ANA Individual Innovation Award Winner: Kathleen Puri

Innovating to improve patient safety, comfort, and independence

Kathleen Puri, MSN, RN, vividly remembers the defining moment in her path to becoming the founder of Fitsi Health. Puri was caring for an elderly woman with very soiled glasses, and when she offered to clean them. She was met with resistance.

“She did not want to be without her glasses,” Puri reflected. “After some time, she relented – but when I took them off, I noticed she had pressure sores on the bridge of her nose and behind her ears. She had not removed her glasses in four days! She was afraid of losing them and had no place to put them safely.”

That experience sparked an idea for Puri that would blossom into Fitsi, a bedside caddy that allows patients to hold their essentials close at hand. Fitsi improves patient comfort, keeping glasses or a phone nearby, but its hallmark feature is that it makes hand hygiene easy. In the US, one in 20 patients get a hospital acquired infection – two million people each year. Fitisi empowers patients to keep their hands clean without the help of a caregiver, mitigating the risk of hospital acquired infections while aiding healing. The caddy even detaches and sits flat on any surface to be used on the go.

“One of the things we spent a lot of time on was the feature of the caddy staying level while attached to a bedrail that would move as the head of the bed moved. We had countless conversations as we worked through that design element,” she said.

Inventing Fitsi earned Puri a 2019 Individual ANA Innovation Award. Since that time, she has earned two patents for the product, which has received numerous innovation and design awards. Fitsi has also been part of several hospital studies on patient hand hygiene. These studies all showed how the product helped to improve patient hand hygiene practices and the overall patient experience. Despite the wide innovation success, Puri decided not to pursue larger commercial sales for Fitsi due to her ALS diagnosis and a confluence of market factors including COVID-19 and hospital budgets.

Puri acknowledges the many opportunities for nursing innovation compete with the day-to-day demands of a nurse. In fact, that was one her biggest challenges in creating her product.

“Finding time for Fitsi was always challenging. We worked a lot on the weekends and had weekly team calls on Sundays since we all had demanding full-time jobs,” Puri said. “Every aspect of making a product has many layers and it is not easy to navigate each layer.”

Designing a product was a completely new experience for Puri, so she partnered with a medical designer who helped her determine the shape, color, size, and material of Fitsi. She also proudly funded the project completely herself.

Despite the challenges she faced, she believes any nurse with an innovative idea should go for it.

“Surround yourself with supportive people who encourage you. Support can come from many people – in addition to my family, one of my most eager supporters was the patent attorney I worked with,” Puri said.

She likens the process of inventing Fitsi to a journey into the unknown and is proud to have persisted.

“I frequently felt like I was driving at night, only being able to see what the headlights shined upon,” she said. “Curves were everywhere on the path, but I learned to trust that I could handle what was beyond the bend.”