Beyond The Device: Mobilizing Healthcare Workflow with Altus

Traveling from room to room and floor to floor in a clinical or hospital setting is already exhausting enough. But bringing a heavy and uncomfortable workstation around brings the effort to another level. So nurses want something that’s functional, mobile, and easy to use. That way, they can easily bring workstations wherever needed to improve patients outcomes. 

Joe Hillebrand and Steven Gapski from Altus join Reid Estreicher and the Beyond the Device Podcast to discuss how Altus-Inc. healthcare workstations and carts increase mobility in clinical environments.   Altus designed carts are built for clinical environments that are ergonomically friendly, easily hold computers, keyboards, and other tools used for data recording, management, and gathering so that nurses can get the vitals of patients from their bedside or in the ER without the need to travel back to the nurse's station to manually input the information.

Transcript

Reid E (00:05):

Two one and we are live and by live, I mean, we're prerecording this in case we make any mistakes. We can edit it down for you later. Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Beyond The Device. I'm joined today with the fantastic team from Altus, we're going to get right into what Altus is, who they are, why they're important for you guys and why you should know about them in the world of healthcare. But before we do that, we're going to introduce you guys to the team. I work with Steven and Joe on a regular basis, but you guys listening or watching might not. So Steven Gapski and excuse me, Steven Gapski. slurring my speech and Joe Hillebrand are joining with us today. Joe, over to you first for an intro and then over to Steven and we'll get right into it. So who are you, sir? And what do you do for all this?

Joe H (00:46):

Thanks Reid. So you all know my name, Joe Hillebrand. I am the national sales director, manage our field sales team as well as a lot of our channel efforts.

Reid E (00:55):

Awesome. Mr. Steven Gapski, over to you, sir.

Steven G (00:58):

Thanks Reid. Steven Gapski here and I am our channel manager for Altus.

Reid E (01:03):

And thank you guys for introducing yourselves. Before we go any further, let's get right into the why Altus message because I'd like to start with the why first. Shout out to Simon Sinek, those of you who have heard of the book Start With Why. Steven over to you, sir? Why Altus?

Steven G (01:17):

Yeah, so I'll bring up a few different reasons we're different from some other companies. The first being our products, it's an extremely durable product. It's a stylish product. It's an ergonomic product. From our aluminum legs to our rust corrosion, our corrosion resistant casters and our non porous healthcare grade work services, especially nowadays with the pandemic. Clean is very important in hospitals. So our non-porous healthcare grade work service doesn't degrade throughout the years. I've talked to some customers recently that have had carts in their facilities for 12 plus years. So it just shows you how durable the Altus product is.

Reid E (01:59):

Yeah.

Steven G (01:59):

How we're different for our partners? We like to say we're a 50 50 partnership, but our Altus area sales managers are happy to be out there being the heavy lifters for the partners, whether it be being on location as the product experts, helping unbox and deploy carts and helping run through evaluation samples with their customers. We're happy to do that.

Reid E (02:22):

Awesome.

Steven G (02:22):

And then we're also not a shoot by the hip company. We're not doing our job right if the carts aren't working well in the customer's workflow. So we'll go out there and go through the whole evaluation process to make sure that the carts is the right fit for the customer. The accessories are the right first fit for the customer all the way down the line to make sure that they're happy with us.

Reid E (02:44):

That's awesome.

Steven G (02:45):

And then lastly.

Reid E (02:47):

Yeah, please.

Steven G (02:47):

Lastly, is a company as a whole, we leverage a US based supply chain. We use a lot of US based suppliers, mainly most of them are based out of Michigan. And so we leveraged the US based supply chain, not really running into supply chain issues right now whereas we see in the IT field, there is some supply chain issues. And last thing I'll leave you with is our three core values are something that we pride ourselves on determined, always improving, and customer first. I just want to touch on customer first. As I said earlier, we're going to do what we can, whether it be evaluation samples, custom product, what we can to make sure what we're doing is the right for thing for the customer's workflow.

Reid E (03:34):

Awesome. Thank you for that. Yeah. I mean, going back to the very top of what you were saying, I mean, from a quality perspective, having carts and workstations on wheels, cows and wows, computers and wheels in a hospital system for 12 plus years is I think that's a pretty remarkable stamp of approval on the quality of the product. And also the customer support thing too, kind of an important deal, right? You got to make sure you're supporting the people who are buying your product, especially now, as we just talked about this on another episode with Bio Key people, just because of the way the quarterly profits are run, they usually try to squeeze companies to be very lean. And as a result, the customer support piece of that and the service support around it tends to wane, just get kicked over to chatbots and 1-800 numbers that get outsourced somewhere overseas.

Reid E (04:20):

So it's definitely a nice thing to have somebody that's taking one more step and actually putting resources into customer support and satisfaction. And then also I was actually was going to talk about it later, but you already brought it up. So we might want to jump into it now, just because it's top of mind. The lead time thing, man, that's crushing for a lot of organizations. And the fact that you guys manufacture here in the US, I think goes to say a lot about the intelligent design behind the organization and the fact that you've thought this thing through. Last year people were hemming and hawing a little bit. It was like, you heard the initial rumblings, I should say, now they're hemming and hawing about it. But initially it was some rumblings about supply chain issue. And you guys clearly got ahead of that, which is pretty remarkable.

Joe H (05:08):

Yeah. Yeah. That's a huge issue. The first thing out of the customer's mouth these days is what are your lead times? What's in stock? What do you have? We've got 50 different SKUs. So we intelligently forecast our sales in advance. We have the appropriate stock. Of course, leveraging local suppliers is key for us. And it allows us to offer our 10 day quick ship program, which is guaranteed to ship out our door in 10 days or less on all quantities, 20 or less so.

Reid E (05:41):

That's great.

Joe H (05:42):

Yeah.

Reid E (05:44):

Yeah. That's again, it's a big deal. If you're trying to get product, man I have seen some crazy lead times and conversations recently going up to 52 weeks. And those of you who are not familiar with the calendar year, that's a calendar year. So 52 weeks, a long, long lead time. So yeah. Very important that you guys got ahead of this. But maybe we can go back and maybe talk about some use cases and problems the way that you guys solve some of those things that you see in a hospital system typically.

Joe H (06:17):

Yeah. So you hear a cart's a cart's a cart. We try and differentiate ourselves from the commodity conversation.

Reid E (06:26):

Sure.

Joe H (06:27):

But health systems really look at these products like they're buying a rental car fleet. It's going to be used, it's going to be abused. A bunch of different people are going to have access to it. So in that sense, they try and commoditize it. But we've sort of move around that. Yes, it's a commodity. Yes. We hit all the permission to play features. It's going to be durable, but we go the extra mile with some of the ergonomic micro adjustments, some of the human factors, the intuitiveness of using it. And then most importantly, the mobility. Our carts are light. They're easy to push pull. So that's a huge differentiator in the market right now for us.

Reid E (07:09):

Yeah. I was going to make a comment, the easy push pull, if your product is super heavy and it's a pain in the butt to move around, you're probably not going to want to use it very long.

Joe H (07:19):

Yeah. Nurses tend to be on the shorter side and the smaller side, a lot of them are women. So having this big, bulky cart that you know is pushing 200 pounds, it has some old casters, they've got sutures in them, hairs in them, picks up all this stuff. It's just not a good experience for them. And when you're in a health system and you've got thousands of these throughout the hospital, you want your nurse to be able to walk up to it and not have that sort of cringy feel like, "Oh my God, I got to push this giant thing into the room."

Reid E (07:47):

Yeah.

Joe H (07:48):

And then go through my whole workflow. So improving that is what we believe in. And we create products to hit the nurses' need.

Reid E (07:57):

So where would we, where would one find Altuss in a hospital? Let's say you walk into a hospital. We've already talked about roll stands, tablet roll stands, bedside. Can you maybe just talk about the various places that you guys, what you found in the use cases for those?

Joe H (08:17):

Yeah. So anywhere there's a computer and a clinician is using that computer to chart essentially. So med surg floors, ER, any care setting you're going to find our products or a like product, because the nurses need to push the cart with the computer into the room and they need to chart bedside. That's sort of in the name of the game of reducing medication errors.

Reid E (08:40):

Hmm.

Joe H (08:41):

Medication errors and charting errors, imagine 15, 20 years ago, nurse walks in, how you feeling? What's your blood pressure? She writes it on a chart, scribbles it, or maybe walks back to the nurse's station forgetting three or four numbers on the way, puts it into the system. Boom, you've got an error. So this product came about 10 years ago when there was a mass migration to electronic health records. So the clinicians now, instead of the charts, we've got to have a computer. We need these in the bedside.

Reid E (09:13):

Yeah.

Joe H (09:13):

We need to wheel them around. So.

Reid E (09:13):

Gotcha. Okay.

Joe H (09:13):

Yeah.

Reid E (09:16):

What about physically on rail mount? Do you guys do anything in that space?

Joe H (09:23):

We see a lot of demand for that, but we haven't got into it yet. A lot of those applications are more geared towards patient engagement where you can choose a lunch menu, whatever you want to eat, you can call the nurse, you can watch TV. So that's more patient experience. We focus a lot on the clinician experience and the clinician workflow, but they all tie together.

Reid E (09:47):

Yeah, absolutely.

Joe H (09:48):

Health systems are all chasing patient satisfaction scores. So if we can improve the life of the clinician, they can improve the life of the patient. They're going to get a better score.

Reid E (10:02):

And what is that score called? I always, is it CAP?

Joe H (10:03):

HCAP.

Reid E (10:04):

HCAP. That's right. Yeah.

Joe H (10:04):

Yeah.

Reid E (10:04):

Your HCAP scores. Those are pretty important.

Joe H (10:07):

Yeah. If you have a bad care experience and you want to get a callback from a facility, you fill out that survey that you get and if it's negative, someone will call you guaranteed. Hospitals care a lot about them. It affects their reimbursement rates. So if they're getting bad...

Reid E (10:25):

Ah.

Joe H (10:25):

Yeah. So that's, and that, yeah.

Reid E (10:27):

It's always money, man. It's always money. It's like, see, they really care. Oh about the money. Got it. Okay.

Joe H (10:33):

Well yes, yes. Everyone is driven on reimbursements in healthcare, so yeah.

Reid E (10:37):

Yeah.

Joe H (10:38):

But no, it's a great way, as a patient, you love to see that hospitals pay attention to that kind of stuff. They're always looking to improve. How can we improve the patient experience? And then they've added, how can we improve the clinician experience? Which is great for us. Right.

Reid E (10:53):

Right.

Joe H (10:54):

It's like, patient, patient, patient. Let's give some attention to the nurses, especially after this pandemic. How can we improve the lives of them?

Reid E (11:02):

Yeah.

Joe H (11:03):

We've got labor shortages. We've got overwork clinicians. We're seeing a lot of demand. Hey, let's give them what they want in the cart. Something that they enjoy using.

Reid E (11:13):

Yeah. Imagine that if you didn't just like the physical day to day of your job is so grueling that you're like, "I just don't want to do this anymore." Because we've had a huge problem. And this is actually, this came out recently, I want to say in a Post article or maybe the say Washington Post I'd have to look this up. Maybe somebody that put it in the comment section, but it was an article about the nurses leaving up even before COVID because of work conditions.

Reid E (11:42):

And again, just trying to squeeze profit out anywhere you possibly could within a hospital system. So then you have all of the craziness of COVID and then it's like you're working with these antiquated machine, some of these carts that I've seen in the hospital space are just massive. My mother unfortunately spent a lot of time in a hospital in the last year of her life. But being there, you see these massive systems and you're like, "God, that would be awful to move around every day." So just an intelligent design making life that much more simple. It's like, yeah. Why can't we support the nurses, right.

Joe H (12:15):

Yeah. Yeah. And there was, yeah. Going back to the beginning, they were slapping these big CRT monitors on the carts, these giant CPU boxes and then ergonomics came into play. Occupational health in the hospital's like, "Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa. We've got some standards here."

Reid E (12:32):

Yeah.

Joe H (12:32):

"That we need to hit." And that's when sort of this space took off with ergonomics and some of the players got involved. Altus started in 2001 as an ergonomic office furniture manufacturer. So it was just a nice natural progression into healthcare where we understand the space. We understand proper push pull movement, proper height for keyboards and monitors. And sometimes I think it gets shoved to the side. But post pandemic, these tiny features and benefits are going to be more important for us moving.

Reid E (13:08):

Absolutely. And speaking of pandemic, I did want to touch on that a little bit as well. What have you seen? Because I know that at the start of this, it was like buy everything that you could get your hands on. I mean literally tablet roll stands, carts, workstation on wheels, computer on wheels, workstations on wheels. Those things were impossible to find. And there were six month lead times, not because of the logistics issue that we're experiencing currently. Everything was purchased. Now it seems that there's been an over purchase. I know here in Chicago, we had the McCormick Center that was sent up as a triage wing for the overflow for the hospitals. And I actually think we only had one or two people in the entire space, but what are you guys seeing from the perspective of hospitals and care systems throughout the nation now that there was that panic purchase that happened. Are we sitting on an excess of these things? Or are these carts and these stands, I mean, I'm assuming they're still needed, correct?

Joe H (14:10):

Yeah. Hospitals have an affinity just to buy these. Even if they buy a thousand a year, it just seems like they continue to buy and buy and buy. Part of that problem is lost equipment, misplaced. Things get lost.

Reid E (14:23):

Damaged.

Joe H (14:23):

And damaged and they get thrown into a corner and then they'd never get repaired. But yeah, that was our fear going into 2022 was, "Hey, we sold a bunch to existing customers," and even gained some new customers too given our lead times. But we haven't seen a slowdown yet. I think what's going to happen is with inflation, the labor shortages and at the reimbursement rates that I mentioned before, as a supplier, our costs are going up and as a health system, their goal is to save money.

Reid E (14:59):

Yeah.

Joe H (14:59):

So we've got this weird dichotomy that always exists in healthcare sales, but it's interesting to see sort of the dust settle after COVID and we're still in that feeling out period where things are starting to get back to normal. Hey, let's strategically think about these products more. Is it the right fit for the nurses? Where during the pandemic, it was almost like I was in a call center. It's like, "Hey, I need a thousand of these carts by next week and I'm across the country and I need a thousand now and I need 500 now." So it was crazy, but yeah, we have seen some calm down. They're not just writing checks and then getting delivery. They're more strategic about it. So it's back to normal a little bit.

Reid E (15:38):

Yeah. Gotcha. So which is again, why it's so important to go back to the top of what Steven was saying earlier about the various call outs in the why Altus messaging. I like to say back to what I was talking about to reiterate what you were saying at the top about the 12 plus years being in a hospital system. I think it's a pretty solid total cost of ownership, right?

Steven G (16:00):

I'd say so.

Reid E (16:02):

Yeah. I don't think anyone would be upset with that, but oh please.

Joe H (16:06):

Oh, I was going to say, yeah, we're in sales here. It's not, yes, hey, I love that. You've got our cart still. And I love going in there and checking the serial number and seeing it's from 2001 or 2005, but at the same time, in sales it's like, eh, maybe time for an upgrade.

Reid E (16:24):

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, fair enough. I was trying get on the point that you guys make great product, but yes.

Joe H (16:29):

Oh yes, yes.

Reid E (16:30):

Buy more of it, 100 percent. Yeah, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So Steven, over to you, what's the best way to partner with Altus?

Steven G (16:38):

Yeah. I mean the best way is just get in contact. Like I mentioned earlier, we have the boots on the ground. Our reps are actively going in and finding these projects. But if you have a current vendor that's, you're looking to fill a void, reach out to Altus in any way. And as I mentioned, we're customer first, so we're happy to be on location, be in customer meetings, whatever needs to be done to be customer first for these accounts.

Reid E (17:09):

Can you guys bring in demo gear? If somebody was like, "Hey, I'm interested in one of your roll stand cards and a tablet roll stand. Can I see these things in person?"

Steven G (17:15):

Of course, of course. Yeah. Altus has an awesome evaluation sample program. We're happy to ship out a cart or roll stand, or even a wall mount for however long the customer wants to evaluate it for. We know projects sometimes take a little bit longer than they originally planned on, but the cart with all the accessories needed during the process, if you need additional accessories, we're happy to get out there and add them onto the cart. We'll do what it takes to match your workflow.

Reid E (17:45):

Awesome. That's pretty good from a support perspective, especially what we were talking about earlier customer support. So yeah, if you would like to see any of these things, we absolutely can get them in front of you. Well, look, this is, I mean, it's roll stands. It's tablet. It's wall-mounted computer workstations. I don't know how much more complicated the conversation has to be than that. It's pretty straightforward stuff. I'd love to figure out for a call to action for us. I mean, people can always reach out to at sales at 3eyetech.com. Is there a partner portal? Anything that people should be aware of on the reseller front or anything from the customers side?

Joe H (18:20):

We are in the process of launching our partner portal. Of course, they can work through your team to start, but yeah.

Reid E (18:28):

Okay.

Joe H (18:29):

We will be up and running and ready to fire with our partner portal. We'll have content, co-branded literature, all the support you could need, priceless, spiffs, rebates, MDFs, all the good stuff.

Reid E (18:39):

All the good stuff.

Joe H (18:41):

All good stuff. Yeah. Yep.

Reid E (18:42):

All the good stuff.

Joe H (18:43):

Yeah.

Reid E (18:44):

Closing comments to you guys. Wrap up in closing comments. And then that brings us stay in episode.

Joe H (18:51):

I'll let Stephen go.

Steven G (18:53):

Yeah, no, like I said earlier, we're looking forward to working with everyone. If there's some products out there that need to fill some void, feel free to reach out to Altus and we'll be happy to make the customers happy.

Reid E (19:05):

Absolutely. Thank you, Steven. Go over to you, sir.

Joe H (19:09):

Reach out. Yeah. We're here to help. Like Steven said, we like to do the heavy lifting. Evaluation samples is a company metric we track weekly. So we like to get those out. It's a huge buying indicator from our customers. So hit us up.

Reid E (19:24):

Awesome. And guys, thank you so much that'll bring us to the end of this episode, but thank you so much for watching or listening, depending on the medium that you decided to tune in to view this content or listen to this content. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave them in the comment section below. You can do that. Let us know what you thought about this episode. If you want to hear more content like this, we can always film more content for you guys. And if you have any questions, please do reach out to us sales at 3eyetech.com. It's another way to get ahold of us at sales. The number three E Y E T E C H.com. Thank you guys so much for tuning in, be sure to hit like, and subscribe and tune in for another episode of Beyond The Device. Next time I think it's with INA, the push to talk to solution. Thanks guys for tuning in. Cheers.