Scott Webb (Host): Welcome to the Healthcare Executive Podcast, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership. To learn more, visit ache.org. I'm your host, Scott Webb,

And in this episode, we're joined by Jeff Surges, he's the CEO of RLDatix, and he's here to explain how RLDatix is enhancing efficiency and quality in healthcare.

Jeff, it's so nice to have you here today. We're going to essentially talk about enhancing efficiency and quality in healthcare. And I know that RLDatix is an ACHE Premier Corporate Partner. So I want to learn more. I was telling you, I don't know much about this. I want to learn more about that. And I'm sure listeners do as well.

 So tell us the story behind RLDatix.

Jeff Surges: Well first off, thanks for having me and we're excited to further our relationship and share a little bit more. This is really discovery, right, as we get to know each other. We're very proud of the company. RLDatix is a global health care IT provider of cloud based solutions for areas in risk management, compliance management, and provider data management, along with workforce management. So that sounds like a lot, but let me simplify it. We are rooted in patient safety and incident reporting. A lot of things go wrong at times in healthcare, and we have to document, and we have to capture, and we have to learn and grow and access information. So at our foundational level, we are an incident reporting system and solution in 20 countries around the world to help our customers gather information, learn through root cause analysis, peer review, and discovery around patient safety. So that is the basis of what we do. That falls under risk management. When you then look a little wider, healthcare is highly regulated, right? We have joint commission in the United States.

We have socialized medicine in the UK. We have different models everywhere that comes under this notion of regulatory compliance, accreditation, and we have to help our customers with that. Highly regulated. And so a lot of what we do in compliance is help what we call the middle office with these tasks. It could be around policies and procedures, contract management, could be around credentialing of physicians and nurses, scheduling of workforce, which we'll talk about a little later, the importance of that now more than ever. So, we provide a category of solutions in what you might think of as hospital operations that are, just requirements to deliver care, safe care, important to make sure you're maintaining high ethical, high standards, high quality, and ultimately getting after the information to help us improve as an industry.

I've been doing this over 30 years and this business that I've been fortunate to run for the last five plus has been the most interesting one with some of the biggest impact yet nobody knows. So your question is a really good one and we're happy to share our story.

Host: Yeah, those are something I really enjoy when we do these is, let's talk about something that nobody really knows about, and then we can teach them, we can educate them, we can inform them. And it does sound really comprehensive. Just wondering how inefficient systems and siloed data impact the healthcare industry today.

Jeff Surges: Those could be trigger words, right? Inefficient and siloed data. I don't think we designed the system by chance to be that way. I just think we happened to stumble into that, right? We solve one problem and we go after a department or we go after a large opportunity. And then as we improve that area, it then bumps into another area.

Now we say, how do we make the data more friendly, more usable? So, you know, healthcare is always rooted in opportunities to improve. It's always rooted in innovation. I'm sure we'll, talk at length about AI and generative AI, this season's big technology. But, we start out with simple tasks like, recording a fall in a hospital, right?

Several times a day, unfortunately, we see falls. Everybody who listens to this has a personal example of an aging adult who's in a hospital for a length of stay, gets up late at night and falls. And now they've fractured a hip. They've, hit their head on the ground. And now you've added 10 or 12 days of length of stay.

We have to figure out how and why it happened, but more importantly, how we can prevent it from happening, right? Getting into preventable harm versus just recording. So that creates an incident that needs to be documented. Well, then you start asking, well, what are the other data pieces or data elements that would help us learn more? And then we get what we call adjacencies. And it starts out as silos, but then if we can open up the data and unleash the information to the quality folks, to the chief medical officers, to the HR, or to the risk managers, we start to learn more and the data doesn't become always reactive or retrospective, it becomes proactive to risk mitigate.

Because we all want one thing, we want safer care. And we want to know, just like if we get on an airplane, or just like if we stay at a hotel in another country or another town, we want to know that we're going to be safe. And healthcare is no different. Patients are patients everywhere in the world, and we believe they're entitled to the safest care possible. And that's one of the big statements we make on our mission, vision, and values.

Host: Yeah, I see what you mean. And having just flown and staying in a hotel last weekend, I'm nodding my head saying, yeah, we want those things. We want those things at hotels and airplanes and obviously in healthcare. Maybe you can describe connected healthcare operations and the benefits of implementing enterprise technology.

Jeff Surges: So I'm going to reach back into some of my years of experience now. I was fortunate to see two or three waves of innovation in healthcare. Early, early on it was supply chain. How do we get the right supplies to the operating room at the right time, at the right cost for a procedure. I saw the electronic medical record years ago, let's move with government motivation or compliance motivation.

Let's get every doctor on electronic medical record, right? Names like Epic became normal. MyChart became very normal. Now we see a wave of opportunity by sharing information in what I call this middle office of connecting operational systems, not clinical, right? We always talk about healthcare, a clinical pathway, a clinical process, a clinical decision support system. Well, now we have an opportunity to do the same thing in healthcare operations, which is, who was the staff that was scheduled to be in the room? What was the procedure? Was the physician credentialed? Tell me more about the environment. Was there equipment being used and was it compliant? Did we follow a procedure?

All of these things have to happen and must be asked when we start to investigate a claim or investigate an incident. And what we're finding is when we pull this data together, the insights are incredible and we can start to actually look at a set of information that might suggest an age, a comorbidity, a set of medications and the adverse effects could lead us to conclude we ought to visit that patient in the bed every 15 minutes and not 30 minutes. Or we ought to have maybe more staffing in this particular area versus another area. And so we start to really get proactive and opportunistic in an industry that you know, is always asking for more and to improve. And so we see this as a great opportunity by connecting to spirit, what I might call vertically consumed silos and starting to reach across horizontally and getting structured data in a way we can learn and enhance our ability to deliver great care.

Host: So, Jeff, you talked about patient safety earlier. You referenced that and how important that is and sort of being proactive about things. So, I'm just wondering what are the key drivers of patient safety incidents and medical errors, and how can connected healthcare operations reduce the risk of errors?

Jeff Surges: Nobody goes into their day with the goal of having an incident, right? Or having something go wrong.

Host: Of course, right.

Jeff Surges: So, first and foremost, we try to connect the heart with the head, right? And, make sure that everything we do is going to be the best in class, best of breed, best efforts. However, things happen, right? It can be said that up to 30 percent of a hospital's inpatient stays might have a safety incident. And it's not always about recording the incident. But it's also about preventing the incident and managing the expectation. And that comes from the staff, comes from the team, comes from education. There's a whole bunch of people that can infect and affect the opportunity. So when we talk about patient safety, we put it into large categories of, you know, whether it's a hospital acquired infection, whether it's an adverse event from medication, whether it is a wrong surgery, Those things still happen, unfortunately. Or maybe it's as simple as a fall, right? Which is the number one incident in safety, or patient safety, is a fall. Happens all the time. And so, when you start to collect what we might overuse the term, big data, or start to collect what you might say is usable data in the right structured format, we can start to predict and understand based on this information, the why and the where.

And then that starts to connect that heart with the head and say, wait a minute, we need to now look a little bit more at a cohort in a particular area. So historically, we just report. And we just, a lot of this is just reactive reporting. We're going to compete on safety. We're going to mitigate and we want to prevent and just get better as an industry who doesn't want that.

And so our whole mission is around helping our customers identify, learn, engage, and then improve in these critical operational areas.

Host: Right. I want to talk about artificial intelligence and AI is just everywhere now. It's in the news, in higher education, and obviously in healthcare as well. Wondering how are AI and machine learning being used, you know, to mitigate workforce, financial, and safety challenges?

Jeff Surges: So, we've seen a couple of these run in and out of the healthcare industry, right? There was, the eHealth initiative when the internet was exploding. And how was that going to help everybody? There were mobile apps. There was content that everybody could reach. I still think the number one thing people do is when they leave their doctors, they go to Google and they just type it in.

And, you know you, we've all know what those horror stories can look like. AI right now has great potential and I still think it's super early, but the energy is there, right? If you go to a show, every booth says it. If you go into a hospital, they now have titles called You know, Chief Medical Artificial Intelligence Officer, or Chief AI Officer, or Data and Analytics AI.

What I translate that to is the opportunity for efficiency and smarter learning. And in our world of connected healthcare, and the operational side, so much of what we see as a burden is the documentation. Right? In order to properly document an incident in a system, some of our customers can take up to eight minutes and have to fill out close to 200 fields because you want to get it right and you want to be complete because there's, there might be some liability, there could be a claim, an investigation, so more is better.

But when we categorize this and when we start to look at trends, we are starting to see through our data and through our customers, areas where we can take an 8 minute incident with 200 fields and take it down to 2 minutes. Because we can group things together, like if it's a fall, we now know these 9 or 10 other pieces of information need to come along. And if anybody has ever tried ChatGPT and just put in a letter or type something up, you can see the efficiency. Once we put our clinical heads, our trust and our experience together, we're going to be able to document more complete, more structured data, which is an IT term, but it's simple. The more structured data we have, the more we can report.

The more we can report, the more we can learn, the more we learn, the more we prevent. So, AI for us, generative AI for us in machine learning, which is a little different term, allows us to capture more information quicker and more accurate in a way that helps caregivers and, the workforce, which we don't have enough of, be as efficient as possible, right?

Be as efficient as possible. So for us, that's how we digest AI and a generative AI is to help for a more complete record, a more accurate record, and a more available data to report and learn from.

Host: Yeah. Maybe this is the 64,000 question for anybody old enough to get that reference. But if you could change one thing about the current healthcare industry to make the greatest possible impact on patient safety, what would it be?

Jeff Surges: Our customers always tell us when it's a culture of safety in the boardroom, it makes the opportunity to enhance and embrace the safety environment way better, more efficient, more effective. I get to visit thousands of hospitals and health systems around the world, we're in 20 countries, RLDatixs. When I see a culture of safety at the top, the enthusiasm, the positivity, the transparency, the trust is just there. And so if I had a magic wand it would be to enhance and embrace the culture of safety because a lot of things are happening that are really good and yet we only talk about the really bad, right?

We always talk about the really bad or the unfortunate or the never event. We have great people working really hard every day, who are preventing, right? We call it a good catch, right? There's a good catch. We caught something. And when you have a culture of safety, you celebrate that, right?

And so the thing I would love is more of a culture at the top to enhance and embrace some of this lonely work that gets done about keeping our patients and our staff really as safe and as efficient as possible.

Host: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because it's the patients, but it's also the staff keeping everybody safe, happy, healthy, it's been really good stuff today, really educational, as I told you as we got rolling here. I want to learn, as I'm sure listeners do, you know, more about RLDatix and the partnership, the premier corporate partnership between, RLDatix and ACHE, so good stuff.

As we finish up here, what do you foresee as having the greatest impact on improving patient safety outcomes as we look to the future?

Jeff Surges: For our customers, our industry, and, the opportunity is we enjoy the opportunity to connect workforce management, which is the staff and the schedules and understanding, the different supply demand issues we have, right? We don't have enough nurses in our industry to take care of everybody, but we have enough energy and intellect to be as efficient as possible.

When we connect the workforce with the patient, and start to enhance and educate through information; we're going to have a great opportunity to accomplish what we've done in other areas of healthcare, whether it's the medical record, whether it's revenue cycle, whether it's supply chain, whether it's a bio or, life sciences and some of these effects we're now seeing with drugs and drug treatments. We have the same opportunity in this little area called healthcare operations, which not a lot of people know. And I appreciate the opportunity to share this with you. It's very transactional, but when we put it all together, you can see the importance it can have for a patient, for a nurse, for our workforce, and for healthcare in general and we can just do our part to connect that heart with the head for safer care.

Host: Yeah, connecting the heart and the head. It makes sense even to a lay person like me. So, Jeff, so nice to have you on today. Learn more about RLDatix and how it's being implemented and used, especially with ACHE. So, thanks so much.

Jeff Surges: Thank you and have a great day and enjoyed our time together.

Host: And for more information on RLDatix and ACHE's premier corporate partners, please visit ACHE.org.

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