Is the data collected in your surgical department reliable? Can you depend on it to make informed decisions about staffing, case volumes, and block time utilization? Join Leap Rail on a journey to learn about the data behind predictive analytics and performance insights for the operating room featuring:
Shayan Zadeh, CEO and Founder - Leap Rail
Sam Shahin, RN, MSN - NorthBay Medical Center
Carie Helt, MBA, Surgical Servies Business Manager - Baptist Healthcare
Justin Poulin - First Case Media
Melanie Perry - First Case Media
Justin: We have a wonderful guest lineup for you today on this Vendor Spotlight here on First Case with myself, Justin Poulin, and Melanie Perry. We're going to be talking about Leap Rail. If you haven't heard about how they really elevate the entire perioperative platform by adding AI or Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, Workflow Automation, and Smart Notifications to improve and automate your workflows, then this conversation is absolutely for you.
We're going to tell you all about it today. We've got a great lineup. First off, we have Sam Shahin, Manager of Perioperative Services at NorthBay Medical Center in Fairfield, California, joining us along with Carie Helt, Surgical Services Business Manager with Baptist Healthcare in Pensacola, Florida.
They're going to give you end-user real-world experiences in working with Leap Rail today. They're going to tell you about how it's helped them in their work, and also to kick it all off with us, well, it's the CEO of Leap Rail, based out of Houston, Texas, Shayan Zadeh, and the founder of Leap Rail. So Shayan, welcome to the First Case podcast, and maybe you can just start with telling us a little bit about your background and how the company was formed before we hear from Sam and Carie.
Shayan: Sounds good. Thanks, Justin. Thanks for having me.
Very excited to be here. My career spans about two decades in technology, and I've done everything from consumer internet to enterprise software in my past. About six, seven years ago, I had a deep desire to get involved in healthcare and put my skills to use in this space.
Probably that need comes from, as growing up, my parents wanted me to be a doctor and let them down and went to engineering. So to compensate for it, you know, I decided, okay, let me see if I can do something in healthcare and help other doctors and nurses. And that was the impetus for getting in this space.
I went to a number of events and conferences, met with a lot of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, hospital administrators, and one of the common themes that was coming up, especially around the operating room environment, was the disparity between how dynamic and unpredictable that environment is and how static the tools are. How hard it was for people to get into real data about how they're doing, how their operations are going, and turning that data into something meaningful, something that they can act on and make things better.
It all came together at an event that MIT holds annually. It's called the Grand Health Challenge. And they bring technologists, people like my background, together with providers from various walks of life to kind of brainstorm together. And Leap Rail was born out of one of these kind of sessions, if you will.
Justin: I feel like a lot of times we see really significant innovations when it comes to the devices that are used in surgery, but not always when it comes to the operations and the management of the operations in terms of creating efficiencies. And so I can see where you really found a gap, like technology is outpacing, in some ways, our ability to keep up in healthcare.
And then in other ways, it can be lagging. And I think for a fully functioning perioperative department, you've got to have kind of convergence of all those things, maintaining course with taking advantage of what's out there.
Can you talk about your development strategy as well? I mean, I've seen a lot of solutions come out and it's people that have great ideas about what they think should work. And then it's really being directed by people who aren't working in healthcare. And so sometimes you can wind up with a solution that isn't quite hitting the mark. It's a great idea. The concept is awesome, but in the real world, it starts to break down a little bit.
How did you make sure that didn't happen as you started to kind of take what was happening at MIT as kind of a foundation and then make it into something that today is doing predictive analytics and a whole host of other things?
Shayan: No, that's a great point. I think one of the advantages or disadvantages of my background is that I didn't come from healthcare, so I knew that I don't know the right answer. And that freed me up to ask the stupid questions and be open to ideas and let people tell me in their day-to-day job what it is that they need. And that has shaped the culture of the company.
Sam is gonna speak to us today and he's at North Bay. North Bay was one of our pilot customers six, seven years ago now. And we really worked closely with them and what they needed and then every other customer since then.
And one of the things that I've tried to keep as our organization has expanded is listening to your customer and taking the lead from them. They might not know how to get there but they know what they wanna see. They know what's holding them back.
And if you have that open perspective and collaborate with them, a lot of times we even put like a prototype together and show it to a handful of customers that we have good relationships with and get feedback from them. And nine out of 10, we have to go back and redo it in some major ways because we are not in that environment every day. And even two hospitals might have different approaches to the same problem.
And we try to take, okay, do we need to make this customizable or do we need to bring together those ideas and make something that can address all those constituents?
Justin: Shayan just said you were one of the pilot sites. So, six or seven years ago, you've got a good history here. And so you've probably seen a lot of evolution but I want to hear it kind of from the beginning.
Being an early adopter is not always easy, especially when you're talking about a solution that's really, it's not just for you, right? We're talking about vendor reps, we're talking about sterile processing, like everybody in that dynamic surgical services environment is going to be impacted. So, when you bring something brand new to the table and you're the pilot site, that's not always easy to pull off, is it? Can you kind of talk about going through that process?
Sam: Yes. So, thanks for having me here also. You know, when I first came on as a manager for periop services, we were very hungry for data. We were early adopters of the Cerner platform and we, you know, the tracking board, the analytics just were not up to speed with where we wanted to be. And we just felt like we're always trying, we had such a lag in information that we just couldn't manage.
We're always putting out fires and looking back in the rearview mirror rather than looking ahead. So, working with Leap Rail and being early adopters of Leap Rail was really helpful because we saw the benefit right off the bat. You know, beautiful tracking board gave us predictive analytics for how the day is going to run.
And then from there, we grew. We grew with analytics. We grew with vendor notifications. We grew with provider notifications and accessibility for the providers and patients. And then we got into scheduling. It's just been an evolution and it's constantly upgrading.
And that's what I love about it. And working with a company like Shayan’s Leap Rail is they listen to the customer. So, when we have issues, we call them and he's the one that answers. And he takes our input and usually very quickly we get a response or an improvement on a request that we had. So, it's been a phenomenal partnership.
Melanie: It's actually very interesting that you just said that because I was thinking as you were talking, being a former OR manager myself and thinking about the data that we desperately needed but didn't have, you know, when you start something new it can be very scary.
It can be very, there's a lot of uncertainty because while we don't like what we had, at least we know what we had and what are we going to get in the future. And so, I was curious about how your department, the immediate benefits that you saw as soon as you implemented it, but also how easy was it to implement a new system so that you could start gathering data?
Sam: So, the implementation, you have to remember when you change, whether it's a tracking board or the way you do business, in periop, you have the surgeons, you have the anesthesiologists and you have your own staff. And initially, you know, some of them, you know, will be very resistant, but we'd like to kind of press through that and let them know that this is what we're going to use. We didn't give them a crutch.
What I see a lot of people when they do major changes like this is they try to keep the old system on one, let's say television for a tracking board and then the new system on another television. Well, as long as you have that, people aren't going to be adopters. It's going to take a long time for them to adopt new technology.
So, we completely took away the old technology. We said, this is a new system. You have to kind of like get a new pair of glasses.
You have to retrain your eyes to look through those lenses. So, the first couple of weeks, there was some challenges. People kind of, you know, especially from anesthesiologists, they're very set in their way and surgeons as well.
And they kind of yelled at us, but we said, no, we're going to stick to this. You cannot say that this is not going to work until you've given it an opportunity to work. So, we just took away the old system.
And then once we started showing them the benefits and the predictability, the analytics that Leap Rail provided, just now, if we tried to go back to the old system, there would be a mutiny and I would not have a job.
Melanie: So, the data helps. And the data helps you with your argument that this is better, that we can know, we can be better prepared for what's to come because we have the data to back up our decision-making.
And I think data speaks to our anesthesiologists and our surgeons in a way that just talking about what we think or what we feel doesn't because data can be measured. And that's very helpful.
Sam: Yes. And one of the key data points that we really look at is, trying to figure out which anesthesiologist to put in what room. You have rooms that finish in eight hours, you have rooms that go in 12 hours. When you schedule through, at least through our platform, Cerner, the case duration accuracy is not the best.
It's probably below 50. It's well below 50%, let's just say that. But when you put it in Leap Rail, it gives you the predictive analytics where it tells you, no, this room is probably going to go until six o'clock in the evening.
So now we know how many rooms we're going to have running past a certain time. We know which anesthesiologist should be in that room, which staff should be in that room based on who's going to be here for that amount of time. So it's really kind of helped get everybody in line. And now it's, like I said, it's our primary way of - our only way of doing work.
Melanie: Okay, I have one more question and I promise I won't monopolize this conversation, but I am a Cerner person. Like this is what we used. And I don't trust Cerner for my case times at all because you can look at how long it books them and you're like, that's not right. We're only going to be here an hour and a half or we're going to be here and there. And so your block times get all messed up.
So how does, and maybe Shayan, maybe this is a question for you, maybe Sam, but how does Leap Rail take the case data? Does it look at the people in the room? Does it aggregate averages of times of that particular case being done? How does it take the data and turn it into an accurate timestamp so that we can really look at our board and see how long our cases are going to go?
Shayan: Yeah, Melanie, that's a great question. So if you think about how Cerner, EPIC or any of the EMRs really do that case duration prediction, they simply look at a surgeon and they say, okay, they have done this type of procedure this many times, we're going to take last three months, six months, whatever it might be and just average it out. And that's the number you get on your quote-unquote schedule, right? But think about the things that were left out of that.
Who's the patient? You're completely ignoring that, right? And we know patients are not created equal. Who is working with the surgeon on this case? I mean, like the staff in the room, who's the anesthesiologist? Have they worked together before? Are they familiar with this procedure? What's their personal relationship like if you work well with certain people and less well with some other people, right? These things are, as an OR manager, as a charge nurse, you probably know, you see those two walking into the same room like, okay, it's going to be an extra 15 minutes here. So one of the approaches that we took at Leap Rail is, well, the technology is advanced enough that we don't need to use a high school average algorithm, right, like just average it out.
We have all this data sitting in the EMR, we have the HMP in there, we assign the staff in advance, we know which room it is in, we know what time of day it is, we know which weekday it is, maybe like on Thursdays and Fridays, things run differently than on Mondays and Tuesdays. So we take all of these elements, about 1,500 data points, and we put it in a machine learning algorithm that gives us a better, more accurate prediction of that time. Now, it's not perfect, it won't get everything right.
I mean, it's still, at the end of the day, an unpredictable thing. We are taking care of a patient on the bed in the room, but the studies that we have done and Harvard Medical School actually used Sam's organization as one of the parties that they did a study for us on, showed 70% improvement in reducing inaccuracies, right? And just exactly what Sam was saying, now you know your rooms are going to be late into the evening, you know where you have gaps, you can accommodate your add-ons, you can have higher confidence when you call the surgeon and say, yes, we can put you in that room at 2:30, it's not going to be 5, right? And these things have a domino effect downstream, right? How does that impact the PACU? How does that impact your overall bed census? All these things kind of interplay with one another. So once you make those types of improvements, it just becomes a much more well-oiled machine.
Melanie: That's incredible. And to think that actually me as a circulator plays a part into that data, like where I get assigned and how I work and what I do and how well I work with or don't work with the other people in the room actually affects the data that's being collected. That is, that's mind-blowing. It makes you feel very important. Like I play a part in this.
Justin: I actually really like how it can evaluate the team, like taking the different team members and sort of taking a look at how they work together. I mean, I can imagine from an efficiency standpoint, you know, there are some things that you likely might know intrinsically if you're a smaller kind of team, but as those teams get bigger, you know, to have that mix and match and trying to figure out where those assignments should go to have the most smoothly running day, I can see that being incredibly helpful.
Carie, so Sam told us about him beginning and he started, you know, as a pilot site six, seven years ago. You're a little bit newer, right? And so can you talk about the process of evaluating Leap Rail and, you know, how did you find them? Let's start there.
How did you find them? And then once you did, why did Baptist Health choose to partner with Leap Rail and really help the organization?
Carie: Sure, we were, we converted to Allscripts in 2017 and were data-poor for a long time. We operationally couldn't get turnover times and first case starts and things like that and block utilization. So we were hungry for it.
And so we went searching for different tools and most of the tools out there sell this gigantic package and we didn't need all of that necessarily. We needed the efficiency metrics and then certain add-ons. And so Leap Rail had that.
They had a menu approach where you can purchase what you need, not just this whole suite of things that you don't need. And also the customization like Shayan saying you can, I mean, I've told him some problems we face. We moved recently last September from one facility to another, we moved our entire hospital and we, you know, we have new challenges at this campus space wise and we implemented the, when the patients check in and have arrived, we send a text message to the physician to let them know what room they're in.
Something simple as that changed the landscape and made our workflow a lot easier. So they work with us like hand in hand, like Sam said earlier for what we need operationally. And making the decision to choose Leap Rail, like I said, when we evaluated all of them, they had the menu approach and they had the fastest standup time. I think we decided in November and we were up in February. I mean, it was four months maybe tops just for analytics. I mean, we didn't do the board at that time and we've since then implemented the OR board.
So we're just doing our thing in phases and Leap Rail works with us on that. And so that's been great for us, great relationship.
Justin: I love the menu factor. And Shayan, I think you built this really well that way because you're meeting your customer where they're at in the process and they also get to prioritize what's important to them. And then you're just earning the business because you're not charging them some huge number. I mean, I even think about, and you know, Carie and Sam, you can chime in on this, but I just think about how these services get purchased and go through contracting and healthcare.
And, you know, the larger the price tag, the more is expected to it to kind of meet in every value prop. And we just know we don't need it for certain solutions for everything, or we don't know we need it. And then, you know, you have a menu situation like this where it's like, oh yeah, well, we've gotten here, now we're ready for this.
And so let's add this on. Is that how you kind of made your decisions, Carie? Because I know you've expanded your services over the last year. Was it really just about almost like a project management prioritization approach to what you would do incrementally over time?
Carie: When we, like I said, originally when we were looking at Leap Rail, it was for analytics and we saw all the tools available.
And then when we came to this new hospital, we did not have a good board solution through our current system and Leap Rail was a better choice. So having such a good relationship helped us make the decision to move forward with more, you know, of Leap Rail.
Shayan: And Justin, that's not uncommon. I mean, we have had probably the same progression at every customer. Part of it is kind of managing the picking a new vendor and like, hey, what, how are we committing and what the ROI, immediate ROI is. But also it's like strategically the organization might be like, if you're focusing on first case on time starts, that's what we need to fix.
Well, they fix that and then another area and opportunity opens up. So now we need to focus on our supply chain side of it, or we want to dig in on our block utilization and engage our surgeons. So it gives them that latitude to align the investment with the strategic direction that the organization wants to go.
Justin: You know, I know we've been speaking to this in kind of the acute setting, you know, hospital setting, but Sam, you're using it at a surgery center. Are there nuances? Is it a little bit different in, you know, that surgery center or ASC setting than it is in a more traditional acute setting?
Sam: You know, when you would talk about the menu approach as far as purchasing Leap Rail, when we first started, we, you know, we have two hospital campuses and we started with both campuses. And then we, once we saw the value, we expanded to our ASC.
And really as far as nuances, the ASCs have just a fast, fast turnovers, but what's nice about it is that all the staff can see the progression of the cases. They know what's been done, what's coming up, but also it gives value because like, if I'm here at the hospital and I'm looking and I can see that the ASC is almost done with their cases and it's only noon and I have a couple of add-ons and I can use those anesthesiologists here at the hospital to get some of these add-ons done. We ask those anesthesiologists to come to the hospital and help clean up, you know, let's get some of these add-ons taken care of.
Same thing when you have, you know, yeah, two hospitals, one team, you, in order to know what was going on at the other hospital, you had to call and find out where are you guys with the cases? How much longer? Well, now we can see both campuses and we can see where they are in their cases. So no, there may have been some nuances like when we first launched it in the ASC, but since then, that's all been dissipated. And now we just basically rely on each other. We can see who has what going on and if someone needs help, how can we help out each other out?
Melanie: I think that's really, really helpful in the, not just with your people utilization, because obviously it is, you're utilizing your rooms well, you're moving people where you need them. You know, if they work at that campus or work at that facility, you can move them around to get your cases done, which obviously helps your staff, helps people get out on time.
Cases aren't sitting around waiting longer because you didn't know that somebody was free. But then you also think about that patient, that add-on patient who needs to go. Maybe they don't need to be emergently added on, but if I had the option to have my case done at two in the afternoon, or I had to wait until nine o'clock at night just because of how things fell, of course I would want to be done earlier so that I could have my case done and then get on with the healing process as any other patient would.
So to think about the downstream effects of patient care, quality patient care, a good patient experience for the patients and their families, that is a great effect to have just by being able to see who you have free, see where they're available and how you can use your staff efficiently. That's fantastic. Right.
Sam: And the other thing one of our orthopedic surgeons wanted is, you know, he said, I want to be able to call and say I have a case and this is what I want to do. And we find the best place for him to do that case, whether it's at the hospital or the ASC based on, you know, the patient's ASA, but also what kind of case it is and where do we have time, who has our earliest availability. And, you know, I mean, of course insurance plays a factor, but at least we can have more options and having all that in one visual makes a big difference.
Melanie: Oh yeah.
Justin: Well, just think about the manpower to do that today. And by the time you figure it out, you might miss your window as well, right? And so, you know, time is of the essence when you're trying to figure that out.
And I'm also thinking about overtime, you know, the cost of healthcare and just how tight our budgets are these days, thinking about paying an enormous amount of overtime in one place when you could have taken care of it at another site within a health system, you know, that has got to have an impact. I mean, I don't know if you've done a study on this, Shayan but just intrinsic, I mean, just intuitively as you're describing the power of having real-time advice being given based on good solid data makes me think it's got to have an impact on reducing the cost of staffing from overtime. And let's face it, we're all worried about burnout from the staff too, right? That's like turnover is another big cost that hits us.
And a lot of times it hits us because people burn out and want to change. And so I feel like managing this more efficiently can really help in the waste that comes from both of those scenarios.
Shayan: Absolutely. And, you know, these, the interconnectedness of this whole world. I mean, if you think about you are at the heart of the hospital and everything else that's kind of connected whether it's staffing, whether it's supplies and the downstream effects of this, this is, if you do a better job of taking care of the patients and provide a more predictable or manageable environment for your staff, that really carries through the organization. And one of the reasons that we have had, some of the growth we have had are, you know, somebody is moving from one organization that has Leap Rail and they go somewhere else.
One of the first calls they make is to us. And I'm really proud of that because that shows that they knew and they felt the value that a system like this can bring, leveraging some of these more advanced technologies and the AI and predictive elements side of it and making it actionable for people on the front line to help them do their job better and really free them up to take advantage of the resources that are at their disposal.
Sam: And I was going to say, you know, one of the things that, there's so many areas of Leap Rail that have been so beneficial. It's kind of hard to put it all in a short conversation, but, you know, patients like predictability, doctors like predictability, staff like predictability. So we gave access to the Leap Rail board to our med surge units. So they know when their patients are going to go to surgery.
We have a 35% add-on rate in our hospital. So, you know, patients know and the staff know when to start getting them ready for surgery. You know, if they know that they're predicted to go at 12 o'clock.
The doctors, they get notifications. If their case is delayed by more than 45 minutes, so they don't have to come out to the hospital and sit around and wait while we are trying to get their case in. That makes them happy.
You know, so it's just, you know, efficiency is a huge part, but, you know, and having staff satisfaction, patient satisfaction does, Leap Rail has a huge impact on that as well.
Melanie: Oh my gosh. I cannot tell you how many times we have gone upstairs to go get a patient and the floor, they, it's no dig at them for not being ready. They have a lot to do, but they weren't informed. They didn't know. And the patient still needs all of the pre-op work done.
And then we're still, we have the room ready to go. We're ready in the OR, but we have an hour to wait before that patient is ready to leave the floor for us to get them down there. And time is lost when, if there were better communication techniques, a better way to keep the floor informed, we could have maybe prevented some of that delay. Maybe not all of it, but we could have definitely improved it.
And I also am curious, Sam, I've asked you a few questions. Carie, I want to ask you one too - when it came to implementing Leap Rail in your facility, did it, did you have to change the way you were currently doing things or did Leap Rail fit into the workflows you already had? How did it look like when you were implementing it?
Carie: It depends on what you're asking. As far as analytics, we did, you know, the first set was analytics. And so no, we didn't have to change anything that was really behind the scenes.
I will tell you one great benefit. At one particular site, we increased the block utilization by 15% by just having, yeah, by just having the data and tools to do what we need to do. And then when we went live with the OR board, we had a little bit of, it was not Leap Rail, but we had a, once we got, let me just say it this way.
Once we got the feed coming live from Allscripts, the only change that we really had to drill into the staff was being a little bit more real-time into their charting so that the board reflected what was going on. Because they're so used to that magnet board, you know, being able to do that at will, that, you know, they could take their time in charting and stuff like that. So that's the only change I would say. And not that they're resistant, but just that's the only thing that we had to push and ask them to do a little bit more diligently.
Justin: I want to go back to the communication piece because I think automating that, it's like one of the things when you're trying to communicate with all those different parties is it really requires somebody to be thoughtful. And it's like, you're almost like automating thoughtfulness by design, it's baked into how you make sure that you're considerate of everybody's time.
I really love how that's been designed into it. You know, there are so many notifications we all get on our phones, you know, like so many apps that you subscribe to, they almost over-communicate with you, right? But it can be really helpful in managing your day-to-day. And yet we really don't take advantage of automated notifications and put guardrails around business practices and healthcare to ensure that we're getting kind of that same automated messaging and reminders about what's going on. So that's really cool.
And Shayan, you shared something with us, you know, in preparation here, and it was a Harvard Medical School study that indicated that leap rail reduces operational inaccuracies like surgical case duration by 70% compared to the other leading EMRs. And I kind of wanted to pose this to Sam and Carie and ask, you know, I think there are probably some people out there that are listening and going, okay, well, I already have an EMR that's doing this for me, right? So why would I need Leap Rail? And I think you've already answered the question, just maybe not as direct, you know, when you start talking about, you know, leveraging a broader data set to refine some of the predictive analytics.
But I also want to hear about some of the actioning that comes from that data, because I think that ties into what, sort of why you would need Leap Rail, even if you already have an EMR stood up.
Sam: So Leap Rail is not just a one solution, it provides so many solutions. So if you have an EHR that does great, you know, case duration accuracy, great, that's awesome. But there's so much more to it for us, its the block utilization, how do you calculate that? We were able to create more blocks and increase our block utilization from what it used to be like in the 60th percentile up to the 80, 90th percentile, because we were able to go back and look and tell the doctors which days they at least used of the month. So we're like, you know, can we take away this block and get it now and we'll have another surgeon that may use it. And we've been able to increase that block utilization, you know, like I said, by at least 30, 40 percent.
And that's huge, that's huge. And then when you look at the case duration accuracy, you know, we've been able to squeeze in more cases. If I know I can run a couple of extra or do a couple of extra cases and go right up to the three o'clock, 3:30 margin, it's fantastic.
And it does kind of result in that efficiency, but also better cost savings for the hospital or increased, you know, revenue for the hospital.
So, Carie, I know you probably have a different look too.
Carie: No, it's a lot of the same.
I will say that case duration accuracy without tools to help you is like a crapshoot. I don't know if that's okay to say or not.
Melanie: I agree, 100%. It's a shot in the dark. I mean, you just don't know.
Carie: It is like the tools we have with our EMR, they're great. Like Shayan said earlier, they average based on six months if they've done three of that procedure. But when you use codified values and things like that, not everything fits in that CPT code. So they might schedule with the CPT code, but they've done five in the room.
So then that average is knocked way out of proportion. And so, and then when you're trying to argue with the surgeon that he can't do a laparoscopic case in 15 minutes, he needs 30 or 45, it's like breaking up with a boyfriend or telling him he's ugly. You know, you really need the data behind it.
Melanie: [laughs] How dare you.
Carie: I know, right? You have to have the data behind it to say, look, I really need you to schedule more. This is from a surgery scheduling perspective. You schedule a little more accurately, not only for you, but the people behind you, because you don't wanna know the day of that you're running till seven or eight o'clock at night for these patients that, you know, if your guidelines suggest and you have to cancel someone, unfortunately, at the end of the day or something like that.
Sam: And I look at the, actually, from the patient's family perspective. You know, if you schedule a case in, like in our case in Cerner, and we say, oh, this is only an hour and a half. Well, Leap Rail tells you, no, this is more like a three-hour case.
We tell the patient's family, this is a three-hour case, so then they don't get into a panic mode at the hour and a half mark, wondering where's my loved one? What's going on with him? Why is it taking so long?
So it does help in so many variables.
Carie: The surgery schedule impacts every aspect almost of everyone's day. So I manage surgery scheduling, so I can really ruin it back here. I can ruin the circulator's day. I can ruin the tech's day.
Melanie: [laughs] Please don’t.
Carie: I can ruin the anesthesiologist's day, the surgeon's day, the patient's day, and the floor. I mean, we affect everyone with that case duration accuracy. I mean, it's by far one of the most important things we can do well.
Sam: And one area I do want to touch on, or two areas - the vendor management. You know, the EMR does not do vendor management.
EMRs, you schedule the cases and you have to manually notify the vendors of the cases and what you're doing. The vendor management tool in Leap Rail is phenomenal. It has reduced the number, or I mean actually, it eliminated the errors as far as, you know, we're doing a case, we're supposed to have this rep here and this is the instruments that we need.
It used to be, you know, like you have to make five, ten phone calls. We quit having to make all these phone calls. It's all done through Leap Rail and the vendors are always there on time with the right instruments that we are looking for. So that's something that's been amazing.
Justin: All right, well, this has been just a phenomenal conversation. I think you all really eloquently outlined the value because I think a lot of times too, with technology solutions and software, et cetera, it can be an abstract discussion. And so it can really be hard for people, especially, you know, on a podcast to wrap their brains around, what's this really look like? What does this mean for me?
But I think really, especially Carie and Sam, just by talking about how this has positively impacted your day-to-day, how you've grown with the company and how Leap Rail has tailored its solutions to just continue to meet where you see opportunities for improvement is just absolutely exceptional. And I just, you know, I'll kind of go through all three of you to just thank you so much for coming on.
But Sam, great job. I wanna thank you for coming on the show and Carie, you as well. Thank you so much for sharing your insights.
It sounds like you really closed us really good there because I think you really talked about, I was waiting for you to say something along the lines of, I can mess up your day and don't you forget it. Cause you know, I'm sure, yeah. I'm sure it takes the stress off of the, cause there's a lot of pressure with that, right? You're worried about ruining people's days in that role and having that pressure be taken off of you and knowing that, you know, you can have the confidence to make some of these decisions and not have repercussions is really critical.
So great job, thanks for coming on.
Carie: Of course, thank you.
Justin: And Shayan, you as well, thanks for really taking an approach to healthcare that's refreshing and needed in terms of how you offer your services and how you tailor them by really listening to the people that are utilizing it on a day-to-day basis. So really appreciate your refreshing perspective and fresh eyes on, you know, what has been a challenging, many areas of challenge, I think, for especially around operational efficiencies in healthcare. So thank you for your insights and bringing this team together to have the discussion today.
Shayan: No, thanks for having me.
And I want to thank Sam, Carie and other customers who have been, you know, the heroes that we try to emulate their passion and their insights into our solution. Without them, none of this would be possible. So I appreciate all of you.
Justin: All right, everyone. That was Shayan Zadeh, CEO of Leap Rail and Carie Helt, Surgical Services Business Manager at Baptist Healthcare in Pensacola and Sam Shahin, Manager of Perioperative Services at North Bay Medical Center out in California. A great conversation today.