Dispatch Update: September 9, 2022
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Contract with UW Medicine
UW Medicine leadership have agreed to a one year contract, expanding by one additional unit to start. I’m tremendously excited to have the the support of the organization.
We still need to work through some details and get a contract signed, but it’s great to know we’ll have the opportunity to continue to serve UW patients.
Other news and notes
Housekeeping
Our work on incorporating housekeeping requests is nearly complete. Patients will be able to request a room cleaning or supplies right from Dispatch and the cleaning staff will get paged with what’s needed.
How this works today..
Video calls for new parents
Before the pandemic at the childbirth center they’d do daily new parent orientation meetings for all the new families discharging that day. “What to expect when you get home” etc. With COVID, these meetings happen individually. During my last visit to the CBC a nurse had 9 of these (~1h) meetings to do. Cutting this down to 2 meetings would reclaim 7 hours (~$600) of RN time.
We’re working on adding video calls into Dispatch that will save nurse time and allow new families to connect.
Food services
The more I talk to staff about having patients order their meals through Dispatch the more excited I am about this work. Nurses are frequently on hold waiting to place an order for a patient’s food. We think that these calls are costing around $8 in RN time each. This is a big opportunity to recover RN time.
Integration work
With a contract in place, we’re going to be asking the UW IT department for a little bit of help integrating with their systems.
Initially we have plans to save some nurse time selecting rooms, and increasing operational efficiency.
Longer term, I’m really excited at the opportunities to deliver more value. One example: getting patients their discharge information right when the discharge order comes through, potentially reducing length of stay.
Ongoing operations
After missing three different family trips this summer I was really glad to be in a spot where things are stable enough to let me take a quick trip to Spain.
This last month I’ve had a number of opportunities to present to different groups at UW, raising visibility of our project. On Monday, Lacey, a nurse manager doing her Masters project on Dispatch will be presenting Dispatch to the system-wide practice council.
We continue to make changes based on what we’re seeing:
Laminated cards in patient rooms explaining Dispatch
Introduction 1-pagers in the “Welcome to the 4th floor” and “Welcome to UW NW” binders for new staff
Using Apple’s “critical alert” push notifications to make sure patient requests are heard even if a staff device is muted
Adding more ways for staff to respond
While things are stable and generally on track, hardware / keeping tablets charged continues to be a challenge. We’ll be looking into a couple of different approaches in the next few months including some process changes and looking into having Dispatch on patient devices.
How you can help
I’ve been interviewing some candidates for an operations/support role. If you can think of someone in the Seattle that would be a good fit for this role please be in touch.
While it’s great validation to have this UW contact in place, three units won’t be a sustainable business. I’m interested in taking some meetings with early stage investors with an eye on raising a pre-seed round early next year.
I’m going to be more actively looking for a co-founder with healthcare / go to market experience. Please introduce me to people!
I hope everyone has had a great summer!
Kevin