BedWatch: Streamlining Patient Throughput Management

[Music] hey everybody and welcome to the Outsource Advantage the show where we help you understand how Outsourcing can give you an advantage in your business I'm really excited about today's episode which features Our Guest Steve Jordan Steve is a CEO of bedwatch a powerful Suite of cloud-based patient throughput management tools since founding the company in 2010 Steve's really demonstrated the ability to not only identify industry F in the market but also create Technology Solutions to streamline Hospital operations across the for I'm really excited about this because his expertise makes him a standout guest and without further Ado Steve welcome to the show thanks jar happy to be here excited so yeah great well look I'm excited to jump right into this conversation so I'm going to kick us off with a pretty general question you know what was really the problem set um that you saw out there that prompted you uh to create and found bedlock sure well interestingly we didn't really start off to to build a software company it was initially started you know uh HHS K said we need better visibility and Reporting around impatient discharges and um so I was tasked with going out and finding that solution so kind of long story short you know we we we ended up building it ourselves after trying to apartment with a couple different vendors in the market and then we uh essentially created our own product and we got great reviews and it's expanded significantly from there as I'm sure we'll get into yeah our kickoff that's great so you went out to the market you didn't really find what what what you needed and you decided to build it yourself that's right we we actually uh partner we did try to partner with a couple different uh folks um one was a bigger company one was a startup company and we just it just did not meet our needs um we've got some as you know we've got really specific needs to for reporting and engagement with our staff and uh specific requirements from the customer customer being hospital um and we realized that in order to meet those challenges we had to ourselves you did and at the time that was kind of when cloud-based technology was kind of becoming a thing we're all used to that now but back then it was sort of a newer newer thing so we started with building on those tools so we were one of the first companies you you know those tools just yeah that's great and I know as I mentioned at the at the intro VI it's a suite of tools um can you elaborate a little bit on kind of all the components that go to build bedw watch and and at a high level what that functionality provides from each of those modules sure sure yall give be kind of the 40,000 foot view so um so at a high level bed watch at this point now is kind of built to break down the silos you know we provide a lot of automation visibility d data um for the end users so kind of think of it sort of like a in a few different buckets one is like air traffic control for nursing so nurses can see have full visibility of the entire hospital they can see which patients need to come in which patients are going out a lot of indicators about specific you know patient condition status um for for the clinicians that's what that looks like but from the service teams think about kind ofing Uber for support service teams we're arming those team members with mobile devices so when when something needs to happen they can respond right away they can update their status managers can see exactly what's going on with them and then in from there you know based on a lot of customer feedback um we kind of built a kind of a we call Community Portal Community Gateway which essentially helps hospitals improve their uh referrals that are from outside of the hospital coming in you know to engage that that surrounding community and then on and kind of baked in with all those tools we've added a lot of automation so you know to basically have when this bin happens it triggers something you know as an example um when a transporter takes a patient out for a discharge as an example that can trigger the automatic notification to EVS to go clean that road and then that once that's completed can can trigger a notification to nursing let them know hey that room is ready for the next patient so think of it kind of like a kind of a workflow engine for patient to for facilities so that's great I know from from a from an operations perspective obviously it it does a tremendous amount of streamlined um tasks autom you know what I would almost call intelligent automation to you know in how the process works but you know on the flip side of that while streamlining operations you know how does bedw watch really impact the hospital's bottom line sure sure yeah it's um there you know when you when you look at when you look at that it it really uh impacts their patient flow overall so think of it in terms of like EV whole times you know that's a big kpi they're looking at you know and that can impact their bottom line to like you know you're reducing your your left without being seen or your you know patients leaving you know AMA um you can impact your link to stay because you know you're getting information about then is a discharge order written for that patient how long is it taking nursing to you get that patient out how long is it taking for EVS to turn that room over and getting it ready for the next patient I mean if you can move your your Peak discharge time back in the day by an hour or two you're effectively adding bed capacity to the hospital without actually adding you know beds that's a great Point there's a lot of other things too when you start thinking about like clinical indicators that you you would see on a bed board like um like observation status we have observation timers and so so clinically they have to make a decision on whether or not to admit that patient within a certain amount of time if they don't they can impact their their bottom line um indicators like you know for things like you know what type of you know line has the patient have you know P or Foley those type of things um the amount of time that those are those are in are are uh can impact you know infection rates um indicators like do I have veral beds uh is this patient a fall risk um is this one one Pati Critical Care Unit so a lot of those indicators can help uh the clinicians make faster and more accurate decisions about where patients need to be moved and what their condition is yeah that's fantastic you know then on the flip side of that as as you're talking about all of that I imagine that this Suite of tools um you know obviously have done right on the operation side as well um I'm imagining it has an impact on on helping nurses what what kind of is the the favorite phrase of today's uh Healthcare industry keeping nurses working at top of license um is that a is that a is that a fair statement yeah sure it sure is you know when you you think about Outsourcing and using technology you know um if you for example if you can have uh patient stay on the floor for discharges um so in some facilities we see um nurses Wheeling patients out and they're waiting down the lobby with the patient you know for that patient to be picked up well meanwhile that patient's offer four and so when you start to engage with uh the service teams and you're you're essentially giving them mobile devices they become their their Uber driver for the patient and take them out so they're Wheeling them down there they're waiting with the patients you're keeping those nurses on the floor and available to take care of those those patients um and so um that that's one example of how that might yeah that's great yeah that's wonderful and then on the flip side of that you know if you if you talk about some three of the random hot buttons in in health right would be nurses top of license obviously with the the crunch on nursing staff coming out of the pandemic um but then and you already talked about bottom line but then a third would really always be around patient experience right how how we're what we're we're doing in a hospital um whether it's technology whether it's other programs Etc impact patient experience and so I guess two-part question how does bedat help impact that patient experience and then how does the data and all of the reporting help improve that level of care so you kind of have both sides of that of that patient experience clinical side plus their overall satisfaction level sure yeah that's a great question um well really um you know if so to zoom out just for a quick second what we do is we sort of act as a layer that's on top of the EMR so hospitals have these EMR systems in every hospital these emrs are designed to basically so you can uh document on the patient meet regulatory compli those kind of things the the care coordination about patients moving through from the Ed to the impatient units and step down and treatment and discharge those systems that's not their that wasn't no primary function and so um we act as a layer that sits on top of those EMR systems and what we can do even with hospitals that have various emrs like some hospitals are using epic and Cerner and U metatech and some hos have a varied you know flavor of all those the same within the Health System we act as that layer we can we can be the uh the that piece that gives consistency across the whole organization for the Enterprise but as it relates to specifically your question about patient experience it's from the patient perspective it's produced way times so because of that consistent consistency in that data hey that P you know we can get a patient moved out of the Ed more quickly and into that impatient bed or a patient now can move from a u an ACU or a critical care area to a step down unit more quickly and that frees those beds up so really it's about wait time it's about getting patient to the care faster and having that visibility makes a huge difference now specifically about the data we kind of we track data in several different ways so we're we have data around the journey so that is how long it take for patient to get from you know point you know the Ed up onto the patient unit or from pacu into a then patient bed or you an internal transfer so we track we track all that you know even you know discharges talk a about that you get data around when is our Peak discharge time you know oh it's at 4:00 in the afternoon well is our EVs do we have Staffing at that time of day to make sure we meet that demand um and why is it at four o'clock why is it not at 2 o'clock or 12:00 well maybe it's because that we track this is when the Dark brid World the dist orders and it takes the nursing x amount of time to get those patients ready to leave or maybe there's a delay on the third floor for some reason the nurses on this unit have a process that causes them to take 4 hours on average instead of two and these other areas why is that so you can use that data to really drive your performance Improvement effort so there's that piece of it there that care coordination that flow piece um the other piece we kind I touched on before is those those clinical indicators you know around patients like those observation status you know what level of care the patient conditional versus non conditional discharges isolation status things like that that data is really critical for the clinicians to be make better decisions and then kind of the last part about the data is really kind of the management escalations and so hey this is this bed hasn't been addressed this is a stack clean the folks on third FL said 315 is got to be clean it's Mark stat nobody's been in there to address them it's been 15 minutes and nobody's picked it up why not so that escalation can go to the manager to intervene the system is really works in a very automated fashion where you don't have things were working managers don't have to get involved it just works so when things don't happen we're not meeting our kpis then it can send a note to the manager or approprate clinici depending that's great so you know speaking of data um actually in every industry now obviously but you know especially in healthcare with the amount of um personal information and those items what does bedwatch do to protect that data um because like you know as you're out talking to cios CTO Etc I'm sure that comes up quite a bit and the propensity to protect that data as best as we can um but how does bedwatch really um what strategy do you use to protect the data well that's a yeah that's a great question it's kind of a it's kind of a multi mind you mind you we try to keep these podcast short so let's get the let's let's not get all the data layers behind that but just for our our our audience me here yeah there I mean when you talk about security there's really a lot of layers to that so yeah you know you know they're in the from the development standpoint you know we have a development pipeline we do security audits we have our whole platforms got kind of these AI agents that kind of sit inside and and monitor everything to make sure that if there's anything that's unexpected out of the ordinary we get flags in real timeing team can respond to those but um but more From theuser perspective you know you know U well first off Hippa there's a lot of regulations around how specific data is treated and so there's really um specific guidance and requirements on how that needs to be handled so encryption INF fly you know has any data you know between you know the application our servers and the customer and our servers that data is encrypted uh encryption at rest we do that um on the authentication side we can support seeing sign on so um we have large customers where they might have thousands of nurses and they need to be able to log in well managing users is a big challenge but if they've already got all those users in their actual directory that can we can they can essentially click a button and log in so they can handle it that way that's great Steve I don't I don't know why everything doesn't use single sign on I I think on a weekly basis I reset the passwords to multiple different things about 12 times um and I never write them down or use as as you've instructed me before get some sort of password keeper and so uh I feel I feel the pain if they have to remember one more password or log in so yeah yeah that's right so there's a lot of other things we do from the St standpoint i g get into the weeds um we have a whole uh page on our website that kind of talks about a lot lot of those things so security is a huge deal and we we talk we literally have meetings security meetings every week to talk about yeah that's great I guess you know kind of transitioning anytime you're you're putting a software package or solution into a new customer whe no matter who it is you know sometime getting the user adoption of that is is almost more critical than the software itself uh in my opinion and so can you talk to us a little bit about how do you um train and then support your customers to use bedwatch to ensure that once it's installed it's implemented we're actually getting the benefit of it so it's not just sitting there and and no one's using it yeah that's a that's a huge deal right because you know there's lots of software out there that you can buy but at the end of the day if the user don't engag with it then you you made that investment for nothing yeah so um we there there's a lot of things you do on the in the implementation process you know we go we do a lot of Discovery at first make sure we understand what we're walking into what the current processes are um then we propose an updated process when we put our technology in that's coordination a lot of times the CN and the clinical leaders and then the support service teams what's working what's not working we go in there and put our systems in we provide lots of documentation and webinar training before we ever show up um they and we even have a Help Center built into the platform so if somebody wants a quick video on how do I work that stat just watch that 30 second okay I see how to do that but then there's there's a period after we do webinar training we show up on site and we help the hospitals through the transition and then it doesn't stop there then there's a followup after so we have kind of an account management team after the implementation team leaves and completes the install there's a hand off to our account management team and then they pick it up from there and then they do the fre good check-ins it's usually monthly so that more frequently after if a brand new customers just coming online they're still getting used to it so it's account management and support teams and so we will help them print out reports and say Hey you know we notice here's your discharge times now here's how you get to these reports um we have sets of best practices that we recommend to let people know like here if you're trying to get well out of your discharge management process for example here are some tips and tricks and reports that you can run and bring this information to your hles talk about this those kind of things so we really um it's kind of a multi-prong approach because meting just S software and walk away we we try to stay engaged with our customers and as a matter of fact most of the I would say 90 95% of the Innovation that we we've made within the platforms which has been tremendously exciting is it's all been feedback from our customers you know man Steve that that that's a amazing segue because where I was about to go is you know how is bedw evolved over the since 2010 and Inception and that those changes really been driven more by the feedback you're getting from your customers your partners um or industry Trends you know how do you as you talk about the Innovation you've included and and where it's gone you know what's been the key driver of that yeah yeah great well I mean just you know it's customer feedback so you know again we started with a discharge can talk about that dist that was basically we talk about customers it's essentially we have an internal customer which is our support service you know company um and then we have our external customers which is the hospital and the clinicians who are trying to deal patient care but we started with Nar management that's near and near to everybody's heart getting those RS turned as you know um so we started with that um and then we started getting feedback you know what we really need now is transport technology how can we arm these these transport with mobile devices so we can respond really quickly when a nury's patient moved from the unit down to Radiology for procedure whatever it is so we build a transport and we actually have a patent around the technology on how we do dispatching because we came up with Innovative approach so that we can kind of help really short the out of response time that you know the Clin experienced there so that happen then yeah that's great then what happened was we started to get feedback from the clinicians and they said you know your your discharge board is great but we really want to see all these different clinical indicators like we we want to see isolation fall rest is a person on cardiac monitor is this a behavioral patient is this patient on tele you know all of these things then I'm going to see link the stay indicator I want to see any notes related to level of care and those types of things and so we started taking all that feedback and so you know we need actually new module so we build our adet and that's that's that adet control that's that your traffic control board essentially and now we that's kind of turned into the ability to do custom bed War so nurses now can go in there and they can pick the column they on to see and create their own bed work um after that you got really uh really engage ACL who we worked with in one of our hospitals and he came us and said you know that watch we really want to do a better job of engaging with our surrounding community of providers how do we do that how do we improve our referral capability you love your technology but can we use this piece to build that and so we said you that's a great that's a great idea so literally it started in front of of a whiteboard and we sat there and we drew it out we said explain to this explain to us what your challenges are and how do you want to solve this and we went from concept to creating our community Gateway product and the first year they they saw and maintained a 60% increase in their patient referral rates because they had a they had a much stronger engagement with that Community because essentially they the they would refer a patient and the next phone call that the referring physici would get would be from the accepting phys and the they love and really anyway so it's just really been a lot of feedback from our customers you know we have a an amazing team of developers and just a really passionate group um but we also got to maintain humility like Min everything and even if we were clal experts um you still got to listen to your customers and find out what they want what matters to them so yeah that's fantastic I mean getting getting that kind of feedback straight from the customers better better than any other way to have your R&D road map built right well then you know obviously from from the last 14 years you've made a ton of improvements multiple modules you know given kind of where the industry sits today and and where technology is going where do you see bed watch heading in the next let's call it 5 to 10 years sure well I don't want to sound cliche try to answer this and try to answer this without using artificial intelligence in it no I'm joking yeah I don't know if that's possible well you know um more and more we're you know we're getting uh feedback about data people want to see data I want to see more data with this I want to see you know VI tools I want to have my dashboards in front of me um so um where where the industry is going I mean it's all about AI but AI um you know is dependent on having data so you have to cre these models and so you need to have good data and so we spent a lot of time thinking about what how do we structure our data how does that go into our warehouse what data are we recording how does it need to be structured so that we can proide the recording in the dashboard the customers want to see so um it's going to turn from here is uh here's your static reports about what happened in the past to predictive where hey what do I you and this is one of the things that one of our two of our customers is approach up about and actually a couple different customers um as an example is nurse staffing they're like right now you know postco uh nursing resources are are a big deal and it's a problem and so we need to do a better job of managing that so we've got all the data on capacity but they want to be able to tie that in with their timekeeping system so that and they want the system to predict do I need to bring on more nurses now or is it time to call them off based on demand so it's that predictive you know analysis you can start to do um with the data that you have um and you know we're we're literally processing you know millions of transactions every day um coming in from the feeds the integration that we get from the hospitals so um we we have certain restrictions that we have to follow based on how we use that data because it's not our data it's customer data but some of that can be the identified and start to you know make predictive analysis and so one of the other things we we've we've done is we started we buil what we call a snapshotting engine so essentially it takes a picture of the hospital of what's going on in the hospital right now so every hour I think of it like a a snapshot you know Tak a picture Tak a picture Tak a picture so and and this is something that's in development but the idea is if a customer comes to us and says man the wheels fell off the bus last Thursday at 2 p.m in the afternoon we had a big problem we had a big spite they took forever to get discharges things were going wrong what happened well you just rewind and go look well we had the Ed was totally full we had no inpatient we had no Med surge availability and we had a lot of patients you know coming out of surgery and stuff at that time and we were still staff uh on these units um and so that's what happened that's why so now you can make you can start to make AIS is go what do we need to do to mitigate that next time how do we handle those spikes um I me that's maybe that's more in the weeds than you want to get but that's oh that's great yeah that's fantastic you know if I was if I was a Administration in a in a Health Care system and I was interested in in bedw watch or a similar solution out there um you know what kind of questions or path would you have them walk down to determine if bed watch would be a good fit you know what are those those key things they should think about or key things they should ask out in the industry yeah yeah great question well um one of the first things I would say would be integration um okay so we talk about nursing and how there's a shortage I mean nurses are incredibly busy those are a dedicated group but essentially what you want to be able to do is provide automation tools that don't require a um a bunch of extra clicks and people to go in there to inter all the data to maintain them right you want it to be automated that's the whole point so tight integration uh you know for example being able to pull order you know uh 18 messages and orders and all that so we the all those indicators that I mentioned before having those be automatically updated so you don't have to have a user go in and click a button to make sure that's in there it just comes across automatically so integration is is huge uh and the ability to do that um is is i' would say critical um another thing is of course you know functional features kind of knowing what you're looking for what are your primary kpi trying to solve for is it is it Eed hold times is it discharge times is it l day you're looking at those kind of things um do the functional features help address those kpis obviously as we talked about and you brought a great Point um user engagement user experience um does the is the system actually easy to use um that's a that's a huge deal and you know I think this often underappreciated um that's T to piece and then I would I would say I guess kind of the last thing might be um just calling your references call other people that have used the technology platform and just ask them ask your counterparts you know have the cn's called their clinical counterparts s the support service teams how does it work does it actually meet the needs yeah um man that's probably what I yeah that's great you know over the over all these years um what's something that you would probably say that you're most proud of achieving in your role it could be a loaded question because you've done a lot yeah um yeah that's a good question I guess well I guess I guess come two parts to that the thing that I'm most proud of the most that that I get gives me the most personal satisfaction I guess is seeing the people that that work in in my group in my groups you know um kind of grow professionally and personally you know in their roles over time uh I I get a lot of Satisfaction by seeing and be able to grow up and prosper so that that's great um the other thing that I that I think that really makes me really want to rejoin my position right now is is taking an idea from concept from a custom like we talked about that whiteboard session we have with that is you know taking it from concept to reality and then actually seeing it working in production and actually making a difference as it relates to Patient Care and cliss experience there's just nothing more satisfying that um I got I gotta say that's that's great also yeah that's great I wouldn't know I come up with a ton of ideas and then never know what to do with them so they just go back in a trunk somewhere so it must be nice seeing those through to fruition you know and then I always like to end with with something um that's more on the personal side and so you know can you tell our listeners and audience members out there something you're passionate about outside of work yeah sure well if you say data it's it's ruined derck I would say you know long walks through the data center I like that no actually you know personally I I really enjoy traveling like working with my hands you know uh mountain biking is a big passion one so I like I did outside you know get on the b s time the family you know those those things so that's great well Steve I really appreciate you having on um you know I great conversation uh probably could have gone two hours with this and we left out a lot of the the powerful things that bedw watch can do and so you know looking forward to bringing you back on to get in some of the weeds as we go and evolve the Software System um but you know for everyone out there listening hope you enjoyed listening to Steve uh CEO of bed watch and if you haven't done so yet please subscribe and thank you for joining the Outsource Advantage everyone have a great day [Music] he

Channel: HHS

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Id: YZhRqlU9OQw

Length: 29min 29sec (1769 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024