Hospital Housekeeping System’s Chief Information Officer Steve Jourdan was selected as a guest speaker for a breakout session for Salesforce.com‘s annual cloud-computing event, Dreamforce. Some 46,000 users from more than 60 countries registered for this year’s event-held in San Francisco at the beginning of September-making it the world’s largest enterprise software conference.
HHS’s deployment of Salesforce’s cloud solutions has transformed the company into a social enterprise, enabling the company to collaborate, communicate, and share information in new ways to improve customer satisfaction and create distinct competitive advantage,” said a Salesforce.com representative.
“The company provides a great example of how social, mobile, and real-time apps can deliver new levels of innovation and business value.”
Jourdan co-presented ‘Mobility: The Prescription for Greater Sales Effectiveness in Healthcare’ on September 1, 2011, during a breakout session. Here, Salesforce users were presented with industry leaders as they shared their best practices for making their mobile workforce a force for business efficiency.
“I got the perspective that Force.com is a very large platform going places with its high energy, and many developers and products which gave me the confidence that we chose the right platform for BedWatch,” said Jourdan.
Jourdan is the mastermind behind HHS’s new technology diversification, BedWatchTM, which recently won the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce “Great Austin Business Award” for Technology in the ‘large company’ category, where it competed against other businesses with 500 employees or more.
Jourdan began by mentioning he had been, “getting his geek on” with HHS for 16-plus years. In early 2010, as the company continued to grow, HHS needed a technology platform for its more-than 6,000 employees to use as a decentralized operation to connect payroll, HR applications, recruiting, quality management, room assessments, documented rounds, and maintenance issues.
As he faced the “build vs. buy” decision, and with the shifting of environmental services to a greater focus on hospitality and improved patient satisfaction, Jourdan ultimately decided to build BedWatchTM on the Force.com platform provided by Salesforce, because it offered security, scalability, mobility, and extensive analytics capabilities.
As a result, BedWatchTM has been able to help hospitals significantly reduce patient placements times because of its real-time view of clean rooms. The system allows clinical professionals to make faster and more-informed placement decisions, which reduce patient hold times in the Emergency Department. ED wait times and Left-Without-Being-Seen (LWBS) cases are reduced, ultimately resulting in better patient care and additional revenue potential.
“With the sweeping changes of healthcare reform, hospitals now have to do more with less, and because of the aging population of baby boomers, hospitals are facing higher census levels and lower reimbursements,” said Jourdan. “It is imperative that hospitals find new and innovative ways to improve operational efficiency.”
“Practical use of the new, next-generation technology tools and platforms is critical if hospitals are going to continue to effectively provide patient care with reduced resources,” Jourdan asserted. “Hospitals are going to have to innovate.”
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