Medline sponsors pediatric innovation event

The best ideas come from partnerships. And in healthcare, Medline actively seeks out innovative concepts and collaborative opportunities to create new and improved medical devices and solutions.

As part of this commitment, Medline sponsored a virtual Innovation Lab Startup Demo Day to showcase pediatric inventions, from a nurse-invented light that minimizes patient sleep disruption during nighttime vital checks, to a patented system that slowly introduces babies to high-risk allergens to prevent food allergies.

Medline Chief Operating Officer Jim Abrams kicked-off the event by urging entrepreneurs and healthcare professionals to think of Medline when they have a new idea.

“We want to be the first place you call when you have an innovation,” Abrams told the presenters. “At Medline, we have a history of innovation, and our best innovation ideas often come from clinicians.

“We’re on the road all the time, keeping our ear to the ground, keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in healthcare. We know that there are many things that can be improved. Know that as you come up with these ideas, we want to hear them.”

Suzy Engwall, national director of Innovation Lab, part of The Innovation Institute, an incubator for healthcare solutions, lauded Medline as a collaborative partner.

“When it comes to true healthcare partnership and embracing the entrepreneurial spirit, it’s not just talk at Medline,” said Engwall. “This is a company that listens to what caregivers need. And they don’t just listen, they take real action.”

Courtney Bott, Medline director of innovation, said collaboration is at the heart of Medline’s innovation strategy.

“At our best, we’re co-creating and collaborating with our customers because you are the problem spotters and often you come up with the first solution,” said Bott. “We look for commercially viable solutions, and sometimes that’s a simple adaptation to something we already have, sometimes it’s a commercial innovation, and other times, it’s a brand new product.

Medline’s primary areas of interest are surgical products and services, infection prevention solutions, patient experience, skin breakdown prevention and wound treatment, adaptive living (bathing, mobility and safety) and patient monitoring and disease tracking.

“We can work with you to take your clinical ideas to action,” said Bott.

Learn more about innovation at Medline.