Innovation
The GCHS collaborates with numerous academic groups from UNMC and Nebraska Medicine as well as external partners to address the most urgent health threats. Innovation is critical to ensuring preparedness for the future. Highlighted below are several innovations made possible by the work and expertise of GCHS staff, scholars, and affiliates.
Recognizing the critical need for innovation and infection prevention and control for COVID-19, James Lawler, M.D, Dr. Jana Broadhurst, MD, PhD, and Dr. David Brett-Major, MD accelarated an existing GCHS project called the Isolation System for Treatment and Agile Response for high-risk Infections (ISTARI). ISTARI is a modular structure that can be used to care for patients who are highly contagious, and is based on an earlier iteration developed for Ebola. It's a disposable structure that fits inside a standard hospital room and dramatically reduces the need for PPE by wrapping the PPE around the patient instead of the healthcare worker.
Funded by the CDC in partnership with Project Firstline, the Infection Prevention Support Center provides education, tools, and resources to support Infection Preventionists (IPs) across healthcare settings. The team has created Self-led Infection Control Evaluation (SLICE) tool, an online, programmatic self-assessment that empowers IPs to evaluate their IPC programs and provides an actionable report for improvement efforts. To date, SLICE has nearly 400 users in all 10 HHS regions.
Funded by the CDC in partnership with Project Firstline, the Infection Prevention Support Center provides education, tools, and resources to support Infection Preventionists (IPs) across healthcare settings. The Extended Reality (XR) Education program provides a five-module training bundle to improve IP knowledge of the Sterile Processing Department in a gamified and immersive virtual environment.
The Open-MediciNE platform was developed in 2020 by Drs. Michael Wadman and Thanh Nguyen in response to the global supply shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of the Open-MediciNE platform is to host free downloadable design schematics of innovative health care technologies. Many of the technologies on this platform have been validated to deliver on engineering parameters determined by each project team. The technologies on this platform may not have direct application to every user’s intended use case but we encourage the community use these design files as a baseline to improve upon.
In response to the perilous shortage of N-95 respirators in the spring of 2020, Dr. John-Martin Lowe led a team to create a process to decontaminate PPE using ultraviolet light during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The process --the first of its kind to implement on a large scale -- involved collecting N-95 respirators at the end of each shift and utilizing ultraviolet light towers to decontaminate the masks and return them to hospital staff for re-use. This creative solution helped preserve a critical resource and allowed UNMC to maintain airborne precautions for its healthcare workers through the spring 2020 wave of COVID-19. As Dr. Lowe noted, "The pandemic has forced us to be as innovative as possible in filling gaps and responding to new challenges."
Led by the Director of the UNMC Emerging Pathogens Laboratory, Dr. Jana Broadhurst, MD, PhD, and her team, UNMC was one of the first clinical laboratories in the U.S. to develop its own PCR diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 detection to support repatriated Americans in the National Quarantine Unit and Nebraska Biocontainment Unit before public health or commercial tests were available. The test received emergency authorization from the FDA, continues to support patient care at Nebraska Medicine and the surrounding community, and serves as a gold standard for the evaluation of novel diagnostic technologies.