Do Tank partnered with a national Quality Improvement Organization to move from early-stage concepts to validated, implementation-ready approaches for increasing vaccination rates in skilled nursing facilities. By grounding innovation in frontline realities and testing ideas through rapid prototyping, the engagement produced a set of high-confidence solutions and a clearer pathway for scaling impact across diverse care settings.
The organization was focused on improving vaccination uptake across skilled nursing facilities — a persistent challenge shaped by workforce constraints, resident trust, and variability in care environments. Early discovery work had surfaced promising ideas, but leadership lacked clarity on which concepts would translate into meaningful, scalable impact.
Without structured validation, there was a risk of advancing solutions that were misaligned with frontline workflows or difficult to sustain in practice. The organization needed a disciplined approach to refine concepts, test assumptions, and prioritize ideas that could realistically improve outcomes.
Do Tank’s Role:
- Designed and facilitated a structured concept validation process grounded in frontline engagement
- Convened cross-sector stakeholders including clinicians, infection preventionists, nurse managers, and SNF staff
- Guided evaluation of concepts using feasibility, equity impact, and operational readiness criteria
- Led rapid prototyping and iterative testing of prioritized solutions
- Developed implementation considerations to support piloting and scale
Do Tank began by convening frontline stakeholders to pressure-test early concepts against real-world experience. Rather than moving quickly to solutions, the work focused on building shared understanding of barriers, trade-offs, and system constraints within skilled nursing facilities.
Each concept was evaluated through a structured lens that included feasibility, equity impact, alignment with CMS priorities, and operational readiness. This process helped narrow the field to a single high-potential concept: expanding vaccination education beyond infection preventionists to enable trusted frontline staff to initiate conversations with residents and families.
From there, we guided rapid prototyping to test key assumptions — including workforce capacity, communication effectiveness, and support needs. Low-fidelity prototypes were developed and refined through iterative feedback, allowing both infection preventionists and frontline staff to shape content, workflows, and usability. This approach surfaced practical constraints early and ensured solutions were grounded in how care is actually delivered.
The engagement resulted in a set of validated conceptual and functional prototypes supported by workflow integration considerations and capacity-building materials. Leaders gained clarity on which approaches were feasible, impactful, and ready for piloting across skilled nursing environments.
Just as importantly, the process strengthened the organization’s ability to evaluate and advance innovation with greater discipline. By grounding decisions in frontline insight and testing ideas before scale, the work reduced implementation risk and increased the likelihood of sustained adoption.
What began as a broad set of ideas was translated into a focused, actionable pathway for improving vaccination engagement across a complex care setting.
This work reinforced that effective innovation in healthcare is less about generating ideas and more about validating them in the environments where they must succeed. When frontline teams are directly involved in shaping and testing solutions, both credibility and adoption increase.
For organizations working to improve outcomes in complex settings, the question is not just what to implement — but how to ensure solutions are grounded, feasible, and supported by the people responsible for carrying them forward.