What operational challenges do healthcare systems face today?
One of the biggest challenges facing all healthcare operations today is staffing shortages. And what we have found by standardizing, we are able to mitigate some of those cost increases in our department. And by implementing technology, we’ve been able to help nurses work top of license. We’ve also been able to provide additional non-clinical support where nurses may be doing a patient sit, we’re now doing it with a professional patient setter. We’ve found ways to make nursing really focus on patient care.
Where are inefficiencies or inconsistencies currently costing health care organizations time, money, or patient satisfaction
I think when you look at it, nursing is challenge, creating creative inefficiencies in healthcare. It’s a very stressful work environment. Patients are more afraid and stressed than ever. And you have nurses that have had the greatest staffing shortage they’ve ever seen. Some hospitals are running 50 to 60% in nursing by temp agency. They come in, they may not have been in the hospital before. They’re trying to learn the hospital, they’re trying to learn the hospital systems, the hospital policies, but they may have never been there before. So the inconsistency in nursing and also that trickles down to all of the support services departments because we’ve had staffing shortages as well. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve used data to look at how we run our business better. We took a step back and said, how do we run our business more efficiently, more effectively, maintain patient satisfaction, but having less people to do the job?
We knew we had to make the job easier. There was more competition for service folks. So we use data and we use technology to make the job easier. And by doing that, we’re getting the same, if not better, patient satisfaction at a lower cost.
How does fragmentation affect the hospital experience?
Hospitals are very fragmented in the way they approach their business. Many of us had a family member or ourselves that have been in healthcare. You may see two or three different doctors and specialists, and they’re all very stretched for time. And what they’re doing is trying to communicate the best they possibly can through a patient medical record. If you look at our support services, one of the things that we did differently with TouchPoint is try to determine how many times who had a patient stay we would actually touch them, and that was the touch points throughout the stay. The best way we can have operational efficiency is by having multiple service lines.
The ability of a valet parker to tell somebody coming into the missions that, “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is coming in. They’re wearing a blue jacket,” that provides a first service impression. Then from there as they’re transported to the room, our patient transporter can possibly say, “Hey, what would you like for lunch? I know you may be hungry.” We’ll know exactly when the room is ready because EBS has already triggered it on our system with Taskup. So those inefficiencies is what we looked at when we redesigned our healthcare model, and that is giving us greater efficiency and greater satisfaction because we’re using every one of those touch points to improve the patient care.
Can you describe some of the financial risks that come from fragmented support services?
Healthcare is extremely challenged financially. So when the business is fragmented, you don’t know where all the inefficiencies may exist. If you look at one service department, they’re isolated. They live in a silo. But if you can connect those services through technology and improve performance and improve communication, that will find all the little steps. I like to refer to it as big I and little I. We have big innovations like TaskUp, which is a technology that allows us to know where all of our employees are at any given time. Then we have the little efficiencies, the small Is, which is a process efficiency that we may find in any service line. And the data has shown us that. We’ve gone for years of knowing what it feels or what we believe or how long it should take to do that. We actually took people in the business and found exactly how long it took to clean a patient room, to do the dishes for 200 patients. And from there we designed staffing models that were connected and very efficient.
When you’re siloed, as in most healthcare systems, those departments aren’t talking to each other. And our touch point model was based on the points that we touch the patient and the information that we gleaned from that to lose the inefficiencies and be more efficient. So fragmentation costs health systems millions of dollars a year. And we knew in our service lines that we could control that and try to eliminate that fragmentation by implementing technology, implementing data, and constantly evaluating that data on how we can provide better service at the lowest possible cost.
Fragmentation in support services can also lead to inconsistent care. How does TouchPoint’s integrated model address that?
Fragmentation support services is something that exists in a lot of healthcare systems that we look at today. So imagine you’re a patient that has come in, you get put on a special diet for example. We deliver the meal. The nurse has not told you you’re on a special diet, the doctor has not told you you’re on a special diet, and you feel like something is taken away from you or something is missing. When that communication is not occurring, and in today’s world, there’s not enough time to stop and communicate, we have found that by putting in technology that allows for immediate communication, we know all the information. So as a patient, you feel like, “I’m being taken care of well. They know me.”
We’re trying to bring the personal touch back into healthcare because patients now feel like a number. They feel like a clinical condition. And with us, we have found that data that we are getting and the immediate communication through the use of technology allows that patient to feel seen, heard, and know exactly what they want. It’s kind of like checking into a hotel and they immediately know who you are when you hit the front desk. That’s the hospitality that we’re trying to bring to healthcare.
There’s so much that we can offer with our integrated model. We call it a Standardized Turnkey Operational platform, and that platform provides the best possible care at the most reasonable and valuable costs.