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Aversure offers virtual care solutions supported by a secure, scalable infrastructure that helps you to lead your organization into a future where cutting edge technology is at your fingertips. and Compassionate Care Converge. For more information, check them out at thisweekhealth. com slash Avasure.

At first it was, how do we hire, enough people after the pandemic? How Now it's about retention.

How do we keep our people in roles? How do we develop them? How do we support the newer nurses that are inevitably coming into the field? And that's our wheelhouse.

Now, onto our interview

(Interview 1) All right. We are doing an interview in action and today I'm joined by Adam McMullin with Avasure. And , we're going to talk cameras and virtual nursing and a bunch of other stuff. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bill.

Always enjoy spending time together.

So what's currently going on? What are we seeing happening with regard to. the virtual space, the cameras in rooms, the ambient type stuff. What's the direction? What are we feeling? What are we seeing right now?

We're seeing a lot of continued focus on ROI, workforce productivity and safety.

So I think that trend, continues, there was the shortage of nurses that became extremely acute coming out of COVID and agency spend has been managed down. So that's abated a little bit. You still have the nursing retirement trend. You have margins that are lower that we're all familiar with.

And now that health systems have really spent the last two decades applying technology to get more things in a digital format so that they can make better decisions. There's the how do we optimize these systems and how do we bring technology in that allows us to operate more efficiently in a safer environment.

and get way better results. And that was the core value prop where, you take up to 20 percent of patients need safety observation. If you do that in person, depending on your geography, that's 20 to 35 an hour. You do that virtually and that's 3 an hour. And oftentimes when you're observing patients, you're actually taking away from that nursing care team.

We can talk about virtual nursing if you want to go into there. and other virtual technologies and now computer vision and ambient to hardware the right things to happen at the point of care and to really drive that workforce productivity and those safety value

props. this like a re imagining the infrastructure in order to enable a more efficient set workflows around the point of care?

What's interesting is You know, you get into those patient care environments, that area has been traditionally dominated by a lot of different disconnected and point solutions. Most everyone is through their EMR adoption. And, I think you we have discussed this with other CIOs at the this week health meetings, the 229 meetings about the trends towards platform.

We're seeing really, Interesting things happening in the large language models around documentation that's driving value. As you get into the clinical environment, you're seeing we're able to do things in virtual care centers that allow you to load balance your critical resources across your organization.

As an example, as you look at admissions and discharge workflows, oftentimes doing those in a virtual care center, you can spend more time, you can get better documentation. In certain cases, you might want to have a hospitalist involved. You can pull them in because they're in the virtual care center.

Detecting things in the environment you might want to know about. Hey, that patient's about to elope, or they're a falls risk, or they're not getting mobilized when they should get mobilized. Or automating things. Hey, that room is empty. We should get another patient in there. Or we've missed mealtime.

And, we've got a nutrition concern there. That's what we're really excited about and seeing more of that coming to bear. And then integrating with the other systems in that space. But also, broadening our portfolio do things that were previously disconnected

solutions. Avasure? Does it have the elements of a platform for a health system?

And, we've added capabilities around virtual nursing, physician rounding pharmacy, other use cases, and computer vision. We really are the most proven scaled platform in healthcare. If you look at Trinity in our virtual care center, we've got, over a hundred hospitals running out of two centers.

And that we can arbitrate and handle all of that integrate with the rest of that environment.

Yeah, open and integrated. CIOs about this is one of the things. we're going into a new set of technologies, Open and integrated becomes key. When we went into the cloud, I remember people were saying what should we be looking for?

I'm like you should make sure you don't back yourself into a dark alley. Meaning like I just signed this 10 year cloud contract or even a five year cloud contract. I got in there, the costs were too high. Now I need to pull out. Oh my gosh, it costs a fortune to get out of this. And that's the cost of change when you're going into these new technologies.

There's new computer vision. You have to have something that's going to be able to accept that and continue to build and grow on it.

Yeah, and we're putting devices, in every room. And when you're doing that, there's only one device in the room. So whether you're running Philips eCare Manager or Epic or any other technology or different computer vision models, our customers need to know we support that and that's done in a standardized way and that's efficient.

And not, creating some, very unstable web of customized integrations. Strategically, I think our customers really want to know that's part of our ethos and strategy, right? We've got a wonderful partnership leader that just makes sure that we're pre wiring these things for the benefit of our customers.

who's driving these conversations in the health system?

It's interesting because you said safety and I can think, all right I know what group did that in my health system. And then you talk about cameras in the room. I think of what group owns that. And man you're working across a broad, spectrum of the healthcare organization, aren't you?

Yeah, we really

specialize different health systems, have different roles. But there is a general trend, traditionally we've always had an extremely strong relationship with the chief nurse. We've got a wonderful chief nurse advisory board. We are deliberately, we are a technology platform, but we are also 15% nurses.

We want to be the company that can work to make your clinical teams really excited about you, right? And say, Hey, not only we get the tech, we want to make sure your clinical teams are using it. And they look at this solution and say, Hey, from a CIO perspective, chief nurses are saying you did a great job.

You put in tech here, it's working, and this has been a great partnership. We see a lot from the chief nurse, where we're historically engaged, but because of the platform element, because of the integration element, because of computer vision, because of the AI and security concerns, the CIO has a tremendous, or their VP of clinical labs the CIO function has a tremendous role to play here.

Conversations we have been having, one of the things I will always throw out there is how many of you have a camera in every room and there's some that are still using the, on wheels, they will roll it in when they need it and that kind of stuff, but I'm hearing a lot of the larger health systems.

have initiatives around this. I definitely have pilots going, but they have initiatives around saying, you know what, we think the future is a camera in every single room and integrated workflows utilize that camera and integration into the EHR.

We just did some polling with the American Organization of Nurse Leaders and with QIIME and across the base, everyone believes in the end state of camera in every room.

that's one where you really have to Look at it by what problem are you solving and have specific solutions, examples, right? If you have ED backlog and you need to get people admitted in your health system, you don't want to have a leakage. You can do admissions and discharges virtually.

It will work better. If you cover a lot of geography and you have specialized skills that are not available in your remote hospitals causing you to have to get people out of their community, bring them into, central then you can put those people in the virtual care center, things like wound care and respiratory therapy and hospitalists and allow people to remain in their community health setting.

And then we have one, and we'll integrate that to the different applications that make the most sense.

This is going to be a fun space to watch and pay attention to. And it's interesting. The ambient listening, I think has hit that tipping point that the ROI models are there, people see them and whatnot.

And then the cost of implementation has come way down. And so we're seeing this tipping point in almost every health system. I'm talking to ambient listening, we're doing the and they're rolling it out at scale. How far away do you feel like we are from the use cases starting to line up and almost everybody heading at this in to try to do this at scale?

And we keep layering on new value propositions. I'll give you a couple of examples. We've talked a lot about physician documentation on the LLMs. Nursing documentation, obviously, is coming. Almost all of the sort of large LLM providers are working on that. We're working to facilitate that in the room.

But then there's all the non clinical stuff. And we just launched new module with NVIDIA and Oracle so that when you're in the room, all those things that you used to hit your nurse call button for to say, hey. When am I going down to radiology? Can I get my lunch? The room's too warm. Can I shut my shades?

And as you start adding those things in as that provides a data layer that allows better decision making, safer care environments, and greater efficiency. So it's all of a sudden Uber showed up. Why did Uber show up? Everyone had a smartphone. We all know the story.

And then you had GPS and you had to get all of those elements in place. Once you go to device in every room and you layer in LLMs and you layer in computer vision, It just, the flywheel really accelerates around very specific targeted ROIs that you can layer onto that platform and provide greater automation, efficiency, and safety in the care environments.

How do we keep our people in roles? How do we develop them? How do we support the newer nurses that are inevitably coming into the field? And that's our wheelhouse. And that's

to do the retrospective.

I know it's,

Moving. I've never been in a faster part of healthcare technology since I've been in healthcare. This is changing very rapidly and our team's working really hard to make sure that we continue to offer the best things to our customers.

But it's been a lot of fun.

That's fantastic. Thanks. I really appreciate your time.

Thanks, Bill. Always

enjoy

it.

Thanks