Endless waiting.
This is a reality in healthcare that leads to enormous frustration and deep patient dissatisfaction.One startup that has rolled out tools to turn this around is Lean TaaS.
In a recent interview, Mohan Giridharadas, CEO of the Santa Clara, California-based company, said that LeanTaaS has “created a software-as-a-service category” that aims to unlock capacity for healthcare providers. The company currently employs more than 300 people and has contracts with more than 500 health systems.
Giridharadas said his company’s goal is to close the gap between clinical and operational complexity in healthcare, as he believes the latter is at least a decade behind the former. LeanTaaS does this by developing machine learning to optimize suppliers’ capabilities.
“Our job is to unlock productivity. The health system’s job is to monetize productivity,” he said.
With more than 500 health system customers nationwide, LeanTaas increases productivity primarily through its three flagship SaaS products designed to optimize infusion chair, operating room and hospital bed capacity.
Giridharadas claims that measuring the impact of unlocked capacity is simple, so it’s easy for health system customers to understand the value of the SaaS offerings they’re adopting. Examples of this include health systems tracking how much the number of procedures or infusions they perform has increased over the year since the service was implemented, or tracking how their unit cost of delivering clinical services has decreased.
After implementing a SaaS product focused on freeing up capacity, health systems often see a difference in productivity easily, Giridharadas said.For example, after Dignity Health adopted LeanTaaS’s operating room service, which was designed to increase capacity through an active block release model, the health system found that it achieved 153% increase In blocks released between 2019 and 2020.
These results, Giridharadas said, are why LeanTaaS offers a 100% money-back guarantee and cancel at any time clause in its contracts. While these contract capabilities may set LeanTaaS apart from competitors like Qventus and XSOLIS, Giridharadas said his company’s biggest competitor is a vendor that believes they can handle capacity optimization on their own.
“The health system hasn’t fully realized the power of this,” he said. “They generally think that if they have two or three analysts and two or three data scientists, they can piece something together and do it without fully understanding the level of sophistication and investment required to optimize capabilities better.”
While things like infusion scheduling may seem easy for hospitals to optimize, Giridharadas believes that in order to do so effectively, it requires extreme attention to detail and a comprehensive approach. Knowing that his company had spent seven years and “tens of millions of dollars” building infusion scheduling optimization software, he said there was no way hospitals could produce the same results by building in-house tools.
He thinks it’s also a mistake to think that expensive EHRs — hospitals sometimes spend tens of millions of dollars to adopt — can handle capacity optimization.
While EHRs can serve as excellent repositories for patient data and financial information, he says they simply don’t have the level of AI sophistication built in to achieve the level of optimization needed to produce measurable results year over year.
Giridharadas shared an analogy for LeanTaaS telling the health system that they thought the amount of money they put into the EHR meant the system would provide a premium capacity optimization tool: You can buy a new car for $40,000, but it’s summer and you want to go water skiing . There’s no need to complain that you paid $40,000 for a car if it wasn’t going to water ski. If you want to go water skiing, you need a boat, so it’s different.
“We believe we are an intelligence, prescriptive and predictive layer on top of the EHR that leverages your previous investments,” he said. “Our software leverages all the data and knowledge and builds operational excellence on top of it.”
Photo: shylendrahoode, Getty Images
