MakerNurse honors the inventive spirit of nurses across America and seeks to bring nurse making to the forefront of health care.

Nurses have been solving issues of patient care for more than 100 years, customizing medical equipment and making new devices that ensure patient comfort and safety. Yet too often nurse-made solutions do not spread beyond the unit where they were created, or worse, are never built, remaining just a sketch on the back of a napkin.

MakerNurse provides tools and resources to enhance resourcefulness and innovation among nurses, and partners with health care institutions to nurture nurses’ creativity and ingenuity. With the right support, nurses can take their ideas and make them into something they can hold in their hands. It’s this everyday making that’s leading to better ways of caring for patients, not just the grandiose ideas that are incubated over decades.

Join us in making health! [LINK TO GET INVOLVED PAGE]

MakerNurse is an initiative of MakerHealth

How MakerNurse Began

MakerNurse, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was launched in September 2013 with the goal of examining nurse innovation in U.S. hospitals and identifying tools and resources that could help more nurses bring their ideas to fruition and lead improvements in patient care. Our solutions, informed by this research, are being adopted by institutions across the country. Learn more. 

Our Team

Anna Young, Co-Founder

Anna has spent eight years teaching field-based prototyping courses and workshops to healthcare professionals, engineering students, industry executives, and Ministry personnel in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Panama, Thailand, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Germany, and the United States. Her medical device design courses at MIT cater to both undergraduates and graduate students across the Institute. Her expertise is in: digital fabrication and design, creating technology from found materials, building networks of health technology innovators and designing clinical studies to move health technology prototypes from the lab and into practice.

Jose Gomez-Marquez, Co-Founder

Jose has worked at the intersection of health and DIY technologies for over ten years. He is a co-inventor the MEDIKit platform, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their own medical technologies. His research projects include crowdsourced diagnostics, paper microfluidics, and reconfigurable diagnostics for extreme environments. Jose directs the Little Devices Lab at MIT’s International Design Centre. He has served on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2009, Jose was selected to Technology Review’s TR35, which also named him Humanitarian of the Year. In 2011 he was named a TED Fellow. He arrived to the United States from his native Honduras on a Rotary exchange and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.