem that gets me to the next step and most importantly, be grateful for every moment. In all honesty, nursing school was initially just a way to elevate my ski addict lifestyle. What I didn’t expect is that I’d be hooked by the second week of classes and 12 years later, cannot fathom a life that doesn’t include the medical sciences. While an ER nurse at heart, I’ve worked L&D, Critical Care, Behavioral Health, Medical Surgical, Long-Term Care and Case Management. The culmination of these experiences is this: if you have a dream, go get it - right now.
Christine E. Weeks, DNP, FNP, PMP functions professionally as a Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) who is passionate about improving the care of marginalized populations through process improvement, education, and public health. This is evidenced by the Pauline W. Brown Diversity Scholarship Award for excellence in multicultural scholarship she received at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for her work “Factors Influencing Self Care Behaviors of African American Adults with Type 2 Diabetes.” As an FNP, Dr. Weeks has served in retail health and several NC state agencies to include the prison, public and mental health systems, and nursing education. Dr. Weeks was also instrumental in developing and implementing projects for HIV/AIDS clinics and community education with HOPE worldwide.
NursePitch™ Judges
Working as a beside nurse has led Taofiki Gafar-Schaner, MSN, RN to rethink how healthcare and technology intersect. His experience in the hospital led him to feel as if the hospital is 10-20 years behind what is available to consumers. Taofiki wanted to bridge the gap between bedside nursing and the tech world. With that motivation, he co-founded Frontier Innovations Inc with Joey Ferry, BSN, RN. They won the 2020 ANA Innovation Award for their product SafeSeizure and continue to research and develop other upcoming solutions. They launched Frontier Innovations Inc to create innovative products that patients will love, and healthcare providers will find indispensable.
Bianca Gonzalez, PhD, NP, RN is the CEO and founder of AMPAworks, a technology company that builds IoT devices to track inventory in hospitals, pharmacies, and beyond. As a nurse practitioner and software engineer, she has worked at multiple hospital systems, startups, and technology companies. She has obtained a PhD from UCLA researching neuronal synapses, MS specializing as a Family Nurse Practitioner at Georgetown, MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, MBA at The Wharton School, and BSN at the University of Pennsylvania. It is important to her to promote innovation and entrepreneurship within nursing in order to create innovative technology and services that improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.
Tammy Kwiatkoski, MBA is the Senior Director, Clinical Informatics, for HIMSS: a mission driven non-profit, global advisor and thought leader supporting the transformation of health through the application of information and technology. Tammy first joined HIMSS in 2011 as Senior Manager, Operations. In this role, she directed and fostered connections between HIMSS North America, the 55 North American HIMSS chapters and internal staff. In December of 2015, she transitioned to her current role of Senior Director, Clinical Informatics and leads a team of subject matter experts to execute global initiatives for HIMSS clinical communities including medical informatics, nursing informatics, health technology/clinical engineering, enterprise imaging, pharmacy informatics and long term and post-acute care. Over the past 11 years with HIMSS, she has led clinical informatics initiatives by advancing innovation, research and surveys, collaborations, and member engagement.
NursePitch™ 2022 Workshop & Scholarship
In collaboration with the ANA (American Nurses Association), HIMSS was pleased to host the 2022 NursePitch™ Innovation Workshop and Scholarship. NursePitch™ is designed to increase the voice, opportunity, and visibility of the nursing audience in the digital health ecosystem by holding ‘nursing led’ & ‘nursing developed’ innovation. To support these efforts, the NursePitch™ Innovation Scholarship is available to full-time nurses or nursing student accredited graduate program related to the health information and technology field or nursing field.
New Event Focus At HIMSS March 2022 Event In Florida!
The scholarship included complimentary registration to HIMSS22 Global Conference and a monetary scholarship. To learn more about what this event entailed, click here.
2021 NursePitch™ winner:
Sigi Marmorstein, RN, MSN, PHN, FNP-BC
CEO & Founder, BabyLiveAdvice, Inc
BabyLiveAdvice is a telehealth enabled service that complements the care offered by obstetric and pediatric care providers. The company employs nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, nutritionists, lactation consultants, and others to serve mothers and parents from preconception to early childhood using a telehealth platform connected to a robust electronic medical record system. A telemonitoring system embedded in patients’ charts measures weight, blood glucose, blood pressure, and more. BabyLiveAdvice staff monitor the health of mothers and their babies, support remote rural communities, and improve care access to the estimated 7 million birthing people who live in maternal deserts.
2020 NursePitch™ winner:
Bianca Gonzalez, PhD, NP, RN
Founder and CEO of AMPAworks
The average hospital spends about $10 million annually on supply chain waste and is the second leading cost in hospitals today. AMPAworks is a computer vision-enabled internet of Things (loT) system that keeps track of inventory in real-time. This suite of devices and software applications provides work-flow tasks, accounts for inventory used during patient-related tasks, and give feedback to team members, enabling healthcare organizations to promote safety, improve quality, and track inventory and supply chain.
2019 NursePitch™ winners:
Sangeeta Agarawal, RN, MS
Founder and CEO, Helpsy Health
Managing your cancer treatment can be overwhelming and costly. Helpsy Health is your virtual nurse and personal health navigator, providing over 20,000 treatment recommendations, and easily accessible from your mobile device. It can be customized to honor culture, language, and socioeconomic status. Information to guide you to community resources for emotional, financial, lifestyle, nutritional, fitness, and caregiver support is also available. Helpsy Health empowers you to take control of your health and begin living again. Read her blog – Calling All Nurses: Take a chance make a change
Lisa Ousley, DNP, FNP, Retha Gentry, DNP, FNP, Candice Nicole Short, DNP, FNP
Founders, Instructiderm, LLC
Prompted by the clinical urgency to improve dermatology education in the recognition and diagnosis of skin disease in all skin types, Instructional Dermatology Surface Models (IDSMs™)was created. These models are constructed of high-resolution digital photographs of skin disease printed on transparent, flexible plastic. The 2D and 3D models authentically replicate skin cancers and most other skin diseases, and can be placed on various skin surfaces (human or mannequin) regardless of texture, age, or skin color. Read their blog – Instructiderm™ Creates Skin Lesion Models for Learning