Load Balancing Healthcare
By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
On this episode I talked to Darin Vercillo, MD, chief medical officer and co-founder of ABOUT Healthcare, Inc. (@ABOUT_est2005) who offer intelligent access and coordination across healthcare networks.
Darin is a board-certified and practicing hospitalist who describes sitting in an ER department with a colleague, where as usual the hospital was full with patients backing up in the ER, ambulances lining up outside and he watched while the ER doctor made 27 phone calls trying to find other hospitals to take patients he was unable to admit due to staffing shortages.
😱 It is hard to imagine the frustration and time wasted with 27 phone calls!
Episode NOW on Demand
We talk about the success in Arizona that created a real time transfer system before the pandemic unfolded on to our world and brought the healthcare system to its knees. Some of the key insights to help drive towards a real solution were similar to the leadership found in NASA and epitomized by Gene Kranz who is famous for saying
Failure is Not and Option (we must be tough and competent)
As Darin describes with the right leadership and vision that was all inclusive the ability to transfer patients in and out of a system successfully was no longer a detractor but rather a differentiator of great service for health systems in Arizona. SO much so they had no need to opening tent hospitals and were taking out of state transfers to help adjoining states out.
Healthcare Needs to be Tough and Competent
We discuss the essential need for ‘Load Balancing’ in healthcare. A term some might be familiar with from the internet and even experience if you see something from Cloudflare or F5. We see load balancing in many other industries – airlines have been managing loads successfully and predicting travel demand pretty accurately (COVID impact aside which has made many of the proviso algorithms and systems less accurate). Their ability to predict is seen in the highly malleable price of an airline ticket that is driven by demand pricing
Darrin explains that the barriers to successfully getting to a better coordinated offering is rarely the economic drivers with a paper that showed that on a national average, a transferred patient provides $10,800 in profit, that’s contribution margin per transfer for the accepting side.
Listen in to hear Darrin’s incremental steps to remove the barriers and allow all parts of the healthcare system to do what is best for the patient and create a frictionless experience.
“get started on a consultative basis to see what is that next natural step, which can be evolutionary, can be innovative, but doesn’t necessarily have to be disruptive to the organization”
About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.
