Rebecca Cherney, RN BSN BS
Registered Nurse
University of Michigan
Rebecca Cherney RN, BSN, BS is a Nurse Innovator at University of Michigan. She was recently named the winner of the 2021 ANA Individual Innovation Award powered by BD. She developed TrachTrail™. It’s the first comprehensive, standardized adult tracheostomy care education program of its kind, focusing on combined nurse, patient and caregiver training with emphasis on empathy for the patient and their families. TrachTrail™ provides user-friendly multimedia content, emphasizing patient-centeredness and builds upon multi-disciplinary collaboration to ensure quality of life with a tracheostomy at home. The ANA Innovation Awards highlight, recognize and celebrate exemplary nurse-led innovation that improves patient safety and health outcomes.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

This multi-institutional project demonstrated how a structured approach to interprofessional collaboration and patient engagement can mitigate preventable harm and improve patient experience for patients with a surgical airway (tracheostomy). Care of such patients is high stakes and fraught with risk. Harm occurs in hospital settings and in the community because poor communication and fragmented care are pervasive. Poor coordination of care contributes to anxiety, frustrations, and complications. Avoidable visits to emergency departments or injury are all too common. We applied an…