Month: March 2022

IT/Software Company Servicing Health Care Industry Plans to add 75 Positions

CLEVELAND, Ohio, March 28, 2022– Axuall, Inc., an innovation IT/software company providing solutions for workforce intelligence and digital credentialing in the healthcare industry, plans to grow their headquarters in the Northeast Ohio Region by adding 75 new positions. The Ohio Department of Development (ODOD) approved the project for tax credit assistance at its meeting today.

Axuall, Inc. is forecasting rapid adoption of its platform by healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth organizations, and health plans. Axuall’s data network provides insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting, while access to this data has proven to dramatically reduce onboarding and enrollment time for its recipient organizations. The company’s founders and management team bring a wealth of experience and past success in data and healthcare innovation, drawing from their past co-founder and leadership roles with Explorys (IBM) and Moat (Oracle).

Axuall has raised nearly $14 million in venture funding since 2019 from both local and national investors, including Flare Capital Partners, Intermountain Ventures, University Hospitals Ventures, MedStar Health, Epsilon Health, InHealth Ventures, AV8 Ventures, JumpStart, M25 Ventures, and North Coast Ventures.

“We’re thrilled to innovate alongside our investors, partners, and customers in the region,” stated Charlie Lougheed, CEO, Axuall. “Ohio is a great place to incubate, develop, and scale technology companies. We’re honored to receive the support from the Ohio Department of Development as we grow nationally.”

Local, regional and state economic development partners – including the city of Cleveland, ODOD, JobsOhio and Team NEO – worked collaboratively with Axuall leadership to build the case for expanding in the Northeast Ohio Region.

“Axuall is a homegrown success story and expanding at a critical time for innovation in the healthcare talent space — where professional staff shortages are a growing concern,” said City of Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb. “We are delighted to partner with Axuall as they continue to advance the digital transformation of workforce intelligence and provide opportunities to attract and retain tech talent in Cleveland.”

“The Northeast Ohio Region is a perfect match for Axuall to build its roots given the unparalleled strength of our healthcare system and our innovation ecosystem,” said Bill Koehler, Team NEO’s chief executive officer. “We are confident they will continue to grow with their innovative product for hospitals for many years to come. Along with our local partners, ODOD and JobsOhio, we congratulate Axuall on its expansion and look forward to working with the company in the future to ensure their long-term success here.”

About Axuall, Inc.

Developed with leading healthcare systems including University Hospitals, MetroHealth, and MedStar Health, Axuall is a workforce intelligence company built on a national real-time practitioner data network. It connects healthcare organizations to a vast array of data, providing insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting, while dramatically reducing onboarding and enrollment time via provider-enabled digital credentials.

About Team NEO

Team NEO is a private, nonprofit economic development organization accelerating business growth and job creation throughout the 18 counties of the Northeast Ohio Region. As the designated JobsOhio Network Partner, we align and amplify local economic development efforts in the region’s 18-counties; we conduct research and data analysis to inform local conversations and influence solutions; we market the Northeast Ohio Region; and we work to increase access to jobs, education and training for the region’s 4.3 million people. We do this to build a more vibrant regional economy; one that is more talented, equitable, competitive, innovative, resilient and prosperous. For more information, visit teamneo.org.

About JobsOhio

obsOhio is a private nonprofit economic development corporation designed to drive job creation and new capital investment in Ohio through business attraction, retention and expansion. The organization also works to seed talent production in its targeted industries and to attract talent to Ohio through Find Your Ohio. JobsOhio works with six regional partners across Ohio: Dayton Development Coalition, Ohio Southeast Economic Development, One Columbus, REDI Cincinnati, Regional Growth Partnership and Team NEO. Learn more at www.jobsohio.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

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Since the pandemic began, health systems have faced severe medical supply shortages for everything from personal protective equipment and ventilators to testing kits. However, those issues pale in comparison to a growing workforce shortage that is touching nearly every aspect of the health ecosystem.

That shortage existed long before the pandemic and has pushed health systems to the brink of their capacity. In fact, hospital CEOs recently reported that staffing has overtaken financial challenges as the top concern for the first time since 2004, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives.

While there’s no single solution that can solve this challenge overnight, there is some positive news. Namely, healthcare organizations are beginning to realize how data and analytics can be applied across the provider community to help solve this problem through an emerging practice: workforce intelligence.

Let’s explore the reasons why workforce intelligence has become essential in healthcare.

Providing the chance to analyze and plan

The pandemic has certainly tested supply and demand limits. But evolving delivery channels, healthcare consumerism and an aging population are forcing leaders to rethink how they plan, engage and onboard their clinical workforce. As a result, staffing shortages, skyrocketing contract labor costs and clinician burnout at levels not seen before have created a perfect storm.

By providing health systems with comprehensive, real-time insight into their current and future clinical workforce, leaders can better navigate the increasing challenges of care logistics. It enables leaders to leverage real-time data to address gaps in workforce supply, distribute precious resources more efficiently and optimize their care networks.

Addressing the burnout crisis

Staffing shortages and inefficient deployment models drive the over-utilization of clinicians, a key driver of frustration and attrition. According to Deloitte’s 2022 Global Health Care Outlook, an alarming 55% of frontline healthcare workers reported burnout, with the highest rate (69%) among the youngest staff. Therefore, reducing unnecessary steps in the workflow and accelerating information to make better decisions can profoundly affect morale and the bottom line.

Reducing the friction within clinician deployment

No task is more bemoaned by clinicians than credentialing.

Clinician information is expensive and tedious to obtain and confirm, especially if it requires manual effort by the already overwhelmed administrative staff. Connecting into provider data networks and applying workforce intelligence can dramatically improve this process for administrators and clinicians alike, decreasing deployment time and easing the burden on overstretched clinical staff waiting to be relieved.

This difference isn’t just eliminating the burden of more paperwork, it’s empowering clinicians to manage the most important documents of their careers: their credentials.

Allowing health systems to always be ready

In this challenging environment, it is crucial for health systems to be efficient and flexible. Real-time updates ensure an always-ready workforce that can be quickly deployed where they’re most needed, all while meeting credentialing and privileging regulations at the same time.

This, historically, has been a daunting task, but thanks to big data, information related to a practitioner’s credentials, skills and capabilities can easily be collected. This provides multiple benefits to clinician teams, including:

• Enabling care collaboration: Leveraging digitally verified provider data to cross credential across locations and care partners empowers organizations to expand services and revenue. This enables healthcare systems to more easily share providers in support of community care collaboratives and national telehealth networks.
• Optimizing economics: Physicians produce thousands of dollars a day in revenue for healthcare systems, offsetting rising costs elsewhere in the organization. Reducing unnecessary delays is key to revenue capture. By enabling teams to make faster decisions about how and where to deploy clinical resources and with the privileging regulations already met, administrators can cut weeks, and sometimes even months, out of a labor-intensive problem that also improves patient access to care.

Looking ahead: the future of workforce intelligence

While the U.S healthcare workforce shortage has been recently thrust into the spotlight, the pandemic only worsened a trend long in the making. The problem is only expected to get much worse over the next decade due to an aging population, longer lifespans, an increase in chronic conditions and alarming rates of burnout, among other issues. We can’t pretend there’s any simple off-the-shelf solution that can be used to solve this incredible challenge.

But by applying big data and workforce intelligence as a solution to the staffing challenge, healthcare leaders can begin to build better networks, eliminate deployment delays, meet patient demand, improve outcomes and ultimately improve the bottom line — a win for all stakeholders.

Photo: PeopleImages, Getty Images

It is important to remember that healthcare organizations do not just have an obligation to protect patient data, but staff data as well. Charlie Lougheed, CEO & Co-Founder of Axuall, stressed this in his statement to Healthcare IT Today:

Data security in healthcare, rightfully so, often focuses on the patient. However, security and privacy are also important to the millions of healthcare workers who serve these patients. Their credentials define their career, and as such, their ability to work in different care settings. It deserves the same encryption, privacy, authentication, and consent level as patient data.

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