A nursing leader at Medstar Health System wanted to improve the patient experience. She decided to ask her nursing managers to make patient rounds every day, after reading that this extra touch was appreciated by patients in the hospital. The nursing managers asked each patient a set of questions during their rounds to assess the patient experience and recorded the patients’ answers on a sheet of paper. The nursing leader saw an improvement in scores, but as the pages grew each day, it became harder to synthesize information and fully understand the total impact of this new practice.

That’s where MI2, the Medstar Institute for Innovation, came in. An emergency physician with an interest in technology, who also worked with MI2, developed an electronic system so not only could the nursing leader understand from a high and deep level what each patient was experiencing, but also the employees on the front lines could access the information to improve their care.

MI2 wanted to share stories with the broader MedStar community that speak to why the innovation center exists: to catalyze innovation that advances health.

This is just one of several stories we learned while working on MI2’s Story. After interviewing 30 practitioners across several MedStar hospitals and MI2 service lines, we got to know an organization serious about catalyzing innovation that advances health.

The MI2 Story is a piece of a larger toolkit for MedStar’s staff people. The purpose of the project was to bring the diverse success stories within a large health system to life for the 30,000 MedStar staff who choose to work with MI2 on specific healthcare challenges and learn to innovate themselves everyday in their field.