Champions of Care

One thing that's very important but doesn't take a prominent role in healthcare settings is furniture. It plays a significant role in patient care when it comes to looks, comfort, and functionality. An efficient and welcoming space makes for a better care experience for everyone.

On this episode of Champions of Care, Host Daniel Litwin sat down with Joanna Terry, Director of Vertical Markets at National Business Furniture, which transforms the look, comfort, and productivity of offices ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, and of course, healthcare. The two discuss bringing the art and science of interior design to a care context, breaking down how medical furnishings impact the interior design process from the very beginning of a new facilities' conception. They also explore why it's crucial to center not only the patient in design decisions but also medical staff.

As director of vertical markets, Terry has a lot of experience working furnishing different niche environments. While she typically is working in healthcare and education environments, she also has experience in hospitality environments. both K12 and higher education. She also works in hospitality environments. With a background in interior design, she worked in that space for many years.

"I fell in love with healthcare design," Terry said. "It's this beautiful intersection of art and science."

While some differences exist between healthcare, hospitality, and education environments, the principals remain the same. Most spaces are designed to be welcoming and warm, not cold and institutional.

Listen to hear more about the cross-sections of interior design and healthcare.

Brant Satterwhite, Director of Operations at Chair-A-Medics, and Michael Coombs Jr., Operations Manager at Chair-A-Medics, joined Champions of Care to discuss the maintenance and service of medical seating, as well as a walk-thru of a typical pre-service visit. Chair-A-Medics is the nation’s largest provider of dialysis chair maintenance and service; however, they also assist with other types of acute care environments, including infusion centers, hospitals, surgery centers, or anywhere that has medical recliners.

To keep patients comfortable and recliners in tip-top shape, Chair-A-Medics offers several types of services. “We offer a preventative maintenance plan,” Coombs Jr. explained. “Customers can also call and get basic repairs, and they can also get parts installed. Our Pro maintenance plan entails a deep cleaning of the chairs, pressure washing, we check on any infectious control issues, and for any mechanical repairs needed.” Maintenance plans run on a quarterly and even monthly basis, depending on need.

For an in-depth look at the type of maintenance Chair-A-Medics provides and some tips for routine recliner upkeep, Satterwhite and Coombs brought along service technician Garret Guest to walk through a demonstration of a typical service visit.

“We’re very proud to be the nation’s top provider of these types of services,” Satterwhite asserted. “They’re critical services to our customers. They enhance the lives of the patients and their experiences during difficult periods in their lives. We hopefully take the burden out of chair maintenance and off the clinic’s staff which allows them to focus on their patient’s needs and care for the patient, which is their specialty.”

Bill Willis, Ambulatory Surgery Center Director for Vance Thompson Vision, joined Courtney Echerd to discuss the importance of eye safety and preventing injuries. Willis, a nurse for more than ten years, joined Vance Thompson Vision seven years ago, and his experiences exposed him to the many injuries that can damage an eye. Willis now works in the surgery center, and he offered up some of the causes of these injuries.

“We encounter eye injury cases up here where it could be fireworks or some other kind of blunt trauma to the eye,” Willis said. “It’s affected people’s vision in a big way, and we’re here for the surgical side of their eye health and care.”

Beyond accidental eye injuries, Willis said it is essential to go to routine visits with an optometrist to stay on top of any issues that could occur and become a problem and eventual safety concern. “With these regular eye exams normal, young, healthy eyes, you should be seen every one to two years,” Willis said.

And to avoid eye injuries, there are specific jobs, tasks, and situations where wearing protective eyewear makes sense and can help prevent severe damage. “The big things that come to mind for me are hammering metal or grinding metal; anything you’re probably doing in the shop,” Willis said. One mistake could lead to a permeant eye injury.

Patients, now more than ever, want transparency, agency and access to care. After a global pandemic gave people new perspectives on the level of proactive and reactive care needed to stay healthy and in tune with their healthcare systems, healthcare systems are seeking positive innovations to meet those desires.

Kezia Fitzgerald, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-founder of CareAline , understands the importance of those patient needs personally. Fitzgerald spoke with Daniel Litwin on how her healthcare journey led her and her husband to create CareAline, a medical supplies company that provides vascular products and personal protection solutions to healthcare organizations across the country.

For Fitzgerald, creating this organization focused on patient-centric solutions was a passion born from her own experiences.

“I was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, and, shortly after, my daughter was diagnosed with her own cancer,” Fitzgerald said. “So, we were sort of forced into the medical world. And we use that patient perspective when we’re looking at problems in healthcare. Not only do we look at problems patients are facing, but we also look at problems that clinicians are facing day-to-day in their care of patients.”

Something Fitzgerald noticed about some large medical product manufacturers is they may not always bring patient feedback into the product development conversation early enough.

“A lot of times, they wait until a product has a minimal viable product,” Fitzgerald said. “They’ve built something, and then they want to try to test it on patients versus bringing those patients in when they’re talking about the problem at the very beginning. Without bringing in those patients to the table at that time, you’re losing an entire frame of perspective.”

A complex healthcare system already full of challenges didn’t need a pandemic to come along and challenge it further, but it did.

Terry Zysk, CEO of LiveProcess, discussed those challenges and how the coordination of care in a hospital setting and management of various levels of staff, resources and supplies have changed since the start of the pandemic a year ago.

Zysk believes operation challenges in healthcare are not new results from the pandemic. They’ve existed for a long time, and all that COVID did was highlight those issues.

“I think there were quite a few unpredictable portions of the situation,” Zysk said. “And those came from treating an illness that we really didn’t understand.”

The duration of this peak demand for healthcare also left the United States’ healthcare system unprepared.

While the healthcare system did adapt to the pandemic, weaknesses in the way the U.S. structures healthcare became obvious.

“Proactive, structured approaches are more necessary now than ever before,” Zysk said. “While an individual organization might be capable of setting that up, it’s really something that needs to be done at the system level with each of the individual institutions and portions of the institution benefiting from a top-down and distributed model that can co-exist and operate together.”

Today, there are tools in place for individual healthcare systems to deal with COVID-19 and various situations caused by the pandemic. Still, the real issue, according to Zysk, is visibility from the enterprise side. Healthcare systems aren’t systemically communicating with one another, which reduces the ability to take advantage of resources, supplies, best practices and even beds to accommodate the shifts in demand.

“Instead of operating as a self-contained unit within a department or within the four walls of a hospital, healthcare systems need to operate more like a network of systems that can share their capacity, so you can effectively adapt and dynamically adjust to changes in demand,” Zysk said.

On this episode of Champions of Care, a Champion Chair podcast and your leading source for industry-leading insights and thought leadership about medical seating and more, BSA LifeStructures’ Jen Worley and Karen Tobin joined host Daniel Litwin to outline how access to more informative and actionable data has elevated the way healthcare design promotes healing, learning and discovery.

BSA LifeStructures focuses on integrating data into the design process, helping designers craft progressive and sustainable structures that help designers achieve those core goals.

“Our mission has always been to partner with our clients and be a national leader in healing, learning and discovery, with the ultimate goal to improve lives,” Worley said. “We’re really excited about continuing that mission and being a part of this generation going forward.”

In today’s world, that means helping designers navigate the ever-growing world of technological innovation and the overwhelming amount of data those innovations produce to craft the right space for the right purpose.

To identify the relevant metrics per project, BSA LifeStructures looks to each market, in this case healthcare, to create a set of metrics that matter, or central metrics that can guide design. Then, for each project, more specific metrics can be selected in additional sessions.

In the realm of treatment spaces for oncology, biologics, and other infusion treatments, Worley and Tobin said there are some “givens” for these environments, such as infection control, ease of cleaning, and more. From there, specific environments and goals can help inform the specification of all of the medical seating.

In part two of the podcast, Daniel Litwin, Jen Worley and Karen Tobin dove into how certain design elements can help patients return to medical facilities and re-engage with routine healthcare, even in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's about crafting a space that supports peace of mind and a sense of safety, and environmental cues can contribute to that atmosphere. Getting people back to the built environment will require a "people-first" approach.

"A sense of control is really essential to an individual's well-being," Worley said. "I think, now more than ever, a people-based approach to choice and control is essential to getting people back to the built environment, and that really goes all down to the experience. Experience now matters more than ever."

Built environments and healthcare spaces need to provide patients a path toward enough safety and comfort to resume getting the care and exams they need, even in the uncertain environment left in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"A lot of what we do as healthcare designers in those spaces, we've already been doing," Tobin said. "So, it's really about infection control when it comes to material selection. ... But, now, it's about having people who are inhabiting those spaces really understand what's behind those selections."

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Healthcare systems find themselves needing to maximize operational efficiencies to remain viable in a period when the COVID-19 pandemic makes everything a heightened challenge.

Even before the pandemic struck, estimates projected that 50% of the healthcare industry in the U.S. will be part of the top 50 IDNs due to the need to realize economies of scale and survive.

Cindy Juhas, Chief Strategy Officer for CME Corp, spoke about these challenges and how the medical supplies industry is coping with the situation.

Like most medical suppliers, the onslaught of COVID-19 and the spike in specific equipment and supply needs proved challenging to manage, even for Juhas’s company.

“The demand was so great that we couldn’t meet the demand. No one could,” Juhas said. “Everybody was back-ordered. We were sourcing all over the place.”

Even an item most take for granted, thermometers, was sourced from over 15 different suppliers.

The pandemic showed that the nation’s healthcare systems need better preparedness while streamlining processes to keep costs down. Now, more than ever, healthcare systems need medical suppliers’ help to handle the logistics end and are ready to help with supplies at a moment’s notice. Juhas said customers recognize the need to work on their emergency preparedness plans, and CME wants to help them in that area.

Today's episode of Champions of Care explores the quality and standards of care in infusion therapy centers and in the practice of infusion nursing. Until very recently, these centers, critical for chronic diseases that require intravenous medications, had no set standards.

This lack of cohesive oversight was observed day in and day out by our guest on the podcast today as she traveled the country for a national infusion management company. That experience and those many visits led her and her current organization, NICA, to craft the first set of standards for infusion centers.

With our podcast today, we're taking a look at infusion centers before and after industry-wide standards were put in place, examining why these standards are important for quality care, and highlighting how capital equipment plays a large part in meeting and maintaining those standards.

For insight and perspective, Kaitey Morgan, Director of Quality & Standards at the National Infusion Center Association, joined us to break down...

• Her perspective on infusion standards as she went from RN to healthcare manager to NICA director
• Why it took so long for standards to appear for this side of the industry
• What the logistical process was like for creating NICA's standards
• How considerations for infusion therapy professionals and patients influenced the standards
• How these standards are helping during the COVID-19 pandemic
• How Champion Chair's capital equipment meets these standards and creates easier compliance practices