Category: News

MetroHealth and Axuall partner to create a digitally-enabled elastic care network

As the healthcare industry swiftly adapts to advancements in technology, digitization, and business model evolution, health systems are simultaneously burdened with workforce challenges exacerbated by the onset of COVID-19. Innovation in workforce intelligence strategies can help Leading Health Systems (LHS) navigate the fast-paced environment, drive decision-making and maximize revenue opportunities. In addition, workforce intelligence provides relief for over-worked clinicians and staff, which translate to high-quality patient care.

One recent example of successfully leveraging workforce intelligence is The MetroHealth System (MetroHealth), a public, academic medical center, headquartered in Cleveland, OH. As Cuyahoga County’s only safety-net health system, MetroHealth plays an essential role in providing care for all in the region, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay.

To read more, download the case study now.

HIT Consultant

By Fred Pennic

Axuall’s CEO & Founder, Charlie Lougheed shares why health administration teams should embrace the power of robotic process automation (RPA).

Built with leading healthcare systems, Axuall is a workforce intelligence company powered by a national real-time practitioner data network. The technology enables healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth, and health plans to dramatically reduce onboarding and enrollment time while also providing unique, powerful data insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting. The company’s CEO and founder, ​​Charlie Lougheed, believes that the smarter use of analytics is a core factor in giving health systems the opportunity to build better networks, all while empowering healthcare administration teams with better, more complete, and more timely data — that also complies with industry standards and aligns with existing workflows.

HITC: To start, why should health administration teams embrace the power of robotic process automation (RPA)?

Lougheed: Robot Processing Automation (RPA) can sound like a threatening term for health administration teams, but in reality, this technology should be looked at as their friend, rather than their enemy. To put it simply, these bots are like border collies because they do the job of constantly herding information (not sheep, of course).

There was a time when shepherds used to herd sheep themselves, but then along came the sheepdogs, and the process got a lot more efficient. The only shepherds that lost their job were the ones that didn’t take advantage of this new “technology,” it has nothing to do with “giving up control.”

HITC: So, it sounds like bots aren’t replacing humans, but rather enhancing their productivity. How can RPA and other healthcare automation tools ensure health administrators can meet the current challenges?

Lougheed: Exactly. Healthcare administrators should view RPA as a tool to enable – not replace – humans. While this automation isn’t a new concept, its potential to help alleviate some of the biggest trends and challenges facing our country’s healthcare system today has become much more prevalent (e.g., the widening gap between supply and demand, a rapidly growing clinician shortage, and the shrinking revenue and budget that follow as a result).

By combining RPA with the provider big data, for instance, the two can eliminate much of the manual intervention that currently holds administrators back from the truly important activity that requires critical thinking. The widespread adoption of this technology could empower MSPs and healthcare executives to collaborate, analyze, plan, and deploy resources where they’re most needed in a way that’s never been possible before – all while automatically meeting credentialing and privileging regulations at the same time.

HITC: How can RPA specifically help health admin teams optimize their employee staffing?

Lougheed: It’s no secret that staffing has emerged as one of the most immediate concerns in healthcare today. In fact, personnel shortages even just replaced financial challenges as the top concern for hospital CEOs for the first time in nearly two decades, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives.

This “new normal” leaves health systems permanently operating in an extremely challenging environment. The key to successfully navigating staffing will be efficiency and flexibility – two things traditionally not within reach for hospitals due to credentialing and privileging regulations. However, RPA is providing health systems with comprehensive, real-time insight into their current and future clinical workforce, allowing administrators to better navigate the increasing challenges of care logistics. Doing so allows big data to be applied across the provider community that can address gaps in workforce supply, distribute precious resources more efficiently, and optimize care networks.

The result will be a future of healthcare that allows administration teams to become data analysts, not just data aggregators.

HITC: What are some best practices for selecting an RPA vendor for health administrators?

Lougheed: There’s no silver bullet solution that will ever be able to make all of our problems immediately disappear – especially in an industry as convoluted as healthcare. However, I would encourage healthcare administrators who are considering partnering with an RPA vendor to seek out those who can offer the following:

• The ability to analyze and plan through comprehensive real-time insight into your current and future clinical workforce.
• Enabling faster onboarding that allows clinicians to speed up the credentialing and privileging process, become enrolled, and ultimately be deployed where they’re needed to meet demand.
• Continuous updates that ensure an always-ready and compliant workforce.
• Cross-credential across collaborative care networks to expand services and revenue.
• Technology that plugs into and leverages existing systems.

Most importantly, any RPA vendor should be able to ensure health systems can optimize their economics by ultimately reducing unnecessary delays, costs, and barriers to revenue capture.

HITC: What are some of the deployment challenges health administrators should be aware of?

Lougheed: A successful deployment relies on top-down support from healthcare leaders. Process change requires aircover and encouragement for those in the trenches. We’ve seen the greatest success in environments where team members are encouraged to make the long-term investments needed to rethink and retain old ways.

Remember, all old ways were once new ways. Healthy and accountable patience for what it takes to transition is critical to transformation.

HITC: What would you like our readers to understand about Axuall and the power of analytics? What is the message you hope to spread through this interview?

Lougheed: Automation, when combined with work workforce intelligence, enables leaders to plan their care networks, providing visibility into where resource supply and demand are today and in the future (especially when combined with market data). It streamlines the recruiting process, making it easier for clinicians to apply for positions or privileges.

This doesn’t just improve patient access to care, but it can dramatically improve the bottom line by preventing leakage, reducing burnout, and improving overall financial performance. In fact, a recent study even found that Cleveland-based University Hospitals could generate an additional $74,000 per new physician hire based on a savings of just 16 days. If the health system leveraged Axuall for only a quarter of the newly onboarded physicians annually, administrators could ensure additional revenue capture of between $9.2 million and $13.9 million each year.

The early adopters of big data and analytics, combined with the power of RPA, are set to enjoy a significant advantage over the competition and reap the benefits long into the future.

Workforce Intelligence

Leveraging Provider “Big Data” to Fuel the Future of Telemedicine

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Partnership to provide a one-stop solution to streamline credentialing and increase onboarding efficiency

CLEVELAND, April 26, 2022 – Axuall, a workforce intelligence company powered by a national real-time provider data network, today announced a strategic partnership with LocumTenens.com, a full-service locum tenens agency and operator of the industry’s largest and most-visited job board. Through this partnership and with the use of Axuall’s network, LocumTenens.com will enhance credentialing efficiencies, reduce placement and onboarding delays, combat provider burnout, meet patient demand, and help achieve financial objectives for its customers, healthcare systems and candidates.

Because credentialing requirements vary from state to state, healthcare staffing firms face the challenge of meeting stringent vetting and credentialing standards for themselves and the customers they serve. Recruiting, matching, and placing providers into roles – particularly those who work temporary or flexible schedules – has become increasingly time-consuming. Fortunately, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and connected verification networks, like Axuall, provide a competitive advantage for staffing firms seeking to remove friction, cost, and inefficiency in the process.

“Expansive, complex, and geographically diverse organizations, like LocumTenens.com, face significant challenges in optimizing their workforces, and access to real-time information regarding their clinicians’ credentials is critical,” said Charlie Lougheed, CEO and co-founder of Axuall. “We developed our network with leading healthcare systems and staffing firms in mind, not only to accelerate their deployment into care settings, but also to maintain workforce readiness and elasticity.”

During a recent pilot phase, LocumTenens.com reported that its clinicians completed their portion of the credentialing process faster than the traditional process and overall were very satisfied with the experience. Based on that data, the company plans to integrate all credentialed clinicians to the Axuall platform by the end of 2022 with a goal of ensuring a seamless experience for both its new and returning clinicians.

“Clinicians are the lifeblood of the organizations we work with each day, and for those who work in multiple locations, on short-term or hybrid assignments, credentialing can slow the time it takes to get from onboarding to bedside,” said Susanne Hodges, senior vice president of information services at LocumTenens.com. “Leveraging the Axuall solution, we anticipate significantly reducing the time required to credential, thus improving patient access to care by simplifying staffing for our clients.”

Axuall continues to grow its network of providers and data partners, building on the success of commercial deployments with leading healthcare systems and staffing agencies.

About Axuall

Built with leading healthcare systems, Axuall is a workforce intelligence company powered by a national real-time practitioner data network. The technology enables healthcare systems, staffing firms, telehealth, and health plans to dramatically reduce onboarding and enrollment time while also providing unique, powerful data insights for network planning, analytics, and reporting.

About LocumTenens.com

LocumTenens.com specializes in optimizing healthcare staffing strategies with flexible, hybrid and temporary placement of physicians, advanced practitioners and psychologists through both onsite and telehealth services. As operators of the locum tenens industry’s most-visited job board, LocumTenens.com connects healthcare organizations with medical professionals to ensure patients have access to quality care. Founded in 1995, LocumTenens.com is a leader in the healthcare staffing industry, and an employer of choice placing clinicians who deliver care to more than seven million patients in over 2,400 healthcare facilities in the U.S. Headquartered in Atlanta, LocumTenens.com is a Jackson Healthcare® company. Learn more at www.locumtenens.com.

Contact Information:

Nicole Das

axuall@pancomm.com

Charlotte Inno

Mary Vanac

Charlie Lougheed is on his third big-data startup in Cleveland since 1999.

His latest company, Axuall (pronounced like “actual”), is a workforce intelligence company built on top of a national, real-time data network that tracks, verifies and reports on the credentials of medical practitioners.

In addition to enabling physicians and other medical professionals to quickly produce digital CVs, Axuall is starting to use its data to bridge gaps in patient care.

The Cleveland company also is moving from the startup phase to the scale-up phase, thanks, in part, to a $10.4 million Series A funding round in July.

Lougheed talked to the Cleveland Business Journal about some of the things he learned at his past startups that are making growth at Axuall a little easier. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What’s the most satisfying part of your work?

Working through tough scaling challenges and learning quickly from them has been really important for us. That sometimes takes a little while to learn. We’re so execution-oriented that we get into the mindset of just getting something done. But as you scale up, it’s important to take a step back and ask questions like, “Is that really an efficient way to do it?” and “Is that what our customers still want?”

How do you manage this task-oriented mentality?

Automation is one of the key elements of our business. We’re a data and automation company; that’s what we do. But we need to recognize that not everything can be automated. Sometimes, the glass is half full, meaning, if we can automate 90% of our tasks, we don’t necessarily have to kill ourselves to try to close the gap today. Our customers are pretty good with having only 10% left to automate.

I’ve also learned that it’s important to understand and pay attention to how we’re delivering our services and the pressure that puts on our team, in good ways and bad. Just learning through the process feels good.

How is your work changing as your company scales up?

At a startup, you wear many different hats. But as you scale, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you can’t wear that many hats. You have to understand how teams evolve and grow. So in the last six months, we’ve added client services implementation and quality verification teams. We sort of all did quality verification, but now we have someone fully in charge of just that. I’ve been through this maturation and learning process a number of times. It’s never easy, and it’s a little different every single time, but I would tell you that just seeing the team grow through that is probably the most satisfying.

Does this learning process get any easier, over time?

I don’t know <laugh>, good question. That’s like asking, “Does Mount Everest ever get easier to climb?” Absolutely, yes, there are some mistakes I know not to make again.

Name one thing that is different for you at Axuall than at your previous startups.

There are cultural differences in our workforce. People have different expectations than I had when I got into my career. By and large, that’s a good thing. There’s a lot more work-life balance going on. And having a mission that our team members can align around is incredibly important to them. A mission gives clarity. It enables you to focus on the North Star, as opposed to the tasks.

As I get older, I feel more responsible for my team. When things go a little sideways, the impact on my team hits me a lot harder. We’ve got pretty low turnover. I don’t ever take that for granted, especially in a job market in which it is incredibly hard to hire. You’ve got to care about your team, because if they walk out the door, it would get pretty hard to serve our customers. They are really important, and I want them to be part of the vision for our company.

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.

To view the entire article, click here.

In the Webinar, Axuall’s CEO, Charlie Lougheed, delves into the topic of healthcare’s provider supply and patient demand mismatch and how Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and real-time provider data networks will reshape the landscape and the careers of Medical Services Professionals for the better.

Topics Include:

• The provider supply and patient demand mismatch: How the gap is widening at an alarming rate.
• How robotic process automation (RPA) and provider data networks are fueling Workforce Intelligence.
• How RPA is changing the role of the Medical Services Professional from task worker to knowledge worker.
• The bright career outlook for Medical Services Professionals.

Want to Become a Great Leader? The Smartest Ones Will Be Doing These 3 Things This Year

BY MARCEL SCHWANTES, FOUNDER AND CHIEF HUMAN OFFICER, LEADERSHIP FROM THE CORE@MARCELSCHWANTES

Planning for 2022, many leadership teams have had to consider employee retention to a degree like never before. What once was enough to keep employees happy — think remote work, office perks, and more — simply won’t cut it anymore.

Amid the biggest talent shift in recent memory, I connected with three executives to get fresh strategies about talent retention for the new year.

Put a premium on the act of listening

“There’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to employee retention. Everyone wants something different out of their job, and as a leader, you must respect and understand that,” said Dean Thompson, chief growth/customer officer at HungerRush. “No two employees are the same, and it would be a waste of time and resources to treat them as such.”

Thompson believes that by listening to employees’ feedback, leaders will be much better informed as to how to keep employees happy. “The most important way to keep employees engaged is to simply listen to what they want,” he said. “Their answers may not be what you expected to hear, and that feedback will entirely affect how you approach benefits and employee management.” Driving home Thompson’s point, often employees don’t want rewards as much as you would think — they want to be heard and valued.

Give employees avenues for feedback

Listening to employees was a sentiment shared by all of the executives. Mark Woodka, CEO of OnShift, believes that to go a step further, you must provide employees with a way to conveniently share their feedback. “The only way to retain employees in today’s competitive labor market is by adopting employee-centric programs. Employees want to feel valued and heard, and one of the best ways to make this happen is with pulse surveys,” said Woodka.

“Sending quick and convenient surveys monthly or biweekly allows managers to monitor satisfaction and capture feedback so they can address problems before they fester,” he said. Additionally, Woodka believes that submitting feedback shouldn’t be the end of the line. “Unfortunately, many organizations don’t focus enough on recognizing and rewarding positive behaviors. One key to success is making sure employees value the rewards and that they’re offered fairly and consistently. Otherwise, this can lead to dissatisfaction,” he said.
Thompson was aligned with this thought process, adding his own two cents on the matter of feedback. “As leaders, we’re often given credit for things accomplished by our teams,” he said. “When someone congratulates you on the achievement, you need to stop them and let them know the employee who actually did the work and encourage them to give their accolades to them. When your employees see they get the acknowledgment, they’ll be prouder of their work and will aim higher to achieve those results.”

Lean on tech to minimize burnout

The pandemic forced many companies to invest in new tools and solutions to maintain workflow, minimize burnout, and keep employees connected. Charlie Lougheed, CEO and founder of Axuall, believes these investments should maintain their use and outlive the pandemic. “Heading into the new year, executive leadership teams should be focusing on how to lean on tools and technology that are available to allow employees to work smarter, not harder,” said Lougheed. “The executives who choose to prioritize preventing burnout now will reap the benefits in 2022 and beyond. Automating as much of the tedious, administrative part of the job allows for employees to focus on what matters in their respective roles, giving your workforce the opportunity to practice at the top of their skill sets.”

Talent retention in 2022 will be accomplished largely by accommodating employees. ​​In the words of Thompson, “once these strategies are put in place, your employees will be more engaged with company initiatives and changes, because their design is based on tangible feedback and they will reap the rewards.”

Link to the article