Mohan Giridharadas is Founder & CEO at LeanTaaS, a market leader in providing AI-powered and SaaS-based capability management, staffing, and patient flow software for health systems. The corporate’s software is getting used by over 175 health systems across the country. LeanTaaS recently became the primary digital health company to surpass a $1 billion valuation with the acquisition of Hospital IQ on January 10, 2023, which also follows Bain Capital acquiring a majority stake in the corporate on June 6, 2022.
You knew from an early age that you just desired to be an engineer, what sparked this interest?
Growing up, my dad was an engineer, in addition to all three of my older brothers. I used to be all the time on a better education path and ultimately entered IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) in Bombay. I studied electrical engineering in undergrad before coming to america and landing at Georgia Tech University for my Masters in Computer Science, after which Stanford University for my MBA.
You worked at McKinsey & Company for 18 years, what were among the projects that you just worked on and what were some lessons that you just learned from the experience?
At McKinsey, I ran Lean Manufacturing and Lean Service Operations in North America, plus Lean Operations and Lean Service Operations in APAC. I left at the tip of 2009 with two important ideas for starting LeanTaaS. First, I noticed that operational improvement projects in all places were happening on the back of excel spreadsheets. Moreover, any form of process improvement efforts require a project team — whether or not they’re internal or external. These sorts of teams have project jobs which might be always evolving with regardless of the top of mind project could also be. My vision of starting LeanTaaS was with the ability to deliver lean transformation capabilities that replace excel-level math with sophisticated math, and replacing the necessity for an on-the-ground project team with a Software as a Service (“SaaS”) platform.
Could you share the story of how an informal conversation at a Silicon Valley cocktail party led to the founding of LeanTaaS?
In Silicon Valley, any cocktail or banquet inevitably hosts individuals who have began corporations, sold corporations, or taken them public. I used to be at considered one of these parties and someone recent asked me what I did. I told him I used to be at McKinsey, but I had already decided I used to be leaving to begin a software company. I wasn’t exactly sure of what it was going to be at that time. He checked out me, and said “that’s a fairly daring leap.” He explained that in my current role at McKinsey, I had the power to get on the calendar of any chief executive. If I left to begin my very own company, with out a product, technology, funding, customers — who was going to see me then? I used to be in my very own head about this for some time, but ultimately I used this conversation as a foundational constructing block. My recent company needed to be something that would leverage the talents that had taken me 20 years to construct, while also being disruptive and distinctive within the software space. This pivotal conversation helped me narrow down possibilities and give attention to constructing a thematic software company with a really clear mission and purpose.
The unique vision of LeanTaaS was broad, what made you pivot to give attention to healthcare?
The LeanTaaS journey began in 2010 with an industry-agnostic approach. We were working with roughly 20 corporations, including Google, Home Depot, and Flextronics to enhance operational performance through custom-built SaaS applications.
Then, in 2013, we partnered with Stanford Health Care to unravel their infusion scheduling challenge. We created an algorithm designed to optimally match available supply with ongoing demand signals. I knew from my past experience that matching supply and demand in an analytically rigorous manner is vital to optimizing operational performance. Our solution worked, and we spent the subsequent 18 months refining our algorithms and creating our first product, iQueue for Infusion Centers. In 2015, we pivoted to focus entirely on healthcare.
What are among the machine learning technologies which might be used to assist optimize operations for hospitals and healthcare institutions?
As an increasing number of healthcare data gets digitized, the chance exists to leverage that data to assist providers more efficiently match supply and demand. Machine learning technologies have mathematical capabilities far beyond the human mind, and have been increasingly utilized to optimize operations in hospitals and infusion centers. These technologies leverage data-driven insights to enhance efficiency, patient outcomes, and resource allocation. A few of the distinguished machine learning technologies in healthcare optimization include:
Predictive Analytics: Machine learning algorithms can analyze historical data to predict patient admission rates, disease outbreaks, and patient outcomes. This helps hospitals allocate resources more effectively and plan for potential surges in patient demand.
Patient Flow Management: Machine learning can optimize patient flow by predicting discharge times or barriers, bed availability, and patient movement inside the hospital. This reduces waiting times, improves patient satisfaction, and enhances resource utilization.
Resource Allocation and Scheduling: Machine learning can assist in scheduling hospital staff, operating rooms, and equipment based on historical data and real-time demand, ensuring optimal resource allocation. That is critical through the current healthcare staffing crisis.
How does LeanTaaS help mitigate healthcare staffing shortages?
Our technology, powered by AI and predictive analytics and fed by the health system’s historic and real-time data, supports health system leaders in fully optimizing their available workforce across inpatient units, infusion centers, and operating rooms. We do that through several ways:
Staffing solutions, to make sure available staff are configured across inpatient areas to best meet the needs of current and future patients. For instance, iQueue for Inpatient Flow offers a staffing module that gives visibility across a whole health system, giving unit nursing leaders and the staffing office the time and insight to proactively discover staffing gaps and allocate available resources to best address barriers and meet individual patient needs. Using iQueue for Inpatient Flow, Health First achieved a 44% reduction in core floating across the health system to different levels of care, a 45-minute reduction in communicating the each day staffing plan, and 500 calls eliminated monthly to deploy staff.
Optimized scheduling tools that ensure staff work predictable, consistent days and take needed breaks. For instance, iQueue for Infusion Centers empowers infusion leaders to create optimized schedules that think about appointment mix, nurse and chair resources, and linked appointments. These schedules “smooth” midday peaks in each day schedules by placing appointments in optimal times, and predict likely add-on and no-show patients in upcoming days to offer nurses consistent workloads that allow for normal breaks. With iQueue for Infusion Centers, Oregon Health & Science University achieved a 39% decrease in percent of days over max capability, 14% decrease in peak chair utilization, and 31% decrease in running past scheduled close.
Features that reduce or eliminate time-consuming or stressful tasks for employees of their day-to-day work. For instance, iQueue for Operating Rooms provides modules that simplify and digitize the booking processes within the OR, show a single source of truth for OR scheduling information, and permit schedulers to release time or request a case booking not with multiple phone calls, but with one click. Through the use of iQueue for Operating Rooms, Baptist Health Jacksonville achieved a 46% reduction in abandoned calls, 4 additional cases scheduled each day per hospital, a 50% decrease in average handle time of calls, and 40% reduced call volume at their largest hospital.
Are you able to discuss among the core features that assist with automating patient flow?
Managing inpatient capability is one of the vital critical challenges for hospitals. It requires a fancy balancing act of coordinating bed availability, patient throughput, and staffing must be certain that the best resources can be found to accommodate patient demand. Without the power to proactively manage capability and staffing, bottlenecks occur that impact patient flow, prompting high wait times, long lengths of stay, diversions, or patients leaving without being treated. This form of operational practice leads to inadequate patient care, reduced staff satisfaction, and lost revenue for the hospital.
LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Inpatient Flow solution empowers hospital leaders and frontline teams to coordinate bed availability, patient throughput, and staffing needs in unison to make sure capability is accessible, priorities are aligned across care teams, and staff are allocated to the areas where they’re needed most. iQueue gathers and analyzes data from existing systems (e.g. EHR, patient flow, workforce management, etc.) to dynamically adjust their capability. iQueue supports every team member by always monitoring the operational health of their hospital to offer real-time insights and pinpoint barriers, allowing them to organize for what’s coming. Through technology-enabled automation and transparency, hospitals can improve the best way they work by proactively managing capability to drive care progression, orchestrating each day discharges and transfers, and streamlining each day staffing.
For a lot of hospitals, LeanTaaS was instrumental in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, what sort of results were seen?
The COVID-19 pandemic very publicly pushed hospitals to the sting of their capability. On the demand side, more patients suddenly needed intensive medical care, while on the availability side, there have been shortages in PPE, then ICU beds, then regular beds, and eventually nursing staff. To at the present time, hospital margins are razor thin from increased patient loads and decreased elective procedures. Without the power to expand their footprint or buy more assets, hospitals have needed to shift their focus to getting more out of their existing assets.
LeanTaaS solutions helped hospitals schedule surgeries, reduce administrative tasks, and ultimately turn into more cost-efficient — a win-win-win situation. For instance, through the pandemic Novant Health faced a shortage of accessible operating room time, 8,000 postponed surgical cases, and low block utilization. The system implemented iQueue for Operating Rooms to assist improve OR capability and supply surgeons and their schedulers with a tool that made OR time easy to view, access, and share. The tool proved vital in navigating the aftermath of the return of surgical cases. Novant Health increased case volume by 4% and cleared its entire backlog, which had accrued over 75-90 days, in only an extra 90 days. They ultimately realized a 6.15X ROI, together with a greater breadth of engagement from surgeons and their practice administrators.
What are among the challenges behind bringing healthcare into the fashionable era?
Traditionally, the healthcare industry has been defined by its antiquated legacy infrastructure that admires problems moderately than proactively solves them; its special obligation to safety and accuracy that daunts trusting newer technologies; and eventually, as financial resources are precious, its leaders cannot risk investing with out a guaranteed reward. The pandemic actually helped change this tune. Health systems needed to rapidly adopt digital solutions like telehealth and our capability management solutions to keep up access to care, and in the method they proved provider and patient demand for cutting-edge solutions, ROI, and that they could possibly be more fast and agile in adopting technology than they even knew themselves.
After a long time of lagging behind other industries, this recent surge in digital transformation is positioning healthcare to skip a technology generation. It cannot catch as much as consumerism, but it may leap ahead and lead the charge into AI. Healthcare leaders now know how one can prioritize safety, privacy, immediate results, and proven return on investment of their technology, which must offer truly supportive and useful workflows that preserve and enhance human expertise. In digitizing so rapidly, they’ve built the infrastructure needed to sustain recent AI-based technologies with security.
Nonetheless, a critical element of bringing recent technology to healthcare is change management. Technology alone doesn’t yield sustainable transformation. It should be paired with change management experts who can guide organizations through disruption towards results. That’s why earlier this yr, LeanTaaS announced the launch of Transformation as a Service (TaaS), a first-of-its-kind service that guarantees outcomes. The TaaS offering provides each customer with a dedicated team that delivers the required services for implementing our technology, ensuring normalized data hygiene, automating and digitizing existing workflows, driving change management, establishing systemwide governance, and guaranteeing success.
Is there anything that you desire to to share about LeanTaaS?
We’re continually listening to our customers and innovating based on their specific needs and advancements in AI. As such, we recently launched iQueue Autopilot, a first-of-its-kind, generative AI solution for hospital operations that gives hospital leaders with human-like conversations and actionable insights to support decision-making for patient flow, scheduling, command center, block management, staffing, and other capability management use cases across each inpatient and outpatient settings. Given such accessible, immediate, and powerful support, hospital leaders will have the ability drive higher financial results and increase access to care; nurses and providers can freely dedicate their time and highest attention to patients; and staff can operate productively day-to-day while avoiding burnout. With iQueue Autopilot, LeanTaaS is bringing our vision of “air traffic control” for healthcare — managing patient flow and capability optimization across the continuum of care on one single platform — to life.