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Welcome to this week Health Community. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this Week Health, A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 fall conferences of CHIME in San Antonio and HLTH in Las Vegas, and we want to thank our show sponsors who are. In our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders and they are Olive, Rubrik, Trellix, Medigate, and F5. Check them out at this weekhealth.com and here we go. All right. Here we are for another interview in action from the Chime Fall Forum, and we're here with Mike Duchen with mobile Heartbeat. Nice to meet you. What's your role at Mobile?

He, I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Mobile Heartbeat.

Fantastic. What is Mobile heartbeat for those who don't know?

Right. So Mobile Heartbeat provides an enterprise communication platform for all clinicians, caregivers, and ancillary workers across an enterprise. So voice secure, text alert, alarm delivery, enterprise clinical direct. Kind of like the underlying communication foundation for the health system.

Wow. Are, are you allowed to talk about , which health systems you're working with at this point?

Sure. Yeah. We're the, enterprise mobile platform for hca organizations like Beaumont, Vanderbilt. We're involved with Mount Sinai, a number of others.

What's the primary problem? How do you get involved with the health system? They're saying, Hey, I've, I've got this problem, and then you guys are sitting at the table.

Now, clearly you're gonna solve a lot more problems, but Sure. what's the thing that brings you to the table?

Interesting question. And the conversation we end up having is that communication is foundational to a high performing health system. Right? If you think about, you know, you need great communication to provide care coordination for an efficient hospital, operat.

For staff satisfaction to unite the culture of an organization. All those things, are foundational to a high performing health system. But yet we hear all the studies about poor communication, right? What does that lead to? It leads to adverse events, leads to, cost, erosion inside of hospitals.

There's a famous study that says a 500 bed facility will lose 4 million a year in inefficient. It's so, there's any number of things we get ourselves into.

So communication is a hard problem. I was talking to a person from an academic medical center and they were saying we don't have any rooms and, the problem is people present in our ED and then we can't get to the, attending physician.

And so it takes eight hours to discharge somebody who could have been discharged seven and a half hours ago.

Exactly. Now they're staying overnight. Now your length of stay metrics, kind of. All knock on effects, patients unhappy, et cetera.

Talk about the implementation though. I mean, one of the things I found with communication is there's cultural communication problems and then there's things that can be addressed with technology, right?

So what does the implementation look like in order to help the health systems to get the most out of mobile? He.

Right. So, it has, there's a technical component as you'd imagine, right? Yeah. But there's a huge cultural and adoption component. But, you know, thinking about it from a technical perspective, , we have to leverage all the infrastructure that's in place.

You're putting the highways in place, we're putting the highways in place, but there's already a telephony system. There's already an emr, there's already a nurse call. You might already have other components that you want. So we have. Kind of sit within that and seamlessly integrate ourselves within that.

All the while making sure the wifi is up to standard to do the types of things we need to do , and a number

of other things.

So you integrate with all those different systems?

We do, yeah. Yeah.

Does that take a significant amount of time or is it like, Hey, we've already integrated with them.

We just tap in,

you know, 99% of the things we've integrated with, we have certified integrations with 35 different ecosystem partners. So we've seen it all at this point. They're standards based integrations, but there's always something new. One of our customer CIOs said it well, he is.

You're not a texting platform. And he said this a number of years ago, he says, you're an innovation platform that happens to have texting. Right. Because once you get it in, you start to layer in all kinds of different things on top of it, and that's where the workflow transformation really starts to happen.

It's interesting, the,, I keep talking to CIOs. We're gonna do about 25 to 30 interviews while we're here. And I'm like, Hey, what's top? of mind And , I've heard financial, I've heard cybersecurity. Yeah. And I've heard physician burnout or clinician. Clinician burnout. Clinician burnout. Yeah. And by the way, not only clinician burnout.

Now if there's burnout outside of the clinician ranks as well. 100%. What is the. Conversation around any of those three topics? Well, let's, start with clinician. I do wanna go back to financial Sure. Cause that's gonna be an important piece. Yeah. But clinician burnout. Yeah. When your solution is, implemented and in healthcare, we've implemented a lot of technology that hasn't alleviated the stress. How does your solution alleviate some of the stress that they're experiencing?

Frustration.

Yeah, for sure. And there certainly is a lot of the frustration out there. One of the best quotes I heard at the conference this week was someone referenced a Muhammad Ali quote that said, it's not the mountains ahead that you have to climb that are gonna get you, it's the pebble in the shoe.

Yeah. Right. So we know we have these mountains to climb, but if you have the pebbles in your shoe, that's gonna drive you nuts and that's gonna keep you from getting there. Communication is one of the pebbles in. that show Right when you can't find somebody, when you're desperately saying, I need to locate a specialist.

I need to, you know, get ahold of someone, I need to speak with someone about this patient right now, and you can't do it. That's incredibly frustrating. So streamlining those things takes some of the pebbles out of the shoe, makes the climb up the mountain a little bit easier.

Talk to me about the financial piece.

So obviously a lot more. Looking at these things, looking at their ROI and that kinda stuff. What's the value proposition for a mobile heartbeat?

Well, there's a, few, right? There's cost consolidation, right? So quite often a lot of these facilities have, you know, multiple different ways of communicating.

Today, it's either device fragmentation, right? You might have old, pagers. Different types of phones out there. The proverbial tool belt that's out there, you can consolidate that. You also might have app fragmentation where you're paying multiple things. So you can consolidate that into, a single platform.

And then it's about what are the financial metrics we can drive. Right. We've seen, you know, we mentioned before, length of stay. We've seen length of stay reductions from 4.2 days down to 3.8 days, and even then down to 3.4 days. Right. That has financial impact to an organiz. Right, right. So there's a number of different things that we can do There.

📍 📍 All right. We're gonna be doing webinars a little different this year. I've talked to you a little bit about this. We got together with our advisors. They told us, Hey, you gotta do 'em different. They're just not serving the community well. And we said, what do you want? They said, community generated topics. Great contributors. Not product driven. They want a more honest and open discussion. And they said what we want is not no on-demand webinars. We want once and done type webinars on a consistent date and time. So every first Thursday of the month. Our first one being January 5th first Thursday a month, one o'clock Eastern time. We are gonna be doing a webinar. You can count on it. Put it on your calendar every first Thursday of the month at one o'clock Eastern time. We're gonna do a webinar. The topics are gonna be generated by the community, and we would love to have you there. Our first one, January 5th, priorities for 2023. A CIO discussion with Integrated Delivery Networks, February 2nd, we're gonna come back with Academic Medical Center CIOs talking about their priorities. And then we're gonna hit some of the other great topics that they've given us for the year, and we would love to have you join us again this week, health.com, top right hand corner, it'll have our current webinar and our upcoming webinars. You can sign up right there. And if you miss it, it's not on demand anymore, so. We would love to have you there. Make sure somebody from your team is there taking notes and bringing stuff back to your staff. So we hope that this works out. Any feedback? Go ahead and send us a note. We would love to hear about it. 📍 📍

Did you guys do a focus group?

We did not do a focus group this week. Oh, okay. This year we were looking forward to doing one next year.

Have you had conversations at the conference and what are you hearing from, from CIOs and others that are here?

Yeah, I've had great conversations.

The conference has been really, really good. The conversations that I've. Have centered around, the proverbial we need to do more with less. Obviously the, you know,

the, the economy, kicking in. But just as importantly, they wanna leverage the investments they've already made, right?

So if you're gonna be a new platform inside their ecosystem, you have to leverage all their existing investments. Otherwise, it's just too big a. To kind and, you know, bring something brand new in and, , kind of replace a whole bunch of other stuff. You have to tie in really, really well.

Yeah.

We've, we've heard a bunch of CIOs say EHR first they'll say Epic, Cerner, Metatech first. Like, if we can do it there, we're gonna do it there. And I'm, sure there's other platforms that they look at and say, sure. And then you become a fabric, a communication fabric that's just

on top of all this.

We have to tie into that Absolut.

That's fantastic. Yeah. Well, hey, it was great meeting you.

It was a pleasure meeting. You

Appreciate the time.

Yeah, you got it.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conferences. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it is Phenomen. That they have taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community, which is greatly appreciated. We also want to thank our channel sponsors one more time, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. They are Olive, Rubrik, trx, Mitigate, and F5. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.