Speaker 1: ♪♪ Thank you, thank you. Well, as you see here, this is a long biography, but I'll just give you a summary snapshot of my healthcare experiences. Since 1988, me and my team, we have made visits to over 750 hospitals, ambulatory care clinics, behavioral health facilities around the nation. We have done so to help them either prepare or recover from a joint commission or CMS survey. Now, I don't tell you this to boast. This is the career path that I've chosen since I left radiation oncology. It is during these 1.8 million miles that we have learned on what and how to prioritize what's important, to identify strategies of what works, and to train leaders as to why they work, because the why is very, very important. Now, we apply these same principles in both established organizations as well as new healthcare startup facilities. Now, for the past 27 years, the majority of facilities we have coached and admittedly have been long-established organizations. However, recently, within the past two years, we've been privileged to be hired and designated as startup team for four brand-new healthcare facilities. So the first thing that I can report without question is implementing a regulatory compliance platform and foundation in a new healthcare facility is quite different. And consequently, it brings more daunting and unique challenges that generally, for an existing organization seeking reaccreditation, don't often feel to be challenged by. So if you'll give me a few minutes and let me unpack that realization and alert you and your viewers, I guess, to one or two facts that may surprise them. Okay, so to begin with is documents. Okay, so from a regulatory foundation perspective, it's obvious that a new organization will need a wide array of new documents that must be tailored to their scope of services that they're going to be providing to the members of their community. Some examples of these policy topics, so to speak, that come to mind would be safe nursing and interdisciplinary patient care, delivery forms and policies and tools, the human resource policies, competency formats, management of the environment of care. You need a number of plans, performance improvement dashboards, patient safety plans, policies and forms that go with that. Certainly a lot of emphasis is placed on information management practices. So lingering here for a moment, the introduction of the electronic medical record into health care these days have really placed a large challenge on many organizations. Part of what we do is to help to establish, with policy foundation, to give them tools to assure that there's accurate documentations that are put in place from the very beginning of starting that facility so as to increase communication, to reduce risk of harm or injury, and certainly to reduce the risk of litigation. That's a pretty big, important factor to put into this formula, so to speak. So life safety, fire safety plans and policies, I think you get it. From a leadership standpoint on the documentation side, certainly a new startup organization needs medical staff bylaws, rules and regulations. We help with the shaping of medical staff committee charters, which are sort of the guidelines that help each of the medical staff committees set their goals on designing innovative programs that are intended to provide excellent, safe, and effective care, to help medical staff leaders oversee, and basically to help them lead. Naturally, quality and performance improvement dashboards and plans, et cetera, are also part of the startup package that needs to be installed up front for a new hospital startup. Now, as daunting as this list may seem, our clients, they never have to stare at a blank screen. They don't have to stare at that screen to try and create documents from zero or call and start to get a leaf blower of bringing in various documents from multiple organizations in the community or around the country, because that could lead to a patch quilt. We are the only healthcare regulatory improvement firm in the nation that has these documents set up on a CD-ROM. They're organized, they're cataloged, and we provide those to our startup clients on day one of the project. So that is a big time-saving initiative, I think, that will enable them to devote their time into other aspects of the startup process. Incidentally, as part of our role on the startup team, we will help our clients, and have done so, manage vendors and contractors. One of the most common applications of that has to do with the life safety building and compliance specification and codes. We're very proud to let folks know that our life safety surveyor specialist on my team, he really is just the best. There are well over 2,000 NFPA codes, joint commission standards, all related to the building and construction, and we want to help our clients get it right so that they're ready for their grand opening, which will be followed very shortly after with a survey, and you want to get that right the first time. Now, you know, one significant reality that I think a new startup organization finds as an obstacle that's not encountered in existing facilities is the management team. You know, there's a selection process, the training, and the integration. Okay, so we help wherever asked. Our organizations that are starting up, we can help define qualities, we can help define qualifications for individuals who are going to be brought on to be in charge of either departmental operations or programs, be it quality management, risk management, infection prevention, facilities management, et cetera. So helping our clients make sure that they adequately define or accurately define the qualifications is an important startup point. So now with this said, there are two things that come to mind at this particular point. Now, the first is to recognize that a new executive leadership team that's coming into a startup hospital, they don't inherit a management team as they would if they were taking a job at an existing facility. They have to attract, train, and create a talented management team from the giddy-up. Okay, now, this is easier said than done, I can assure you. Now, secondly, I can confirm that over the span of the startup process, there definitely is a direct correlation between the ease and the time factor associated with implementing a regulatory foundation program for a startup based on the caliber and the unity of the startup management team. The more unified they are, the better that that train will move down the tracks. So that brings me, I guess, to two important significant differences from a management perspective. Again, comparing an existing facility, trying to seek reaccreditation as opposed to building and driving a startup facility's launch and their success. First off, the majority of healthcare directors and managers being recruited just don't have experience in starting a new facility. And that's important. I estimate that, in my experience, less than 10% have had that experience of starting brand new facilities up. And that is an additional skill that needs to be layered on above and beyond the skill that they bring for their individual program itself. So a great ICU director, for example, who has not started or been a part of a startup organization will need to learn new skills and to be able to facilitate that startup. Okay? On that note, and I say this, but I don't mean to smile, during this course I have witnessed many individuals quite talented, knowledgeable of their own specific discipline, that they have just been not used to the rigorous activity of what's called upon for a new startup, and they have actually burned out during that process, which also has an impact on senior leadership because it makes them restart the clock again, and time is so critical for a startup endeavor. Okay? So starting a new healthcare facility from the ground up, this is definitely not for the timid. That I can confirm for you. All right, so the second piece that comes with bringing in new directors and new managers into a new startup environment as you want to onboard the best caliber individuals that you came is you have to understand that as they come from new facilities, they're going to bring habits and tendencies that they have learned and have developed over time in their previous facilities. And I guess on that point, I can tell you that, yes, it's true. I've witnessed it that sometimes they bring constructive habits, but I got to tell you, sometimes not so much. So that is something to be aware of early on in the phase of bringing new leaders into the organization. Speaking of bringing leaders into the new organization, the dynamic is so unusual as compared to an existing facility in that all of the leaders, managers, directors, et cetera, that you're bringing in from multiple facilities, either in your community, across the state, or sometimes you have to recruit around the country, they all do not have the experience of working together. So there's this universal aspect of team building and unifying them to embrace the mission of the facility, to learn to work together and play nice in the sandbox while under very, very considerable stress. Those who have started, who are viewing this, who have been a part of a startup organization, they understand how stressful it is above and beyond the skill set that they brought to be a program director. So one of the takeaways from this that I wanted to alert you to is that we've talked about talent, we've talked about management teams, we've talked about integration and unification. All of these dimensions are really intended to assure that there's financial efficiency. The experiences we've had with the four startups just recently is that once you make proclamation of what your grand opening day will be and the lights are on and the air conditioning systems are running and you're paying all of the staff and you're spending on your capital equipment, it is so important not to miss your grand opening day. So bringing together the management team, I guess the short version would be, will enable you to maximize on your resources in the most efficient possible way by giving them an extra layer of training that we can offer them so that you'll make your grand opening and you'll keep your budgetary restraints all in order. So I guess the logical question that may be on your mind or the viewer's mind is, why select this guy Gary and his team to increase the chances of a successful launch of a new healthcare facility or to help an existing facility seek and achieve satisfactory reaccreditation? So let me sort of summarize that with three points. As I indicated earlier, during the 28 years that we've been doing this, we've made over 750 visits to a broad spectrum of healthcare facilities across the nation, either preparing them or helping rescue them by redesigning their management programs, their quality and management, quality and performance programs, et cetera, to raise their level of effectiveness, which incidentally will result in the delivering of better and safer care. Second reason that I would like us to be considered is, you know, the new startup instructive experience will help take any guesswork or any finger crossing out of the formula. We have developed proven strategies on training, on how to integrate and empower a new collection of directors and managers that were recruited from a wide array of facilities. You know, bringing them together is so, so damn important. And lastly, I would say as a reminder that we are the only healthcare compliance firm in the nation that will show up on day one with a collection of CD-ROMs containing approximately 1,500 plans, policies, documents, bylaws, the starting point documents to give the facility a running head start so that they do not have to worry about the time that it would take to assemble all of those. So, I think I'm going to quit here. I thank you for your time today. If any of your viewers are interested in posing any questions or need any further clarification of what we've talked about here today, they certainly can contact me directly at the office. My name is Gary, and I'm here to help. ♪