Timothy Poore

Couldn’t agree more! I knew a manager for a company I worked with that everyone loved and had great numbers. He would come in for the standup meeting, leave at 10:30 and then find a spot to watch premier league for the rest of the day. I never told anyone where he was at.

If your solution works well to lower ALOS it is going to walk through a VAC. But during the run up time don't just share your victories and successes, but it is also important to share your failures. We don't want others to make the same mistake. Pilots have what is called a Pilot Debrief, and this has greatly improved overall safety of air travel. It is important to follow up with your successes, but also to follow up with your failures to better address why it was felt your solution wasn't a match. Doing so also shows the respect you have for your customer's opinion and improves trust. Additionally, they are going to probably add something that you haven't considered or considered as being very important.

In developing our AI platform with our partners, we not only got involved in the placement process, typically working with health systems to find a placement options for their most challenging patients. We also worked with the communities and post-acute care providers that serviced those hospitals to investigate and work with them to develop solutions to reduce LOS and improve the patient experience. Since there are so many players involved in here, we had to make our AI platform not only very robust, but completely behind the scenes, allowing the clinicians to operate at the top of their license. This is the easiest way to handle objections.

You should always look for opportunities to listen to your customers. You don't become an expert by talking over people, especially if you work in the healing business. You become an expert by listening and understanding their specific issues and being able to support a solution that you come up with together. You may have done all the testing and work up in the world but if your solution isn't adaptable to their problem you are not going to be helping anyone, especially not the patient.

LOS is a quality metric, and lower ALOS is often associated with better care and outcomes for patients. So really lowering ALOS is everyone's business to some degree. However, only a few are specifically focused on addressing LOS. We were speaking with a former VP on this a few years ago, and he said "once you know one health system, you know one health system" implying that each health system is set up differently on who is responsible for addressing LOS. But typically, this issue is addressed by the CFO and CMO, with heavy support or by in from the Director of Care Management. Each one of these positions have different key points you need to address.

I would add that also before approaching a hospital, you really have to understand the environment that it operates in, and how it serves it's community. Your value proposition changes according to the hospital type as well as the internal customer you approach. LOS is not top of mind for all hospitals, so you need to make sure that this is something they wish to address. Additionally you need to understand the the environment your hospital operated in is equiped to handle the solution you are proposing. For example, if dialysis patients are taking a while to be placed, your solution of identifying dialysis appropriate patients may not be the solution needed if the downstream issue is lack of available dialysis chair time.