A nurse innovation leader

When Oriana Beaudet, DNP, RN, PHN, was named vice president of Nursing Innovation for ANA Enterprise in December, she already knew that her top priority would be to support and empower nurses working at the bedside and others who want to participate in, design and lead health care innovation. At a time when the complexities and politicization of the health care system are increasingly creating obstacles for caregivers and patients, Beaudet believes nurses are exceptionally well positioned to think about health care in ways that can shift the system for the better. It should not be a surprise, she said, that the World Health Organization named 2020 as Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.

“Nurses are the ones who tie health teams together and naturally act as a bridge between the complexity of the medical and science world and the human experience,” said Beaudet, who earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree in health leadership and innovation from the School of Nursing in 2017.

Nurses are also working as intrapreneurs within organizations as CEOs and entrepreneurs in health care, as well as in the community and other industries like law, business, technology and research. The problem, she explained, is that the potentially transformative things nurses are doing often go unrecognized.

“Nurses are building extraordinary new care and delivery models, and their work is intimately tied to the people and communities they serve,” she said. “In my new role, I want to bring their work into the spotlight and connect nurses and nursing leaders with academia, industry, research- and health care systems, and organizations in the U.S. and globally.” The goal, she said, is to build a collaborative network across the ANA Enterprise and beyond to create a strategic national framework for nurse-led innovation.

Beaudet’s passion for health care innovation is longstanding. Before joining ANA Enterprise, which includes the American Nurses Association, American Nurses Credentialing Center and American Nurses Foundation, she spent more than 15 years as an innovative change leader in the health care field. Most recently, she served as vice president of transformation with Array Advisors, where she led strategic change management and business development for national health system clients.

It was her early work as an acute care nurse and nurse supervisor that inspired Beaudet to address organizational- and system-level challenges faced by patients and health care staff.

She chose the University of Minnesota’s DNP program because the health innovation and leadership specialty aligned with the transformation and design needed to address industry-wide change. And she focused her doctoral studies on building nurse-led innovation to shift organizational cultures, which became the foundation for the launch of the Planting Seeds of Innovation Conference in 2015.

Still ongoing as a project of the Nursing Collaboratory, a joint project of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and M Health Fairview, Planting Seeds of Innovation’s annual conference has a different theme every year, each one designed to equip nurses with the tools and resources they need to put their innovative ideas into action. “A recent conference was all about foresight and how we can innovate into the future needs of health care,” Beaudet said, explaining that situations aren’t static. “People are trying to find solutions to address the complexity and challenges in their work environments and across systems. Without a doubt nurses are capable of transforming the future of health care and our profession.”