The Enterprise Mobility Roundup
The Enterprise Mobility Roundup
Mobile-First Healthcare: What Device Downtime Really Costs
Workstations on wheels (WOWs) are outdated. They’re slow, frequently unavailable, and keep nurses tied to a scarce resource when they need to be on the floor with patients.
On today's episode, we challenge the legacy mindset and reframe mobility as a vital form of essential infrastructure. Drawing from parallels in warehousing and retail, where downtime is quantified in dollars, we explore how healthcare can reclaim lost clinical hours and reduce risk by adopting mobile solutions that are resilient, fast, and frontline-centered.
Especially during a staffing crisis, every minute of reclaimed time matters. It’s not just a matter of efficiency; it’s a matter of delivering life-affirming care without delay.
Welcome to the Enterprise Mobility Roundup Podcast brought to you by Bluefletch. We discuss technology topics related to Android and workforce devices and how they intersect with business and mobility.
Speaker 2:Hello, I'm Brett Cooper and today I'm joined by Lee DeHines for another episode of the Bluefletch Enterprise Mobility Roundup Podcast. We're going to be covering a topic that Lee is going to be speaking on later this year at a conference specifically around healthcare, and I'll read the title of the presentation or else I'll get it wrong because it's a little long. We might have to figure out how to cut some words out of this, but it's titled the Real Cost of Device Downtime in Clinic Mobility and the subtitle is what is is 30 minutes of downtime cost, and I think this is a transition from we've been working in retail logistics warehouse. A lot of these other organizations started working with health care in the last two years and thinking about a lot of the things that are similar and a lot of things that are very different in health care, and Lee was going to cover some of those key points at his upcoming presentation, so I wanted to walk through some questions I had on it and dive into some of those sub areas.
Speaker 2:So, lee, thank you for joining me today. Yeah, thanks. So the first question and I mentioned we've been doing a bunch of different types of industries over the last decade. When you're looking at the healthcare space. I know you've run a couple projects in that. What else have you done in healthcare? What's your credentials? Are you a former doctor? Do you play one on TV?
Speaker 2:I've played a doctor on TV.
Speaker 3:No aside from the healthcare customers that we've worked with up to this point, I have some personal credentials, I guess.
Speaker 3:My wife is a OR charge nurse and a lot of our conversations are around operational improvements and things that she sees in her day to day. And what I've discovered is based on our history as an organization. A lot of what Blue Fletch has done in other industries like retail, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics. There are lessons learned that do transfer over and we did learn that, particularly in some of the healthcare customers we've talked to, is because they're a little bit behind in terms of the shared device ecosystem than other industries. They are looking for what has worked with a different lens on what the measurability is. So their focus is going to be on patient care and clinical outcome and clinical mobility, but the tools in a lot of ways are going to overlap. So I think our credentials to some extent are transferable. But then just personally, I have a stake in this just from the point of view of living with someone for the last decade and a half and understanding where she's coming from and what sort of challenges her organization she's worked for face.
Speaker 2:So really you just want your wife to stop complaining less about the shortcomings of technology and healthcare, got it? And I know, when there's certain areas in the clinical space, that there's a lot of cool technology and true technology. When you think of the bulk of mobility technology and technology for frontline healthcare workers or clinical workers, what does that typically refer to? What does that space look like for you?
Speaker 3:Sure, so you know most of their different departments in the hospital, obviously in different ways, that the frontline workers are going to interact with technology. But if we're talking about, like floor nurses, clinical frontline workers that are on the floor dealing with patients day in and day out, a typical technology stack for them could be a mix of their own phone, like their BYOD device. That could be Android, it could be iOS, it could be what is called a workstation on wheels or a wow, so that's literally a computer on a cart that gets rolled around and follows them, or even one that is attached in a room that pulls down from the wall and in some cases, a telephone that they're carrying like a decked phone and or even still a pager. So it's a pretty complex tech stack that has a lot of fragmented interfaces and a lot of specific tasks that I think could be consolidated down quite a bit from unifying that into one shared mobile device for them. That would help streamline a lot of things.
Speaker 2:This is a lot of different pieces that can break along the way as well. Speaking of that so that we were talking about the downtime of devices. So I know in typical example is you have a crash or something doesn't work right or device isn't charged right. There's all sorts of things that can go wrong with technology along the way. I think the thing I would wonder is you have like 20 different pieces of technology. There's more things to go break For you. How do you define the cost of a downtime? Let's talk about the other industries, like retail or logistics or warehouse. Let's take warehouse how would you define the cost and I think you had like a $500 analogy for a logistics center where a device goes down or technology goes down? Can you talk about what those costs would be and then how that translates into healthcare?
Speaker 3:Sure. So you know we've talked about the, like you said, the $500 analogy. So in logistics, for example, if the device is down, then an employee can't work. If you're paying that employee $20 an hour, that's the cost of80 an hour to fix that problem and then the company is going to be losing $400 in value just because someone can't fulfill an order, can't deliver a product, can't pick an order, can't stock a shelf. Those kinds of things really add up quickly.
Speaker 2:So in that example that's $100 of seen costs and $400 of invisible costs.
Speaker 3:Exactly, that's $100 of seen costs and $400 of invisible costs, exactly, and then I think that could easily be much higher depending on the value of the products that you're trying to move. And then, if you transfer that to healthcare, set aside for the moment the financial side of it, it's much more critical. This is literally life or death. This is people who are not well and need to be made better, and if technology not working is getting in the way of patient care, that's the ramifications for that.
Speaker 2:You can't put an actual dollar cost on um from the point of view of that person or that person's family, or that person's quality of life, um, so you do have the cost of the, the known cost of the 70 bucks for the, the nurse, and 100, or 600 bucks an hour for the doctor, and then the, whatever the room costs. You do have your fixed costs, but the, the visible costs, are these ones where it's life or death and just completely intangible, right, yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 3:You know, like a $400 invisible cost in logistics is nothing compared to someone not either having quality of life anymore or even not having a life period. Uh, so it's that much more crucial, I think. And, um, from that perspective, you can learn lessons from retail and logistics and transfer them to healthcare. But I think that the biggest challenge that we're facing right now is getting healthcare at an organizational level to understand how much more empowering their frontline workers can really affect these outcomes.
Speaker 2:When you think about the money flow in healthcare. Healthcare does definitely I call it money flow, but it's how organizations get paid, how they pay out, how the finances work. I feel like there's a much more complex web in a lot of healthcare organizations because of certain doctors or contractors, you have Medicaid Medicare insurance, medicaid Medicare insurance. When you think about that and then try to tie that back to some of these other things around the outages and the types of technology that clinicians and clinical workers have on the floor, what are the things that you can draw a clear delineation around, I guess? How do they get paid and how do you actually tie that back to the technology and the work that's being done?
Speaker 3:Sure, so I don't.
Speaker 3:I don't.
Speaker 3:If you've ever been unfortunate enough to to get a healthcare bill in the mail, if you've ever stayed in the hospital, you'll know that the line items in there are extensive, to say the least, and each one of those things that is in there is because someone that was doing the frontline care and that work has charted that, meaning they've tracked everything that has happened to you or to a patient in that facility what treatment they've received, what food they were given, what medications they had, what procedures were done, done.
Speaker 3:All of those things need to be charted, essentially in real time as they're happening, because that is what the healthcare organization needs to turn over to. It's Medicare, it's Medicaid, it's the state, it's the insurance company. They need to have that information to pay their doctors out, particularly if they're contract doctors, like you said. So the downtime around not having the ability for a frontline worker to be charting in real time where they're caring for a patient is going to be is massive. That's why there's a whole ecosystem of companies that do nothing but going back and auditing charts for healthcare organizations to make sure they're optimizing their costs and getting mirrored burst as much as they can.
Speaker 2:I was actually talking to a doctor about this recently that works in the ER and they were articulating how their pace of what they do when they're seeing patients is so fast that they end up having to do the majority of their charting and write-ups at the end of their shift, when they're not on the floor. And I can imagine there's probably a lot of things you're missing when you see I'm going to call it that you know six to 20 patients an hour over an eight-hour shift and then try to remember it all in the last two hours of your day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if you went a whole day and did, let's say, 100 separate tasks but didn't go back and start taking notes on any of that until after eight hours of work, you're going to be super tired and super inaccurate. So it's even more critical in healthcare, just from understanding what you need to do next to help that patient out and increase those improved outcomes, but then also from just the financial side of it too, it's critical to be tracking that stuff in real time.
Speaker 2:So, moving on to one of the other topics you had in your slide deck, when I looked at it you had a maybe controversial, maybe not, but the workstations on wheels, or wows, as they're known as in the healthcare space, are outdated. Like what's from your perspective? Why are they outdated? What are the things that hospitals and the healthcare environments be doing differently with those and or other technology, and why haven't they moved away from them or updated them?
Speaker 3:Sure. So yeah, I think they're. They're outdated because it's a it's an old way of working from the perspective of you are relying on the availability of a scarce resource to have that available at all times for the frontline worker to be able to do their job and track what they're doing. At the same time, despite the fact that these are on wheels, they're not necessarily super mobile, they're not necessarily very easy to move around and when they break you are just kind of in a position where you have to choose between tracking what you're doing and actually caring for the patient, and so sometimes you're going back and forth to the central desk on a floor to track what you're doing from a charting perspective and then going back out and treating that patient desk on a floor to track what you're doing from a charting perspective and then going back out and treating that patient. I think a lot of it is.
Speaker 3:There's so much sunk cost in that infrastructure and it's been around for so long that there's probably fear around what I've heard people call the rip and replace, where, if you're going to take, let's say, there are 15 workstations on wheels for a particular floor and you're going to replace all of those, there's workflow changes that need to go into that, not only from an IT perspective but from an IT support perspective, but then on how frontline workers are working as well, and when you have a nurse caring for on average six patients per shift, if they're on a floor, it's difficult to set aside time to take away something they already know how to use, put something else in their hand that's going to mobilize them and make their job easier, when really all their time at work is dedicated to caring for patients and not doing training. So I think the fear around the rip and replace is really a reimagination around how healthcare and technology need to work together.
Speaker 2:I know, one of the things and this wasn't in your presentation, but we've talked to folks about this recently is the I'm going to call it DEX, or extended workstation belays, actually having fixed monitors and being able to cast from your mobile device to one of these, and we've been doing this, you know, as consumers, with Apple TV for 10 years or whatever it is, google Chromecast for 10 years, and I feel like that would be to me seems like an easy replacement if you had the right mobile technology in the hands of the healthcare workers. What's your thoughts around that, or have you seen very much of that?
Speaker 3:We've definitely seen a lot of thought around that and requests coming from not only software vendors, like some of the larger ones that are out there, like your Oracle or your Epix, are definitely going in that direction, and also from an OEM perspective.
Speaker 3:So these are the actual mobile device manufacturers that are in that space. They are also looking at this as well, because they understand that if I'm a doctor doing rounds or if I'm a nurse seeing six patients, if I can walk into a room and simply tap my device on the monitor that's likely already in there for infotainment purposes or other reasons I can put that up directly in front of the patient and we can essentially see side by side what their care plan is, what next steps are, what they've done up to that point. It's a lot easier than you know. Hospital rooms are not big, and trying to bring a wow in there and slide it around if there's a family member or you know hospital rooms are not big, and trying to bring a wow in there and slide it around if there's a family member or you know other machinery in there, like breathing apparatus or medication dispensing it's a little bit difficult and I think it's just a simpler process to be able to walk in with something that's in your pocket, that follows you around wherever you are.
Speaker 2:So, for the shifting gears here, I know in the slides you mentioned some of the bootstrap case studies we've done with healthcare providers. As these organizations transition to what, be it an Android device or a mobile device, what are some of the hurdles that they run into? That they run into and then, on the flip side, what are some of the things around efficiency they've seen with, whether it's with our tools or some of the other tools that are out there in the mobility landscape?
Speaker 3:Sure, so I mentioned it a little bit earlier or alluded to it.
Speaker 3:Some of the hurdles are going to be it's a re-imagination of the workflow process.
Speaker 3:So when we first started our conversation today, we talked about a frontline worker could have a decked phone, their own phone that they're using for work and also a pager, and then, in addition to that, they have this workstation on wheels that they're using. Consolidating that all down into one device is a reimagination of how you're deploying your technology to your frontline workers. So you're going to be doing charting communications over voice communications to other members of the clinical team and charting all on one device. So if your team isn't accustomed to shared mobility or Android, for example, they're a Windows-based world and a PBX-based world. There is some education that needs to happen in there, but that initial hurdle of work getting over that is going to really increase efficiency on the backside of it. I think it can be scary to think about that transition. That has to happen, but once it happens, I think the growth curve on the backside of it from an efficiency perspective is going to pay for itself, and just in terms of reduced friction.
Speaker 2:Got it. The ROI of this, like with the, you know, there's the basic ROI of this. There's the basic ROI of less devices to maintain less cost. You talk about some other things being able to serve more patients in a shorter period of time, less time spent dealing with technology but I think there's a lot of other hidden costs associated with just some of the legacy technologies out there. What are the things that you called out in your presentation or that are worth mentioning, as you've been talking with customers around this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think once the new model is rolled out, your healthcare IT team is going to be focused a lot on improvement, and what I mean by that is taking the existing technologies that are there and improving the process for the clinical mobility, patient outcome side of things, really focusing on what the hospital is supposed to be doing. They're not going to be focusing on fires in terms of why are all the computers on floor on a particular floor not working today? Um, it's going to allow more face time with the patients. Um, from a frontline worker perspective, um, it's also going to give you a lot more information on location of staff.
Speaker 3:So, with staff being scarce, um, particularly in an environment where it's shift-based and you're trying to measure and anticipate what you're going to need for the next shift after the one that's currently happening, planning ahead knowing where your employees are at all times is going to be super helpful, not only operationally but also from a safety perspective, is going to be super helpful not only operationally but also from a safety perspective. The not great reality is being in healthcare, particularly in an ER environment, can be quite dangerous in some cases, depending on the hospital. So having a specific understanding of where your employees are, even what applications they're using gives you a view into what they're doing, from just a pure safety point of view. And then, finally, it's going to give you better ability to automatically track and record charting in real time, not going back to your example, not being that doctor that has to go back and remember notes from 7 am when it's 5 pm and they're finally sitting down to write down those things. Um, it really just makes it a lot easier.
Speaker 2:I think that's all allowed to be folded together there's also, yeah, that once you start being able to do that, then you actually can layer in some of these newer ai technologies too, because you have more, more real-time data, like like, imagine working, you know, walking from one room to another and being able to record all of your notes you know on on your mobile device Definitely, definitely makes sense. One of the things and I think Richard and I talked about this recently, but I think you also had in your presentation is frontline centered design and getting IT teams to think more about the users and the frontline workers. What's the root of that, or what's the heart of why they should be spending more time thinking about the actual end users?
Speaker 3:Absolutely, I think it has a lot to do with starting with what you have the technology for, and that technology is to make the frontline workers job more efficient, more effective and be able to improve patient outcomes. So I think from an IT team perspective, it's a bit of a mindset shift. So I think we've talked about the phrase they need to. The focus needs to be on listening and not engineering. So stop over-listening, stop over-engineering and under-listening. So I think a lot of that comes from just understanding that nurses are going to adopt what helps and they're going to ignore what hinders.
Speaker 3:So to give you a concrete example of that, if there's a acute, emergent issue in a room on a floor with a nurse, the first thing they're going to be focusing on is making sure that patient is better and in the flurry of the moment maybe it's 45 minutes later that they get back in front of a computer to be able to chart what happens they're not going to be focusing on that in the moment. So if you can incorporate technology into what they're doing, it's really going to help that out. It has to work in the rhythm of their flow. You can't be over here helping a patient and then simultaneously trying to write down or chart specifically what you're doing, so the focus really needs to be on incorporating the technology into the rhythm and flow of how they work.
Speaker 2:All right. So in closing, you talked about a lot of different things. So why mobility is important, some of the hidden costs of downtime and outages. If you had to give concrete, here's your homework, here's the next three steps to go work on. What are those things that you would recommend people start with?
Speaker 3:Sure, and I say these knowing that these are easier said than done. For sure, as everything is, yes, but so, in closing, what I think can be helpful from a healthcare leadership perspective is it's really just getting on the floor with the frontline workers and observing what's going on and observing it from and look at how could this flow or workload be better for a nurse, and don't necessarily try to staple the technology onto it. Just look at how the thing could be improved. And if technology is part of that and I honestly think that it is and when applied in the correct way, technology is part of that, and I honestly think that it is, and when applied in the correct way, look at it from that perspective. Also, look at what other organizations have done.
Speaker 3:I know that healthcare is very in its own world in terms of the uniqueness of the challenges that they face. However, if you look at, like, what a Walmart or an Amazon have done from a retail perspective, they've completely disrupted the industry in terms of how asset tracking happens, how go to market works, how communications with frontline workers, how communications with customers work, how inventory planning works, literally every facet of retail, every facet of retail and I think you can look at that and focus on ways that you can apply some of those lessons to your organization, because healthcare is a complex organization with many moving parts and they do have asset tracking, they do have planning, they do have patients who are the customers. So there's a lot of different lessons you can apply there. And then, lastly, what I would say is look at the process of the patient, because that, at the end of the day, a healthcare organization, their job is to make someone leave better than when they came in.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of barriers inside of healthcare that are going to make that difficult. You know regulation, insurance, legal liability, concerns privacy, but I don't let that stop you from looking at small wins that you can take to make incremental improvements. Just think about if you took the four devices that a nurse may interact with on a daily basis, meaning like a pager actually, a fax machine is one they still work with a decked phone, a computer, maybe another computer on wheels and maybe their own phones. That's actually six devices. If you can consolidate that down to one device just for communications and charting, for example, that's going to make a huge difference and you don't necessarily have to touch on regulation or insurance or any of those things, because there is software that is HIPAA compliant and privacy aware that will allow you to continue to do those tools and those jobs.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah, I like that one the best Focus on the patients. How do you, how do you make their, how do you get them in and out better and healthier? In and out, better and healthier. Lee, thank you very much for walking us through this. I know you and your team are attending a number of healthcare conferences later this fall and are speaking at some of those. What do you guys have lined up or what are you heading to?
Speaker 3:Sure. So we're going to be going to health, which is in October I believe the 18th and 19th in Las Vegas, and then we're also going to be going to HIMSS first quarter of next year, which is a large technology conference, maybe at HIMSS even exhibiting inside of an OEM booth as well. From a mobile Android perspective, Some of the things we're focused on outside of our existing purview is also expanding into device support. That's more reflective of the technology landscape that a lot of hospitals have deployed. So definitely keep in touch with us for announcements they're going to be making over the balance of this year.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you, lee, for walking us through this and if anyone has any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to us at info at bluefletchcom or hit us up on LinkedIn and any other ones. But thanks again for following along for another episode of the Bluefletch Enterprise Mobility Roundup Podcast. Thanks everybody.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Enterprise Mobility Roundup Podcast. If you enjoyed the discussion, please take a few moments to rate us. If you would like to listen to future episodes, please subscribe. To learn more about mobility topics or submit any questions, visit us at bluefletchcom.