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Scott Webb (Host): This is One-on-One with Regional One Health, your inside look at how we're building healthier tomorrows for our patients and our community. Join us as we get to know some of the individuals who help provide life-saving, life-changing care for our community.

I'm Scott Webb, and today Alejandra Alvarez, Chief Innovation Officer at Regional One Health is here to talk about the Center for Innovation and how it's having a positive impact on patients at Regional One Health and beyond. And I'm also joined by Dr. Eunice Yang, who's here to tell us about, Okay To Stand Up, a startup that predicts and hopefully prevents falls for patients.

It's really nice to have you both here today. Alejandra, I know you're the Chief Innovation Officer at Regional One Health, so you're the perfect person to have on for this topic. So let's start there. What is the mission and goal for the Center for Innovation, and how do you and your team work towards achieving that goal?

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Scott. It's great to be here and this topic is very near and dear to my heart, as you said. I have pleasure of leading the Center for Innovation. So our mission is really to serve as a tool for Regional One Health to position Regional One Health as a hospital of the future by transforming ideas into growth solutions.

And we do that through different programmatic initiatives that involve both internal employee, staff, relationships that we have within the organization with different partners, but also externally. We realized early on that in order for us to really make an impact, we needed to work with those that were innovating outside of Regional One Health.

So we have programs also catered to startups, and those that are creating new value propositions for healthcare.

Host: Just want to drill down a little bit, Alejandra, tell us about the different types of innovators you work with, how they interact with the rest of the team at Regional One Health.

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Sure. So internally we have an innovation lab, which serves as a platform where employees, members of the organization can come in and work on ideas, submit challenges, solve pain points that are important, relevant to the organization, and from there we move through sort of the typical innovation framework, which is to ideate, build prototypes, test those prototypes, and so on and so forth with the goal that hopefully that whatever we build, gets either integrated and or commercialized, as an extension of the value that we bring to the organization.

And then we also work on another key pillar program called the Regional One Health Healthcare Access Incubator, which is specifically catering to startups who are in what we call the seed to series A stage. So they're sort of early development stages, and they are in need of customer validation of both their business use case and their clinical use case.

And so those are the two key programs, again, focusing both on internal facing initiatives as well as external facing initiatives.

Host: Dr. Yang, maybe you can talk a little bit about your role here. You know, we're talking about the different types of innovators, which in fact, you may be one of those innovators. Tell us how you kind of fit into this.

Eunice Yang, PhD: Our role here, with Ali at Regional One Health was to validate our solution. We had validated our solution in the nursing homes, but validating it in the clinical space of hospitals was one that we had not explored, and that's where Regional One Health, becomes a real key component to our solution. Is it usable? Is it scalable? And does it make sense for our hospitals to be able to leverage Okay To Stand Up?

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: And if I may, Scott, that's exactly right. So within the innovation world, right? There's three questions you've gotta answer. You've gotta know whether your solution is desirable. So do people like it? Do people want it? Is it feasible? Can you build it? Are you able to do whatever it is that you're aiming to do? And is it viable? Is it something that makes business sense? So when we looked at the innovation framework and we're trying to decide whether or not, you know, we should expand our programs and we should work with startups, we found that that was a key missing element that they had in terms of being able to take their startup concept and move it through the development cycle. And so we felt that we could provide value to them by creating an incubator environment that allowed them access into a hospital system that would replicate a quote unquote real customer. And through that engagement, be able to engage with providers, clinical staff, patients, and as a result, learn from that experience. And we're talking about both from the aspects of not just the solution, but also how they're framing the solution, how they're building their business case to better understand how they can bring it to market. And by the time they do that, they've gone through all of the lessons learned, they've gone through all of the hurdles, hopefully, and, and so making their success rate more possible and higher. And so that's one of the value propositions that we believe we bring to the table is how do we, there's a lot of money being invested in helping startups or create startups, but there's not a whole lot of money or programs and or support, taking place in order to help them and ensure that they're successful, right? So our goal here is how do we increase their success rate and our incubator program does that.

Host: Right. Yeah. And you used the word success there a couple times. How do you measure success? What does success look like for the Center for Innovation? And maybe you can share some of the success stories.

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, so as part of our incubator, we put together a scope of work that's based on what does the startup need to validate. And Eunice, I would love for you to kind of talk through what was your current state, if you will, prior to joining us and what were you needing help with?

Because that's going to give our listeners, some insights as to how we put together a scope of work there.

Eunice Yang, PhD: Yes. Sure. So Ali, you said a very, very important word, which I heard at the onset of being invited to the incubator and that was access. So that key word is so tremendous, especially for startups like, Okay To Stand Up. So when startups are working with healthcare facilities and healthcare organizations, there's a huge barrier to getting our solution in the door.

I mean, literally, that front door of Regional One Health or any other hospital, it's hard. So that access is okay we come through the front door and it was like Nirvana. Okay. It was amazing because going into the program, in my mind, I had a misconception in my mind. I'm thinking, oh wow, we got Regional One Health.

Now we're going to sell them our solution. It's Ali said, oh, ho ho. Hold on, hold on. We need to validate it first, right? So there was this cycle of, oh my goodness, I went through another door in Regional One Health, they're really going to buy it and we're going to have access to all their resources.

Then Ali says, hold on, hold on. So let me, I want to share with you what I learned in terms of the access, it's access to people like Ali, who understands the hospital network from the top to the bottom and left and right, access to clinicians. We're working with several clinicians within the units of the hospital, and it's direct access.

Like I get to talk with them and this is huge because it provides me an opportunity to understand what problems they're having. And then the access to even the C levels, the financial officers, the nursing officers, all that information that we have gathered really helps us as a startup to really, truly understand what makes hospitals tick and what problem areas that they have.

And it made me see, ah, I see there are gaps in our solutions. This incubator has allowed us to see gaps. It has allowed us to see strength and it has also allowed us to see other possibilities that we can help hospitals, not just Regional One, but across the board, help hospitals solve their biggest pain points, which in our case it has to do with fall prevention.

Host: Right.

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: And actually that's a great segue to, let's talk about your solution. What value proposition, are you working on?

Eunice Yang, PhD: In hospitals across the United States, for every bed there is a fall. So in the United States there's about seven or 800,000 beds. So yes, there are about seven to 800,000 falls each year that happens within the hospitals. These falls cost $35,000. That's a direct cost.

What we do is we put in the scenario of saying, what if we can help hospitals prevent those falls? And the key word is preventing them in real time. So what our solution does is the patients wear a monitor on their chest, it tracks their fine movements, and we're able to predict that they have intentions of sitting up.

That's key. Once we know that they have intentions of getting up, we let care staff know that patient in room 415 in the trauma acute unit has intentions of getting up. So please go ahead and provide that intervention. And we've been able to do it within the nursing homes, with five care organizations, 44 high fall risk patients, over 4,500 hours of remote monitoring, and we had zero falls.

So is that translatable into the hospital? So that's the value prop that we provide to be able to prevent those type of falls and to be able to help the staff minimize the burden of care that's associated with fall incidents.

Host: Yeah, it's uh, pardon the pun, doctor, but it sounds really innovative, like predicting when someone, when a patient is about to sit up, which then could lead to a fall and trying to prevent those falls. It's very innovative. Very cool. And Alejandro, I want to bring you back you know, what's your team's role in this innovation process and why do you believe it's so essential to the partners you work with to Regional One Health and also to the larger community?

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Sure. So as far as our role goes, we are responsible for essentially facilitating and managing the access. So early on, as part of our intake process, we put together a scope of work that specifically outlines what questions they need answers to, what validation elements are still missing, what gaps do they have.

And this is all based on initial assumptions, mind you. And so we put together a scope of work where we try to understand what's the effort like, how long is it going to take, what does success look like. And then upon creating that and everybody signing off on that, we take on and, and then our role then transitions from not just understanding and building that scope of work to facilitating and supporting the actual incubation work.

So a lot of project management, a lot of coordination takes place and a lot of the scope also consists of collecting data. So we have team members that are able to do that, such as a research nurse that can help with all of that, engaging with patients if that's needed as well. There's different members within the team that can help support all of those different components.

And again, like she mentioned, you know, being able to center everyone all the time in terms of here's what you're learning, here's what you're experiencing. Here's how we could do that as they continue to learn. Because throughout the process, and Eunice can speak to this, there's aha moments, right?

And those aha moments create a pivoting conversation. Should we fix this? Should we do this? Should we do that? And so our job is just to help kind of guide them and support them in that process. And so by the end of it we can say that this is what we learned. We can say this is how they are now going to move forward as the result of the insights that they gathered.

 We find that be the most valuable component because if we did not come up with the solution, we should be able to at least help influence how the solution is designed and implemented. Because eventually we're going to be utilizers of that solution, right, at some point, whether it be them or anyone else putting together a value proposition, an innovative value proposition. It's going to eventually hit the market. And so we want to make sure that if at any point in time we're using that, it was at least considering our specific environment and or just general healthcare environments and there's a lot of gaps there, and there's a lot of cool innovation happening with people who are not in healthcare at all.

And so they were smart enough and cared enough to come up with a solution for what they thought was a problem, however, they still need support to really understand how that solution is going to be received. Just because you made it doesn't mean somebody's going to buy it. Right. To that, how is it going to be received? What's the adoption like? Then we hit the mark or not, and so that's where we believe the value is and that we can bring to the table. If we didn't directly create it, how can we help those that are already innovating so that we can make sure that their solution does meet the needs the healthcare industry?

Host: Yeah. Yeah. And I love that you have sort of, of course, going into things and partnerships and all of that, that you have the initial assumptions of how you think things might go, but you're prepared at least for those aha moments. Maybe you look forward to the aha moments, right? Where the team may learn things and pivot and all of that.

It's all good stuff. Just want to kind of finish up here and just get a sense from you, Alejandra, about the goals for the future for the Center and for Regional One Health.

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Well, first and foremost, we definitely want to continue our work with Eunice and the Okay To Stand Up solution to make sure that they get all the insights that they need before they scale. But as far as the Center for Innovation goes, we want to expand our impact. So we're looking to grow.

As this new technology evolution continues to take place, where technology's changing every day, how can we be part of that conversation? We want to be part of the formula. So our goal is to grow.

Host: Yeah. Growth is good. And I'll give you, last word here, Dr. Yang, in your role, in your capacity and what your group is working on, what are some of your goals?

Eunice Yang, PhD: So right now our goal is primarily focused on workflow integration. So in terms of the technology piece, we're solid. Where Regional One Health comes in and the Incubator Program comes in is a critical component of workflow integration.

So what we are trying to do right now is to make sure that our mobile app, our onboarding of the solution, fits within the hospital environment and trying to make sure that adoption and compliance and using Okay To Stand Up is high. So those are our primary goals.

Host: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you both here today to learn more about the Center for Innovation, Okay To Stand Up, this partnership, the success stories, all good stuff. So thank you both.

Alejandra Alvarez, PMP, CPXP: Thank you, Scott.

Eunice Yang, PhD: Thank you so much Scott and Ali.

Host: And learn more about the Center for Innovation at Regional One Health by visiting innovation.regionalonehealth.org.

And thanks for making One-on-One with Regional One Health, part of your journey to better health. Join us next time as we introduce you to another member of the Regional One Health Family. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well.