Employee innovators were back to business in 2022 with the help of the VA Innovators Network (iNET), a community of 35 VA medical centers. These sites have committed to empowering frontline employees to design their own innovative solutions for problems they experience firsthand.

In addition, the sites foster a VA-wide culture of innovation through education in innovation-related principles, delivering innovative solutions to challenges that Veterans are facing today.

To discover more about how employee innovators are innovating for Veterans, dive into the 2022 iNET Annual Report.

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VA innovators working to save Veteran lives

The iNET Annual Report

The Annual Report reviews 2022 and outlines the network’s priorities for 2023. One of the priorities is to create an Amazon-like market for frontline employees to shop VA employee-designed products. These products are also designed through Greenhouse Initiative collaborations.

These products support not only frontline employees but Veterans as well. Some of these VA employee-designed products include:

  • Veteran Integrated Chair Kiosk (VICK): VICK is a kiosk that catalogues, tracks and disinfects wheelchairs for use while in a VA facility.
  • The Kyphotic Wedge is an inflatable device that uses air to push a kyphotic patient comfortably into proper positioning during an MRI.

Throughout 2022, iNET made headway toward this goal, conducting market research about manufacturing, intellectual property, contracting, FDA regulations, purchasing and more.

Spotlighting past and present work

The report also spotlights several achievements of both individuals and the Network-at-large:

  • Annual iNET Awards: Each year, iNET celebrates and recognizes the accomplishments of three individuals who excelled in the work that is foundational to iNET.
  • New iNET Sites: Six new sites join the VA Innovators Network this year. Illiana; New Jersey; Bedford, West Palm Beach, Alexandria, and Charleston joined iNET in 2022. Innovation Specialists from those sites and many more from other sites also joined the Network.
  • iNET’s Spark-Seed-Spread Accelerator Bootcamp was back in person in Washington, D.C., for the new cohort of  investees. Over 100 frontline employees traveled to Bootcamp in November for a 3-day superhero-themed event.

You can read iNET’s 2022 Annual Report here.

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4 Comments

  1. Tom McHugh February 16, 2023 at 14:22

    The ICARE program at the Edward Hines Jr. facility is broken. Helping Veterans is still a goal for most employees but if you do and happen to get injured in the process don’t look for management to back you. I’ve been fighting a Workman’s Compensation claim for over 3 years for “Doing the right thing”. I was severely injured while helping a Veteran in distress at one of our CBOCS. Management figuratively threw me under the bus by stating I left my duty station without my supervisors permission which is simply not true but that was the easy way out. In the past it was second nature for me to help Veterans at the hospital but since this incident I think twice which is wrong. I have a complete folder of facts if anyone is interested. No one at Hines is.

  2. Harold A. Lay February 16, 2023 at 11:55

    I would like to innovate not having people up the chain making seemingly arbitrary decisions that negatively affect my job but do nothing to improve the workplace or increase safety. Then us on the front line have no recourse but to kowtow because our supervisors or their supervisors or their supervisors will even ask a question as to why we’re doing such inane things.

  3. Paul Gunderson January 22, 2023 at 17:04

    At least at the Houston, VA if the nurses and doctors would actually ask veterans the questions about how they’re feeling if they thought about harming them self instead of just pencil whipping them because they’re afraid they might have to do paperwork. Maybe we could save some veterans and that doesn’t cost much at all. Pencil whipping those forms and putting them in our medical records, I would consider fraud.

  4. Bob January 22, 2023 at 15:47

    The Spokane VA is totally broken. Get me out of this terrible place, it is unsafe

Comments are closed.

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