Deeply Embedded, Broadly Engaged: Inneo Lab's Active Partnership with Rady Children's Hospital – Orange County

Innovation in healthcare rarely emerges from a single conversation or project. More often, it grows from sustained relationships—from consistent engagement, listening carefully, and building the kind of trust that allows a clinician to say, “I’ve noticed something. I think there’s a better way.”

That is the type of partnership Inneo Lab has cultivated with Rady Children’s Hospital – Orange County (RCH-OC) and its Mi4 innovation team. Our team has been actively engaging physicians and clinical staff across various departments and care settings to not just explore specific projects, but to understand the broader landscape of where care could be improved.

Collaboration as a Catalyst

Inneo Lab’s Product Development team hosted a collaborative brainstorming session with the Mi4 team from CHOC Children’s – Orange County. Together, we explored potential design implementations for a product developed by physical therapist and clinician innovator Betty Kuo. Betty’s innovation aimed at improving care for patients with Omphaloceles. It was an engaging discussion focused on translating clinical insight into practical solutions that could make a meaningful difference for patients and care teams alike.

This multidisciplinary session focused on translating insight into tangible design pathways. Through structured discussion, the team explored how a concept could be implemented in a way that aligns with clinical workflows, supports safety considerations, and integrates thoughtfully into existing care environments.

This type of collaboration is central to how Inneo Lab operates. By engaging closely with member health systems and their innovation teams, we ensure that ideas are not only inventive—but also practical, scalable, and positioned for successful development.

“It is always a great experience to work with the hospital systems on exciting and innovative devices. Being able to offer a fresh perspective on a problem or going to the hospital systems to get a fresh perspective on our projects is one of the most beneficial aspects of the relationship between Inneo and the health systems from a product development standpoint. Seeing this project go from a concept to solution is great, and I can’t wait to see its full impact one day.”
– Inneo Lab, Nikolas Pourghahreman, Product Development Engineer II

We are grateful for the continued partnership with the Mi4 team at Rady Children’s Health – Orange County. Their commitment to advancing pediatric care and their openness to collaborative innovation exemplifies the strength of our network. After the session, Mi4 has been working on advancing the concept further so it can be broadly available to children with Omphaloceles. [MS1.1]

Listening in the NICU: A Visit with Holly Hyland

During an on-site visit with Holly Hyland, a pediatric physical therapist at RCH-OC, our team had the opportunity to step into the environment where her work comes to life and experience the challenge up close. Holly’s work centers around creating developmentally appropriate environments, including providing a meaningful visual stimulation to infants in the NICU and CVICU, a clinical need she has thought deeply about and developed a thoughtful solution around.

Our team was able to walk the unit, speak with the RNs, PTs, OTs and speech therapists who show up for those patients every single day, and observe how they navigate the unique constraints of those environments. For the tiniest and most fragile patients, sensory development is critical and witnessing that reality up close gave our team a much deeper appreciation for what Holly’s innovation is designed to address and what it will mean for the families and care teams who need it most.

Engaging Where Clinicians Are: The NRIC “Medical Devices You Love to Hate” Event

On May 4th, our team will be on-site at the Nursing Research and Innovation Conference (NRIC) for our “Medical Devices You Love to Hate” engagement. The name says it all. This is a space for frontline clinical staff to be candid about the tools they work with every day—what frustrates them, what slows them down, and what they wish someone could fix.

For the Inneo Lab team, events like this are invaluable. The feedback is unfiltered, the frustrations are real, and the insights that emerge often point directly to the kinds of problems worth solving.

Exploring What’s Next: Casting, Splinting, and a Novel Biomaterial

In the coming weeks, our team will also sit down with orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to discuss a novel biomaterial with potential applications in casting and splinting. Bringing surgical and rehabilitative perspectives together at the outset, we’re able to ensure that whatever direction the work takes, it reflects the full arc of how patients experience care, from the operating room through recovery.

Elevating Clinician Innovation

At Inneo Lab, we believe that some of the most impactful healthcare innovations begin with a simple observation: a moment where a clinician recognizes that care could be improved.

Our role is to take that moment and build the pathway forward—providing the structure, expertise, and partnerships needed to evolve early-stage ideas into solutions with real-world impact.

These engagements are examples of how clinician-driven innovation and pain-storming, when supported by the right ecosystem, can move from concept to potential solution. It also highlights the importance of creating environments where ideas can be explored collaboratively and developed with intention.

Building What Comes Next

As we continue to expand our pipeline, opportunities like this reinforce two critical priorities:

• Showcasing the ingenuity within our member health systems
• Strengthening pathways for industry partnership and commercialization

For clinicians, these sessions are an open invitation to bring forward ideas grounded in care delivery challenges. For health system leaders, they represent a tangible expression of innovation in action—demonstrating how internal expertise can translate into a broader impact. And for industry partners, they offer early visibility into thoughtfully developed, clinically informed concepts with strong potential for scale.

Innovation in healthcare does not happen in isolation. It is built through collaboration, shaped by experience, and realized through execution.

Our engagements are reminder of what’s possible when those elements come together—and where the next generation of impactful medical devices begins.