EL PASO, TX – May 24, 2020 – The Medical Center of the America Foundation’s (MCA) Innovation Center is launching Nurse Innovator, a binational program that empowers nurses, and other health care professionals, to take their innovative ideas from concept to prototype to production. The MCA Innovation Center will help nurses in El Paso and Cd. Juarez develop solutions to the problems they experience day-to-day in the clinical setting.

“The day-to-day nurse experience discovers and solves problems that plague healthcare settings. Nurses and other healthcare professionals are on the frontlines, caring for patients and solving problems to make their care better,” Says Nancy Lowery, Senior Director of Innovation at the MCA Foundation. “This program empowers frontline healthcare workers be designers of their future and invent and innovate the healthcare settings of tomorrow, sharing these inventions, and bringing product ideas to life to benefit patients and providers.”

Through education, training, one-on-one support, and access to resources for rapid prototyping and fabrication the NI Accelerator moves healthcare professionals into the entrepreneurial landscape. This 18-week program will connect nurses with local makers and will teach them how to build a solid foundation of best practices for how to test an idea, build a prototype, develop a business model and value proposition that delivers the product in the right way to the right market. In partnership with the Innovation Center, Fab Lab El Paso and Fab Lab Juarez, nonprofits dedicated to providing community access to the tools for technical innovation, will work with nurses to bring their ideas to life.

“By opening up the perspective of possibilities, duct tape solutions become polished products, frustrations become outlets for creativity, and design flaws become opportunities for value creation and capture,” says Cathy Chen, Executive Director of Fab Lab El Paso.”

People who have an existing health tech product or an idea for a product and are looking to further develop their technology or business are invited to apply as individuals or as teams. With a science and engineering-focused approach, healthcare professionals can come one step closer to improving the healthcare workplace by moving ideas from the bench to the bedside. Healthcare professionals can apply at https://mca-learning-center.thinkific.com/courses/nurse-innovator.

For more information about the application process and program, please contact Nancy Lowery at nancy@mcamericas.org.

The MCA Innovation Center, under the nonprofit Medical Center of the Americas Foundation seeks to drive economic growth in the Paso del Norte region by sharing information and resources to help technology entrepreneurs commercialize ideas quickly.