Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Crain’s Chicago Business Chief Financial Officer Breakfast. Deidra Merriwether from W.W. Grainger and Katie Rooney from Alight Solutions joined me on a panel hosted by Luigi Zingales, Professor from the University of Chicago.
While CFOs will face uncharted waters in the next year and beyond, challenging times, like a soft economy, can be the best time for innovation and transformation.
Even with the best of intentions, mistakes happen at every healthcare organization, and the health of patients can be impacted.
In a survey conducted earlier this year by American Nurse Journal, the official journal of the American Nurses Association, 353 nurse respondents indicated that:
Our customers’ responses reflect what other surveys and studies bear out
Ever wonder what’s keeping your customers up at night? We did too, which is why we recently polled them on LinkedIn during this past “Get To Know Your Customer Day”. I doubt anyone in healthcare find the results surprising. All three are issues that have plagued healthcare for the past few years and they are interrelated.
Here’s what the majority of MedSpeed customers had to say when answering the question, “What is your team focused on?”
June is designated as National Safety Month by the National Safety Council, with the directive to “help keep each other safe from the workplace to anyplace.” As both an employer of many “safety sensitive” team members and a service provider to healthcare organizations, it’s worth discussing how the service MedSpeed provides aids in keeping people safe.
If you look up patient safety on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website, they note that “the occurrence of adverse events due to unsafe care is likely one of the 10 leading causes of death and disability in the world.” While the cause of harm can be from a range of adverse events, nearly 50% of those adverse events are preventable.
Let that sink in for a second. Almost half of those adverse events are preventable. Clearly, the goal must be to keep those “adverse events” to a minimum.
This Friday, May 6, marks the beginning of National Nurses’ Week. Since 1990, this week has been set aside to honor and acknowledge the vital role that nurses “play in ensuring our health and prosperity.”
Given this, I think it is fitting to share some recent findings about how the care nurses provide can be significantly impacted by healthcare logistics or courier services. A couple of months ago, we partnered with American Nurse Journal, the official journal of the American Nurses Association, to survey nurses to better understand how logistics and courier services impact those incredibly important frontline healthcare workers. And while we thought we had a reasonable idea of what they encounter, the results were pretty staggering.
On April 10th MedSpeed turned 22. In the time since we began operations with three routes in Chicago, we’ve seen many changes within the healthcare industry and within our own organization.
For all of these – and they are too numerous to list – one thing has been true throughout: everything we do rests on the foundation of our team, the now nearly 3,000 MedSpeeders that live our mission every day.
The recent climate accord in Glasgow, Scotland, brought world leaders together to discuss the serious impact of climate change. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are a large contributor to climate change which is why the U.S. is on the path to cut its GHG emissions by between 50% and 52% from 2005 levels by 2030.
J.P. Morgan Chase spotlighted the huge impact that healthcare has on GHG emissions. “The healthcare sector uses enough energy that even a modest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will play a significant part in the global effort to reduce emissions.”
It’s the start of a new year, and with a new calendar, comes predictions about what to expect. Fierce Healthcare recently asked 12 healthcare executives for their thoughts about what lies ahead in 2022.
Many of the themes that were foisted on the industry or accelerated by pandemic are still at play in their predictions: interest in virtual care, responding to the ongoing pandemic and the need to focus more on patients’ social needs. One area of note is how COVID-19 sharpened the focus on health inequity and the need to address social determinants of health (SDOH).
John Schwartz, chief revenue officer at HSBlox highlighted how his team “uncovered the value of incorporating social health requirements.” He went on to say that care outside the walls of the hospital continues to grow and so too has a need to incorporate SDOH.
A high functioning supply chain has always been vital, but never was its true criticality more in stark relief than at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial shortage of PPE made headlines everywhere. As I’ve recounted in this space before, our team at MedSpeed was able to play a role in supporting our clients as they worked to ramp up their management and distribution of these lifesaving supplies during this crucial time.
The difficult part of risk mitigation is realizing what investments are needed before it’s too late.
In 4sight Health’s recent article, “September 11th and the importance of proving negatives”, David Johnson shines a light on how hard it is to prove the urgency and thereby justify the investment to avoid consequences from events we have never experienced and hope to never experience.