(inspirational music)
- My name is Blake Henderson
and I'm director of the diffusion of excellence program.
We act as an internal accelerator for the emerging promising
practices and innovations
here at the veteran's health administration.
We are a massive nationwide network of 170 hospitals,
and over a thousand clinics. And at any given time,
there's likely people in our facilities
who are finding better ways to do things either, you know,
incremental improvements or maybe they could be making
you know, transformational improvements
and applying certain types of technologies
like 3D printing or machine learning.
And so for an organization as big as us,
it's really important that we have mechanisms to allow our
workforce and our employees to come to the table
with some of these great new things that they're creating
Shark Tank is important for us, because it's a platform
that allows us to again, recognize
those most promising innovations,
but also at the same time,
kind of qualify them by putting them
in front of prospective
buyers or the sharks.
And these are medical center directors
as well as network directors
who decide they want to participate.
And they listened to all the pitches and they actually
bid resources to bring the practices to their facilities.
It's a pretty demanding competition.
We usually get about 400 submissions annually
and we have 10 winners.
- With 17 veterans a day dying by suicide.
We can all agree that one veteran a day is too many.
Despite VA strives to reduce that something's been missing.
- VMET is a winner of our fifth Shark Tank Competition.
Shannon and T-bone are really exceptional in that they saw
a problem in their local community
with veterans who are in crisis,
and they recognize that VA wasn't quite set up
to meet those veterans there in the community.
Traditionally VA police and social workers in a lot of ways
had confined themselves to the campus of the VA.
But the problem is most, most suicides
and other at-risk events are happening off our grounds.
And so working with their facility leadership
they came up with a way to work more closely
with our community partners,
including local police departments,
local social service nets,
and to interact with these at-risk veterans.
And it's been quite successful.
One of the winners of our sixth competition last year,
it's called a remote temperature monitoring
for diabetic foot ulcers.
And why this is important is because diabetic foot ulcers
are the precursors for a lot of amputations.
And so we've been fortunate enough to partner a startup
in the industry named Podimetrics who has invented a really
seamless and easy mat that a veteran stands on each day.
And it gives us all the information we need to determine
if a diabetic foot ulcer is going to form within the next
four to six weeks.
It's nearly a hundred percent effective at preventing
diabetic foot ulcers and also
near a hundred percent effective at preventing amputations.
Innovation has been a part of VA since its inception
dating back to the polio vaccine,
pacemakers, nicotine patches. The list goes on and on.
But I think what we're trying to do here
with the Shark Tank Competition
and VHA innovation ecosystem is really
take a set of fresh approaches to innovation at VA
by clearly giving our workforce as well as industry,
a lot of opportunities to come to the table with solutions
and great things. And for us to invest in them.