CarePoints Ep. 16: StarCare CX: Revolutionizing Patient Care

For 33 years, Lone Star Communications has been crafting outstanding customer experiences for its hospital and education customers. Building off that legacy, Lone Star is excited to introduce StarCare CX, a suite of services that go beyond our already exceptional technology products. To find out how StarCare CX's high-touch, high-impact services can help your hospital or school, visit www.lonstarcom.com forward slash StarCare CX. Welcome to the latest episode of CarePoints. I'm your host, Kenny Schiff, Director of Marketing for Lone Star Communications' new Alero Business Unit. Today's episode is part of my continuing series of conversations with my collaborators at Lone Star, customers, partners, and notable folks in the tech industry. It's my pleasure to interview Donna Montgomery, Chief Clinical Information Officer for Lone Star Communications, Assistance Integrator with primary focus in healthcare, and Kevin Henderson, the COO of Lone Star's Arkansas region. Welcome, Donna and Kevin. Thank you. Thanks, Kenny. Let me set up the episode. To celebrate its 33rd anniversary, Lone Star Communications just launched StarCare CX, a new customer experience program built to foster the exceptional relationships that the company has established in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beyond. Today's conversation will explore why Lone Star, a highly regarded integrator known for exceptional technology delivery, is amping up its focus on customers. We'll try to answer the question, isn't the technology good enough on its own? My conversation with Donna and Kevin will explore the genesis of the new CX program. We'll tell you a little more about what CX is, detail how it acts as a framework for excellence built on knowledge and relevant experience. Kevin, we're going to start with you from a question standpoint. Your career has taken you through the entire customer technology life cycle, sales, on-the-ground deployment, aftermarket service, executive leadership. You work with institutions large and small, and Arkansas, as an example, has a different flavor than, say, Texas. Can you share your vision of customer experience and also explain how your perspective on the difference between customer experience and just plain old customer service, what's different? Sure, absolutely. My vision of customer experience is us understanding the customer's business and their environment as well as we know our own. To develop a trust, a true partnership, and provide them with insights and perspective based on their data and current workflows. And then aligning our technology and team around their needs, you know, consistently getting their feedback, what that looks like to them, and not just what we perceive that it should be. Ensuring that they're always well-versed on the technology that they have, and not just what it does right now, but what can we continue to help them evolve that technology and how they do things to meet their needs and their changing needs. That's probably one of the most common things that we notice, is that as healthcare gains more information and knowledge, how they manage their workflows changes, and we have to be ready to do that with them. And it's probably fair to say that it's a partnering model. So, you go in with an agreed-upon set of requirements, and you learn as you go together, in a lot of respects. It's the two biggest pieces, you know, is developing that trust. And yeah, it's a partnership, a true partnership, where we really know each other, and we know their teams, they know our teams. And it's not just that once-a-year touchpoint, that it was kind of that old-school version of what customer experience was. I would consider, you know, my vision of this is that it's just short of embedding four- to eight-person team in their facility. It's just short of that. You know, our goal is to improve the caregiver's day. That means everything to us, and we want our StarCare CX team to represent that to our customers and in their environments, and really drive the results they're looking for. And where, I think the second part of your question was around how that differs maybe from what we've seen in the past. And, you know, in the past, in some circles, and it may still be, it may still exist in some parts of customer service environments, but in the past, it was, I've installed this complex system. I made it work how we think it should just work, based on what we know, and then we kind of taught you how to use it for four to eight hours, and then I left. And if you had a problem, you called me, and we solved it, and we sent you a bill. You know, whether or not two years from now, you know how to use it, or it's even helping you, was not really a concern. And by that time, as we've all seen, the staff has changed. The system's not really being used. There's no adoption by the staff. It's no longer doing what it needs to do for them, and now you're not a partner. And so that's where I think that we're making the biggest difference in where we're trying to go. Excellent. Let's go to Donna. At a recent meeting of our executive team, when we were discussing the CX concept, and its adoption in the mainstream in general, you cited a prestigious consulting company, McKinsey and Companies, championing of the concept. Let's talk about how it aligns with what loan stars are doing on their own, what their own customer experience journey is all about, and tell our listeners more about why CX is mattering more than ever, especially in the healthcare environment. Yeah, so thanks for the question, Kenny. I think I want to pick up a little bit on what Kevin just talked about, because what McKinsey learned through all of their market research, and all of their interviews with customers, and potential customers, is that in all service industries, a change is occurring or has occurred. And what that change is, and I'll talk mostly about healthcare because that's what I know the most, but making sure that we understand this is not just about loan star. Customer experience is a very important thing. It has changed in customers' expectations. And that is why McKinsey has made this something that they do now, and they offer consultative services. So the problem is that our customers, they have undergone a lot of change. And their change is, to a point that Kevin made, they have introduced a lot of technology into hospitals, ambulatory care clinics, emergency rooms, all the places that patients seek care. They are not interested in spending any more money on technology unless they can quantify the results that they're going to get, and the improvements that they're going to make. This is really why we are changing at Loanstar. We have been changing over time. I think we've recognized some of this, probably even when I first joined Loanstar over five years ago, we were already recognizing that some things were changing in what our customers were expecting for us. But I would say in the last two to three years, that has been amplified. And I think you could also confirm, and Kevin wears a sales hat in Arkansas also, but he can tell you, customers are not just going to sign up with you anymore because you have a nice brochure or because you have a great sales pitch. That doesn't work anymore. They want to dig in. They want to understand how you're going to supply their results. So this is about high touch, high impact that we can have with our customers. That is really the difference of what we need to do differently as an entire service organization for our customers. We're talking about healthcare today, but that's also an education. That's everything we do at Loanstar connects to a customer. So we all have to be focused on what can we do to deliver the results to them that they are expecting. And no one person or no one team can do that. It is going to take everybody in our organization to be focused on that result that we need to deliver for our customer. We'll have different roles in that. My team has a very different role than the IT team or the service team has, but we all have to be aligned in what the result is for the customer that we have to deliver for them to let them see us as a true trusted partner, which is what customer experience is all about. Yeah, and it means that a technician who's doing a service call or maybe remedying a relatively simple technical problem is as important as somebody who's handling things at a strategic level. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And so this will mean, I believe, more communications across our departments and within our teams of how we take care of our customers, probably by hospital. We're going to have to, in some instances, we've already done this. Some of our really big customers that are highly complex, we already have teams of people from service and the CAS and informatics team and IT. We already have these teams coming together to plan activities and with sales. We plan these activities so that we're aligned in what we tell them. We're aligned in how we service them. We're aligned in what we need to do for them. So we have started this work. We just need to amplify it and apply it to all of our customers. Kevin, I'm going to go to you. I want to ask you a question about the customer who suggests that they don't need much help and they don't need external collaborators. What do you say to those folks? I would challenge that based on getting back to something Donna said. We've had extensive discussions with our customers with the frontline caregivers all the way up to leadership. You just cited some examples from consulting firms and the reports they're putting out how overloaded the caregivers are. And what we want them to be focused on patient care and patient safety, not trying to figure out how to get data from three different systems that aren't integrated and the calls aren't going where they're supposed to go or just an incomplete workflow that doesn't match the way they're taking care of their patients. And we're really driven by the idea of creating an environment where they can deliver the patient care that they're passionate about without the distractions of the technologies not working for them without the nuisance alarms but having all the right data at their fingertips when they need it to make the decisions they need to because everything is integrated together and we've helped them through that and really understand what they need to do all day and how everything needs to be a little more automated, for instance. We get into that a lot. It's all about making their day easier and leveraging what they have instead of, and I think Donna touched on this, continuing to buy things to fix the problem. You have the things that you need. We just need to make it work and we need to work with you to continue to make it work the way you need it to. And having some outside expertise, experience, perspective allows an organization like ours to be in an augmentative position. It's not like we're displacing people on the customer side. We're filling in gaps that they have that they are struggling to fulfill on their own. That's right. Donna, I'm going to go to you. So one of the things that I've heard you speak very passionately about is the intersection of the technology and the process and that any one element of this is not as useful or will give you the level of impact you want without the others. And our ability as an organization to assist filling in some of those things that are just, people just don't have time to do or they just don't have perspective. When your team comes in, they have the benefit of not just working for that organization, they're working for their peers and have a sense of how others are doing it as well. Yes. Yeah, we have an advantage in that. One of the things I love about working at Lone Star is I get to work with so many different customers. And even though they're all in healthcare, they are all different. So it really gives us an opportunity to make recommendations to them about what some best practices are that we've seen, bring the literature in to help support that with them and help them see how we can help them achieve the results that they're looking for. Let me go to Kevin. So Kevin, Lone Star and your predecessor organization have been in business helping customers for a long time and have worked on customer experience, customer service in general. Is StarCare CX a revolution or is it an evolution? And what can customers expect from the CX program going forward from us? I prefer to call it an evolution. Yeah, it's a combination. Kind of going back a little bit to, so this is where all of this comes together, what I was saying and everything that Donna just said. Going back to something I kind of touched on earlier, the evolution part is, I'm not suggesting that people never wanted to take care of the customer. It was the thinking around what it takes to take care of the customer that is evolving. Part of that is because our customers are far more advanced in their knowledge of technology, how it works, what's out there, what's available. I mean, that's completely changed. And so we've had to evolve around with that. And so what I touched on is previously, you might have, the way it worked is you might have a salesperson or a customer rep that shows up somewhere once or twice a year, but they were experts in what we do. What we're doing that's different is we're taking professionals that worked in that space at the bedside, in leadership, in informatics, they've done this work. And we're mixing that with our part of the business where we have spent all of our time focused on properly delivering a product to a customer. And we're mixing those together. Working with Donna has absolutely opened my eyes into what does customer care really look like. And helping us get here. You know, we're not going in once or twice a year. We're sending people in every quarter. How are things going? Analyze the workflow. How is the technology use based on your specific needs? Analyze and share data trends. We were working with you last quarter on intentional routing. Let's look at the data and see how is that helping you? Or do we need to make another tweak to that? Oh no, this is going exactly how we want it. Can we get this out to the other line units? Yes, absolutely. And then they're supported by IT and server experts and integration experts and programmers. That's their entire focus every single day. So that's the evolution of that piece. The traditional part was you had a team and we've had that here before. You have a service team and in some cases the install team is the service team at some companies. But their focus is across a lot of things. And maybe the person who's coming out to see you hasn't been here in a year or two years or hasn't worked on your system in a year. They don't know why something was programmed or set up the way that it is. And now they're going to change it but they're not even talking to the right people to have the right conversations. And then everything snowballs from there. And that's the revolution part for me and how we're going about is we know that environment. We know the technology. We know the customer. We are so ingrained with them that we know everything that's going on, why it was programmed that way. And we have put a lot of effort into communicating with each other and the customer and documenting that. There are no surprises when we go back in a quarter of why something is. And using, again, the professionals from that space, that's the revolution part. Yeah, I think you're talking about an integrated delivery model. So in general, businesses like Lonestar consider themselves to be integrators, but that tended to be much more at a nuts and bolts plumbing level. What you're describing is a collaborative, cooperative, knowledge-sharing framework that everybody who touches the customer has a place in the overall delivery and that there is inherently a ongoing communication and feedback framework, whether it be internally, between the various people working on the account and the customer itself. And that's probably really, what word did you use? Combining revolution and evolution? That's it, right? Evolution, yeah. Evolution. Yeah, so Donna, I'm gonna go to the last question for you. And we'll put on our kind of thinking hats about looking forward. So what are some exciting yet practical technology and service combination providers like Lonestar can offer up to customers and how can they be difference makers? So I mentioned kind of at a high level, Kenny, two major initiatives that we have consistently heard from our customers that we are continuing, that we are listening to them about what they need help from us about. One is that they are held to certain metrics in patient experience scores. They are scored on that by patients. So they're held to those metrics. It determines their payments that they get from Medicare and soon to be private insurance. And falls with injury is also a metric that they are held to not only for payment, but also in nursing, super important because magnet hospitals attract highly qualified nurses. And if you're fall with injury rate is not at a certain level, you cannot attain magnet designation, even if you meet all the other standards. So fall reduction and improvement of patient experience are the two areas that we hear a lot about. So we have been working at Lonestar in professional services, in the development of the Alero software package. About how can we help our customers solve these problems and get the results that they're really wanting. So the first one I wanna talk about is improving patient experience. Nurse call enables the patient to be able to call, right? And one of the things that we know is that if the caregiver can talk immediately to the patient and let them know when they will be in the room, that increases patient experience. Coupling that with an evidence-based bundle, that means that the research tells us what helps get to a result is called proactive rounding. So we're already in these hospitals, they already are thinking of us to help them with their call response times and things like that. Coupling that with us supporting them to do proactive rounding in a hardwired way on their patient care units will help them get to the results. And fortunately, we've gotten to do this a little bit with some of our customers and we're writing improvement stories and we're seeing that the numbers are changing, which is so exciting for me to see that improvement in the result that the customer asked us to partner with them on. So I'll use that as one example. Another example is in fall reduction. So we have bed exit alarms already in Responder, right? We've done that for a long time. The problem with that can be that patients continue to try to get up to go to the, usually go to the bathroom without calling for help or they've called for help and the clinician maybe is doing something else and they're not able to tell them that they'll be there right away, don't get out of bed. So one of our technologies is helping detect that through AI in the room. It can send a warning before the bed exit alarm goes off. That's the technology piece, which is very exciting. The other piece of that is using the evidence against research-based, what is it that should be happening before the patient tries to get up? And nursing should be applying, not just nursing, all clinicians that go in the room should be applying to the patient to help keep them safe. And that's called a fall tip bundle. And so we have those services available that we can go into an organization, help teach this, help look at workflows, help make recommendations to the organization about some things that we would recommend that they do differently based on the evidence-based bundle and really get this in place so that it's hardwired along with the technology then we should see a decrease in the fall rate. So those are two examples of things that we're offering now that we are helping customers with and more to come on our continued results, helping customers get the results that they want in both of those scenarios. Great. Kevin, I'm going to ask you to give us a wrap here. You have any closing thoughts for us? Well, I think one of the things that Donna touched on a little bit is, while obviously we focused on the customer experience part of what we're talking about, there is obviously a responsibility on our part to also be aware of the changes in technology and what's available because that again is part of, or we take that on as part of our responsibility. Your job is to take care of the patients. Our job is to come to you and ask you how we can help you do that better, faster, more efficiently, whatever that is for you and us be very aware of what's available to us to make that happen. And so that is another part of that transition from here's this thing that I have and I just want to sell you this thing to tell us what you need to have happen and we're going to make that happen. And that's a big adjustment. Yeah, and I would say that instead of being in the brilliant technology business, we're kind of shifting our focus to be in the results business and being in the results business requires us to refashion how we go about doing the work and orchestrating it on our side so that the customer gets the things they need when they need it in a proactive fashion. I think probably our businesses are at our worst when we are reactive and I think a lot of what StarCare CX represents for LoanStore is really about being proactive in the service of results. Yes. Donna, you have a sentence or two to finish us up with? I'll just put a little, I'll just add a little bit to what Kevin said because I think the other implication that I am really realizing about StarCare CX, we do need to be a high touch service organization to make high impacts. And I really like that because that has implications for every single employee at LoanStar. Whether we are there to fix a piece of equipment on the wall whether we're there to install a new system whether we're there to support elbow to elbow and implementation all of us can be asking different questions of our customers to make sure that anytime we are connected with them we're making sure that we are meeting their expectations and that we are completing with them what we need to to get the result that they were looking for. So I think it is much bigger than the CAS team or the IT team or the service team. It's really all of us together making sure that we know what that result is that our customer needs from us because we all touch it in a different way. And so I think that's why I'm so excited about StarCare CX because it really does involve everybody at LoanStar. Thank you very much Donna. I appreciate the passion in your answer and it's a great opportunity for us. So thank you Donna and Kevin for joining me today on CarePoints. 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