Driving Results Blog

By Angie Gray, Vice President of Human Resources, MedSpeed

Last week, seven college students wrapped up their summer internships with MedSpeed. We were fortunate—as we have been in the past—to host students from universities across the country. The “Class of 2018” worked at seven different MedSpeed locations, most of them focusing on operations, and one who focused on marketing here at our support office.

Every summer, our company is infused with the fresh perspective and innovative ideas of our interns. MedSpeed’s intern program is a significant source of talent for early career positions and leadership development.  In fact, last summer we had an intern who we hired as a supervisor who has now moved into implementation, and this year we offered a full-time position to one intern upon graduation.

Internship programs are a great (two-way) learning experience and our human resources team partners closely with intern program leaders to ensure that our interns are given meaningful assignments and a rich experience. We want to drive greater engagement and attract and retain the next generation of MedSpeeders.

Thanks to our 2018 interns for their hard work, commitment and enthusiasm. We hope that you found this experience rewarding, both personally and professionally, and thank you for sharing your summer with us.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in exploring careers or internships with MedSpeed, please reach out to our HR team at hr@medspeed.com for more information.  We can’t wait to meet the Class of 2019!

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Dave Johnson, CEO of 4sight Health to talk about MedSpeed’s journey over the past 18+ years, from a business school concept to where our company has grown today: with close to 2000 MedSpeeders in 29 states.

Dave’s a great interviewer and we covered a lot of ground in this particular podcast. We talked about the importance of tech solutions and processes, but how both are dwarfed in comparison to culture and people. That fact is evident every day at our company where the stars on our team are the MedSpeeders who support our customers and their patients each day.

We also discussed the importance of forming strategic partnerships with our customers, which means we’re on the same side of the table, looking at shared common goals. It has to be that way if we’re all going to succeed. By helping healthcare organizations constructively evolve, we can help them deliver superior healthcare.

I did talk a bit about what may feel distant today, but what intra-company logistics could help accomplish by 2025. We’ll have to wait seven years to see how accurate I am about that.

In the meantime, I invite you to listen to the full podcast here.

By Bonni Kaplan DeWoskin, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships

Farm-to-hospital; it’s a growing trend. A couple of years ago I wrote about the (then) innovative idea of serving healthier food with wider choices at hospitals—a la hipster restaurants. I recently ran across yet another article about a hospital changing the food they serve and how they’ve listened to their “customers” who include their own employees.

“We take our staff’s feedback seriously,” said a chief operating officer about a hospital’s recent decision to open an on-premise micro market that is open 24-hours a day and offers healthy food choices. Hospitals are staffed 24/7 and the hospital wanted to ensure that their employees could benefit from the new healthier choices too.

Sure, marketing is about selling your product or service to attract new customers, but it should be more than that. It should be about listening to all of your stakeholders, including employees, meeting their needs and developing innovative ways to create a win-win situation.

This kind of internal approach to population health seems like a gimme, but those of us who have had some pretty terrible hospital food in the past know that it’s not.  Hospitals are recognizing the growing demand for a more diversified dining experience and meeting the meal preferences for patients and employees, whether gluten-free, kosher, vegetarian or vegan is important.

This isn’t a marketing gimmick. Instead, this movement is a way for organizations to genuinely improve the health of their employees, patients and communities. By innovating and offering a wider variety of healthier choices, everyone is not only healthier, they’re happier.

Providing healthcare has gravity, because the consequences of failure can be dire. Operating in this environment has driven many healthcare organizations to strive to become a High-Reliability Organization, or HRO. HROs are organizations that operate in complex, high-risk environments with fewer than normal accidents or catastrophic failures.

High-reliability is important in direct clinical activities, but high-reliability is just as important for support functions that have an indirect but significant impact on outcomes. Think about it: a late supply delivery or a damaged lab sample can negatively impact care and patient outcomes. Conversely, efficient and reliable intra-company logistics supports providers’ commitments to high-reliability.