HLTH 2025 Recap: How Nurses Are Reshaping Healthcare

Welcome to Club Nurse.

I'm Colton Lord, your host. By you being here today, it shows me that you are someone who wants to learn, grow, laugh, connect, and just let your emotions flow. We are here to share real stories and hear real life experiences from real people. You are not alone in this, and Club Nurse is here to show you that. Don't forget to follow the show and share today's episode with someone you love. Now let's dive into today's conversation.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the Club Nurse Podcast. My name is Colton Lord, your host, and I know it's been a little while. We've kind of been up and down with the podcast, had a lot going on recently, um, but we're here gonna give you guys a full episode. I'm actually going to chat about the health conference that I attended in Las Vegas, or I went to Health in Las Vegas. And if you don't know what Health is, I'm going to give you a little bit of a background on on what it is. So basically right now, I don't know the history of Health, so excuse me, but right now it really is a conference that's focused on how people are innovating healthcare, like people with startup companies, entrepreneurs that are there, that are in the medical field that have new devices, new AI softwares. There's a lot of AI, it's a huge focus, as most things are in the world right now are focused on AI because that's just where we're going. And I think that there's a lot of fear around that for nurses just because of a lot of misinformation and a lot of things out there that have nurses scared that AI may be coming for our jobs. I'm gonna give you my perspective just from the conversations I've had with people who are innovating and leading in this field for nurses as far as artificial intelligence goes. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. I actually think that this is going to help us. I think that we need all the help that we can get, and AI may be the answer that nurses and healthcare needs to help us to not feel Like we're carrying so much weight on our backs and so much burnout. And yes, of course there's gonna be cons as there is with anything, but I think overall the idea of AI being able to step in and just do little things for us or maybe big things to help smooth out just our, our day-to-day work life as nurses especially, I think it's great. And I really got to talk to some people, nurses who are innovating healthcare and are using AI and are coming up with methods to just make our jobs easier. And really what I've gathered from talking to all these different people is with the similar goal in mind to get the nurse at the bedside more with the patient, doing patient care, doing the things that we as nurses actually like to do instead of having to sit at the computer and document as much and not have to do so many tedious things. You know, I think again, there's caveats I think to this. I think with there being a way to, you know, more quickly document or get things out, I think that of course these hospital systems are probably then going to be like, oh, well, what more can we add on the nurse's plate? Plates to, you know, get things done since there's all these methods to produce more work. But that's neither here nor there. I just mean the strain that we feel as nurses. I think that AI is there to really help. But that's not what this whole episode's about. I'm not here to sit here and preach to you about artificial intelligence and AI. I think it's a great conversation to be had. So back to health, back to the conference. So I really wanted to start with a huge reason why I think health is something that is important for nurses to be at. I will start with the tickets to go are expensive, but there are ways to be there. There There were several people there on scholarships through companies that had provided those scholarships to them. There were nurses there who were influencers who were able to go on an influencer pass where the full ticket was paid. And it's a big deal. It's a big deal because it's an expensive place to be. It's an expensive ticket to be holding. There's ways around that. If you are a nurse out there with a huge idea, like, or even a small idea, if you have this idea of how to make healthcare better, how to make bedside nursing better, just anything that you've witnessed in your job and you have the answer, you think you have the answer and you wanna try it, health is a really good place to be because there's investors there. The energy is high of people who are really innovating and networking and talking and having conversations. And where I really saw this was the Nurse Hackathon. And we did an episode on this. We had Rebecca Love and we had Shannon Lundt here from Nurse Approved talking to us about the Nurse Hackathon. If you don't know what a hackathon is, I didn't either. That's okay. So let's kind of talk about it. A hackathon basically is a bunch of people are On teams, get together, start collaborating and networking and talking about issues and coming up with a solution in a short amount of time. And so when you look at that as from a nursing perspective, basically there were, bear with me here, maybe 10-ish teams of nurses and they ranged from, there was actually one person who was solo, she had an idea, she was on her own, upwards of like 10 people on a team, which is really, really amazing. So that's the hackathon is these nurses got together. I actually participated in it, it was super awesome. Awesome. My team, you guys probably know, that's Lindsay Shelton and her husband Jared. Lindsay is Scrub Hacks on social media. She was there at Health and we got together and then we also had another nurse with us as well, Fasha. Oh my gosh, I hope I'm saying your name right. Fasha? Oh my God. If she's listening or you hear this, girl, I'm sorry. Fasha, it's a beautiful name. She was super awesome. But yeah, we got together, we came up with a device. Actually, it was Lindsay's idea and we kind of just Between the 4 of us plus our mentor Rhonda, we just started like bouncing ideas off of each other, drawing up different prototypes and like coming up with an idea of something that we felt like could improve nurses' lives at the bedside and what we're doing every day. And when you start talking to people who are doing this, who are working at the bedside and are used to like having to just pull from resources from everywhere to try to get the job done, it's amazing what things people will come up with. So the hackathon was great because again, it's just a bunch of nurses together. getting things done. And just the ideas were super awesome. I think that there's actually gonna be separate articles about the winners, so make sure to check out the nurse.org website and keep up to date with those articles because you'll see the winners and the things that people were coming up with, these nurses were coming up with. So I just wanted to highlight a couple cool things that I found about health. I wrote an article, so if you're interested in reading and seeing pictures, be sure to check out nurse.org. And you can find the article there. You can search at Health, search my name, Colton Lord, whatever. Find the article and make sure you're going through and seeing kind of the pictures that I threw into the article of these really cool devices. Okay, so there was this really cool device. So it basically was me covering the Nurse Media and then Angelina, who is the director of marketing here at nurse.org. Her and I were walking around Health. There's a huge showroom, okay? You walk into the showroom and I'm telling you, it is massive. It is huge. There are booths as far as your eye can see that you imagine being inside of a building. Like imagine, honestly imagine like Costco just being like completely emptied out of shelves and then just throwing booths on the ground of just a bunch of different nurse innovators, healthcare innovators, doctors, business people, all with these like really amazing products and ideas and AI softwares that you can walk by, you can trial. Some of them have the products that you can try there. And this one in particular that I'm talking about was by Noom. That's N-O-O-M if you want to Google it and check it out. But basically what I did was I sat in front of this mirror, okay? Scanned my face, went around, you sit there very still, I think for 60 seconds it scans your face. And in that 60 seconds, it will give you your vital signs and it basically is measuring your biological age based on many factors. I was not particularly in love with this because it did not give me the score that I wanted, but it also is eye-opening. So basically it gives you real-time vital signs and it is basically, it is evaluating your metabolic and your heart health indicators and gives you a biological age. So I'm 29. I'm almost 30, but it gave me that I was 34.8, but that was my biological age. And again, it looks at all these things. I don't know the mechanism and how that works when it's scanning your face, but it told me that my inflammation was high, my stress levels were high, and I believe it. Hello. I mean, I'm sure all of us nurses can relate to that, but it was really cool to kind of just sit there. And these are things that you're essentially using for free. Yes, you bought the ticket to go, but you have access to all these cool things to kind of sit and just— everyone loved this one 'cause it's just a mirror. Again, check out the article so you can see the pictures. I think I did actually post a TikTok about this as well at Nurse Colton on TikTok, but super cool. It just evaluates you, gives you a little snapshot of your health in a couple seconds. Amazing. There was also one that I liked this one better. You stand on it, you kind of go around in a circle. It gives you like a full body scan. And that one tells you— that one, my health was optimal. And the guy said that my health was better than anyone he had seen there. So I like the full body scanner better. I'll just go out on a limb and say that. But those ones are really cool, more interactive devices that you can kind of use. One that was at the Nurse Innovators Pavilion. So when you go into health, there's a whole— again, there's this whole showroom, but there's a specific spot now for nurses, the Nurse Innovator Pavilion. Again, this has all been really— the trail has been blazed by Rebecca Love with Nurse Approved. She really, really, really is elevating nurses' voices and putting us out there and getting our voices just heard. It's quite amazing. But the Nurse Innovators Pavilion, There was this one device that we really enjoyed using. It's called, it's from Lucid. It's a virtual reality headset. You put it on if you've ever used VR or virtual reality. And basically what this device was there to show you was what it looks like to be in the eyes of a patient who is like acutely delirious in the hospital that's suffering from delirium. And it was shocking. It was terrifying and eye-opening because you get to see through the lens of these people. And it's like, no wonder grandma, And Papa are scared of us when we walk in there and are punching and swinging at us when they're confused in the hospital, because this stuff is scary. Like whenever you put those on, you're seeing like figures that are stabbing you. You're seeing blood everywhere. There was like flooding. You're seeing spiders crawl over you. It's quite alarming. It's quite scary and you have no idea what's going on. People are touching you. It really gives you an inside look and maybe makes you feel— made me at least feel more compassionate towards my patients that are experiencing this, because how scary would that be that you really don't know what's going on? And as the bedside nurse, I understand it's very frustrating at times to be taking care of people and patients who are acutely delirious and they're confused and they're pulling at everything. It's hard. It's hard work. You need to get a sitter. Maybe you don't have a sitter. They're pulling out their IVs. They just pulled out their 3rd IV for the day. They're almost falling. It's a lot. It's exhausting. And I'm not discounting that. But to step into the eyes of the patient and be able to just to kind of see like, wow, okay, it maybe just makes you take a step back and realize that They're not doing it on purpose, which I think we know that, but just to— just a reminder, like we constantly need these reminders. It's like with anything in life, we learn these things and then we just need those little reminders to be like, okay, let me, let me just recenter myself and maybe just give you a little bit more patience when you were taking care of your patients. Uh, in the article I also just covered, there were some really cool like influencers, healthcare influencers from social media that were at the conference. Uh, like I said, Lindsay Shelton, Uh, one of my friends, she was there. Uh, we got to meet Dr. Tommy Martin, which was super cool. Uh, super nice. He has a really awesome platform. It was really nice to run into him, get to chat with him. Uh, I think that we will be doing a podcast episode with him here eventually. Oh, I wanted to highlight this too. This, the Eko stethoscope, which nurse.org has done some partnerships with as far as giving away. So always be on the lookout for those in the future. But the Eko stethoscope I thought was super cool. Like it has a, a literal like screen on the stethoscope that you can see like the little telemonitor going across. And when you put it on the chest, it's really there for early detection. It can detect like AFib, some heart failure symptoms, and really alerts the provider while they're listening. It's simultaneously using AI to also evaluate the patient's heart. And really early detection is key and to make sure that we're not missing any kind of diagnoses. I think that's a super cool way for AI to be collaborating with the healthcare professional in something like that. So that was a super cool one we got to kind of look at. We didn't get to like fully try it out, but we got to kind of the device, look at it. And so as far as that, that's kind of what I wanted to cover. I mean, like I said, there were so many things there. There's like a— there's an influencer lounge that you can sit there and talk with a bunch of the other med influencers. We got to sit and we got to chat with Lady Spine Doc, Dr. Betsy Grunch, uh, Mama Nurse Tina. We got to go watch her comedy show, which was super awesome. She was so funny. But really, my take-home for the nurses at this conference are just— it's just putting yourself out there. It's getting yourself noticed. It's even if you don't have these grand big ideas or that you're not ready to maybe even talk about, just being in those rooms and like listening to everybody and it's very inspiring. And you never know, it might just plant that seed. It might just give you that little boost that you need, that little motivation that you need to put yourself out there further, to take that next step. Maybe you've been having the, you know, you've been dreaming about stepping away from the bedside and starting this company and you know you have this thing in your head that will change healthcare. It's these kind of rooms and these kind of conversations that help to jumpstart that. Or maybe you meet your future investor who's gonna invest in your company. You know, it's just, just a great place to be. And at the end of the day, if that's not what you're looking for, you're, you're networking, you're collaborating, and you're just, you're around people who are wanting to improve healthcare. And I think that's super important. We met with a nurse who is now the COO of Microsoft, which is so amazing that nurses are even in those roles because she's helping to bring forth AI and use that Yeah. And dictation, I don't think they're calling them dictation anymore. I'm sorry, I forgot the term now. But you know, when you hear the doctors talking into the microphone and then it's translating onto the paper for them, you all have heard that. You know, there's things that they're doing like that for nurses through Microsoft that we got to try out and see in real time. Like, wow, this is really gonna save us some time. And again, I'm gonna have these people, I'm gonna have podcast episodes with some of the amazing nurse innovators that I met. So I'm not gonna cover all of that in this podcast, in this recap. Be on the lookout for those episodes episodes that I do with these nurse innovators. These— there are people helping international nurses get to America. There are, like I said, the COO of Microsoft who was a nurse who was helping bring AI to the documentation of nurses to help with just real-time, just conversation, turn that into documentation so you're not having to go sit down and type. And so amazing. We met with, met with nurses who have come up with actual devices. Last year when I went to Health, I remember meeting a man who had come up with a device to help with contaminated blood cultures because we know how many blood cultures are contaminated, waste so much money, so much time, so many resources. There's nurses that just are seeing things and coming up with ideas. And that's really what I want to push forward. That's the message that I have is that nurses are natural leaders. We are natural entrepreneurs because we are resourceful. We have to be. Healthcare is a hard place to be. It's a difficult thing to do to work in healthcare. And so we already know how to innovate because we're doing it naturally to keep our patients alive, give them the best care. And best experience that we possibly can while they're in the hospital. So that's what I have for you on the health recap. Be sure to read the article, check out the pictures, and be on the lookout for the episodes that will be coming up in the next few weeks with these super amazing nurse healthcare innovators. Again, my name is Colton Lord. This is Club Nurse. Thank you so much for being here and for listening, and we will catch you next time. If you want to stay up to date on all of nurse news, Be sure to go to nurse.org/news to stay up to date on all the breaking news. Uh, we're gonna be doing episodes that you can read articles or you can listen to the breaking news via a podcast, or you can do both. Um, but it's all gonna be available to you. Just be sure to go to nurse.org/news or to catch all of Club Nurse, go to nurse.org/clubnurse. All right, we'll catch you guys next time. Bye.

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank you for being here at Club Nurse. I hope you gained something valuable From today's episode, and if you did, remember to share this episode with someone that you love. Follow me on socials at Nurse Daddies or Colton Lord 17, and be sure to follow nurse.org to stay informed with all of the hottest healthcare topics. Until next time, take care of yourself the way you take care of everyone else. Love ya. Bye.