Bonnie Clipper

Bonnie Clipper works on the question every hospital in the country is now facing: whether the model of care delivery a health system inherited can survive the workforce it actually has.

She was a chief nurse executive for more than twenty years and then became the first vice president of innovation at the American Nurses Association, a role created because the profession had decided innovation could not stay an individual hobby. She is the founder and chief executive of Innovation Advantage, and was among the earliest advocates of virtual nursing, the model in which experienced nurses support bedside teams remotely, handling admissions, discharges, documentation and mentoring so the nurse on the floor is left with the work that requires presence.

That model is now being piloted across US health systems, and her value to a hospital audience is that she has been working on it since before it had a name, including the parts that go wrong: the technology chosen before the workflow is designed, the bedside staff who reasonably read a camera in the room as surveillance, and the pilot that succeeds on one unit and dies on the second.

She holds a doctorate in nursing practice, an MBA and a master's degree, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and of the American College of Healthcare Executives, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Executive Nurse Fellow. She has written extensively on the subject, including The Innovation Handbook, The Nurse's Guide to Innovation and The Innovation Roadmap, all written for nurse leaders rather than for a general management audience.

She is booked by health systems redesigning staffing models, by nursing conferences, and by organizations trying to build an innovation practice inside a clinical workforce rather than importing one.