As the healthcare landscape evolves, how is TouchPoint preparing services to scale and stay ahead of industry shifts?
TouchPoint, today, is a much different organization than we were 10 years ago when I first started. We’ll be a much different and better organization a year from now. And the only way we’re able to do that is with adaptable agile culture filled with passionate people that are absolutely obsessed with creating a better operational ecosystem, a better experience, a better culture, a better outcome for our clients, for our patients, for our associates alike. TouchPoint is that beautiful blend of a small organization with the power and the wherewithal of the sixth-largest employer in the world. That allows us to build the right technology package so that we own the product roadmap, product roadmaps not imposed upon us. So, we build our own data product team, where we’re building and customizing data products that come out of that technology and customizing reporting out of it, so that we have AI and generative AI built in natively into our applications.
It gives us all of that resources and support, but connected where I get text messages about ideas directly from our frontline teams. And that creates such a unique organization, where we’re able to do what I refer to as bidirectional innovation. And that propels us forward further, faster. So, what makes TouchPoint unique, and how we’re able to be a different organization, and a better organization in the future, starts and ends with our people. It starts and ends with ideas that are executed, and scaled, and scaled everywhere.
How important is flexibility and future-readiness when choosing a long-term service partner?
When you’re evaluating who you’re going to have almost in your home, in your environment as a service provider, it’s a tough challenge. And you can’t always be sure about what’s next.
One of the most important things is alignment perspective. What’s important with that is you don’t know what challenges you’re going to have in three months or six months. What you need is a partner that’s able to flex, and pivot, and adjust to whatever that need might be. You make a decision not for a three-month decision or a six-month decision. When you’re making a decision about someone that’s going to be in your hospital day in and day out, it’s critical. It’s your brand, it’s your integrity. You need to select a partner that’s going to align with both that and be equipped with the horsepower, the wherewithal, to be agile enough to change in the future, so that you’ve got a partner that you can lean on and trust when things don’t go according to plan.
And I think that’s where you truly see differentiation, is when things don’t go according to plan, how do we react? How do we solve for that? And ideally, that’s happening very, very rarely. But ultimately, that can happen. What happens when there is that flood? What happens when there is some issue in the supply chain? How are we fixing that so that that is not an impact to you? And how are we leveraging data to do that? How are we leveraging relationships to do that? How are we leveraging technology to future-proof that? And how do we create a culture of preparedness, so that we can be flexible and adaptable to whatever change might come, so that instead of that unforeseen incident happening and things starting to fall apart, it causes people to strengthen and come together.
How is TouchPoint helping its partners future-proof?
We’re constantly looking at what’s now and what’s next. We’re doing a lot of exciting industry-breaking revolutionary things today. We’ve also got plans for what’s coming after that. How are you going to take that to the next level? And we have a dialogue on how do we future-proof and solve those pain points. We’re able to look at the full continuum of every single task that operations manager does, that that sous-chef does in a hospital, and figure out how to make it more efficient. We’re in the field and we’re experiencing that firsthand. And that’s time spent in authentic, engaging conversations at every level of our organization. The way that we’ve made and we’ve evolved TouchPoint has been so intentional, and is looking at every single step and every process, and figuring out better ways to do it. Both looking at the bottom up and also top down, what big idea can move the needle in a major way?
Do we need to build a new technology from scratch, which we’ve done many times? Do we look at what’s out there in the marketplace? Or is there just something very simple, very elegant that we can put in place that solves that pain point so we don’t have to deal with that anymore? But where that becomes impactful is when we take that, we take that one idea in Alabama, that one idea in Kansas, and we then take it everywhere. And that becomes some of TouchPoint’s standard operating platform. And when we put that in place, we know it gets results.
How would a partner like TouchPoint support an organization’s goals today and in the future?
If TouchPoint’s anything, we’re nimble. One of the joys in my role is coming up with creative solutions to tough problems.
A lot of these problems have vexed our industries for years. And in time and time again, we find that there’s technology that exists today, that we can repurpose and change that. But the right application of that technology within our industry, within our ecosystem, and operationalizing that technology, that’s the fun part. That’s taking something like generative AI and building a custom application off of it that connects thousands of different data sources together into one prescriptive approach for our associates. That’s being able to take 80,000 patient comments and analyze that in 30 seconds or less, and coming up with, here’s a curated action plan based on other strategies that have worked at other sites that work well based on your demographics, based on your patient populations, based on what we’re hearing from patients that have been there.
We’re an organization that is absolutely obsessed with providing the best quality care at the most affordable price point. We’ve been there. And that’s what’s different, is we’re going to be hyper-obsessed, critical with coming up with the very best solutions always. We iterate them constantly and we scale them everywhere.