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W W W. M A I N E B I Z . B I Z 21 S E P T E M B E R 1 9 , 2 0 2 2 H E A LT H C A R E / W E L L N E S S Berg's take on Maine's climate for fostering innovation and startups in health care: "I hope it becomes an amazing place to found any company, especially those that help people and the planet." Play Portal: 'MacGyvering' medical play for youngsters Bethany Sweet is a former teacher employed as a certified child life specialist at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center in Portland. She's also a budding entrepreneur and inventor of the Play Portal, a rep- lica of a medical device used to draw blood and give intravenous treat- ments to oncology patients. Known as a port-a-catheter, the device is placed under the skin and attached to a catheter. To make the procedure less scary to pediatric patients, Sweet came up with the Play Portal to show how it works with a stuffed animal or doll before going through it themselves. "Sometimes medical play is just open-ended play with regular toys and with medical equipment thrown in there, so that kids can explore medical equipment in a non-threatening way," she says. While she often improvises on the job using equipment on hand, that's more difficult with expensive devices like the port-a-cath, sparking the idea for a replica. To bring her idea to life, Sweet received guidance and support via her participation in the MaineHealth Innovation Cohort. e eight-week program aims to advance early-stage ideas from employees across all dis- ciplines to address unmet care needs they observe in their daily work, like the pediatric education gap that Sweet aims to fill with her Play Portal. Sweet received support from MaineHealth Innovation, an inter- nal ideas incubator created in 2020, to secure a provisional patent and was introduced to the University of Maine Maker Innovation Studio laboratory to help produce several 3D printed prototypes of the Play Portal. She also received funding to conduct a pilot study at MaineHealth. Without support from her employer and connections she made through the cohort, Sweet says she probably "wouldn't have had the stamina" to push her idea forward. "A lot of us in the health care field do what I call 'MacGyvering' whatever we need," she says, refer- ring to the 1980s-era television series. "Without the MaineHealth Innovation Center, I wouldn't have known where to start." Susan Ahern, MaineHealth's vice president of innovation, notes that MaineHealth Innovation is "so much more than the cohort program," which was launched in 2018 and has become a tool for employee attrac- tion and retention. "It's a huge value proposition." Eventually, Sweet envisions a Play Portal product she can license out to makers of dolls and stuffed animals. Still undecided about setting up as a business entity, Sweet says she "absolutely" thinks of herself as an entrepreneur. R e n e e C o r d e s , M a i n e b i z s e n i o r w r i t e r, c a n b e r e a c h e d a t r c o r d e s @ m a i n e b i z . b i z a n d @ r s c o r d e s MAKING WORKERS' COMP WORK BETTER SINCE 1993 WWW.MEMIC.COM A lot of us in the health care field do what I call 'MacGyvering' whatever we need. — Bethany Sweet Maine Medical Center P H O T O / C O U R T E S Y O F M A I N E M E D I C A L C E N T E R Bethany Sweet, a certified child life specialist at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center, invented the Play Portal to familiarize young patients with medical procedures. F O C U S

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