Sheila Minton, President and Chief Executive Officer at TAGNOS, was recently featured as a guest on Becker’s Healthcare Podcast where she discussed Hospital Interoperability.
Armed with 15 years of experience in healthcare, computer science, and data analytics, Sheila speaks to the challenges and opportunities hospitals face today when trying to achieve broad interoperability within their healthcare organizations and potential approaches to see better results.
Here is a link to the audio version of the podcast on Becker’s Healthcare:
For the video version of the podcast:
For your convenience, the transcription of the podcast is provided below.
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Sheila Minton, President and Chief Executive Officer at TAGNOS, Aired Thursday July 15, 2021
Sponsored by TAGNOS
Interviewer: Laura from Becker’s Healthcare
Guest Podcaster: Sheila Minton, President and Chief Executive Officer at TAGNOS
Laura: Hi everyone. And thank you for tuning into the Becker’s Healthcare podcast. Today I’m pleased to be joined by Sheila Minton, president and chief executive officer at TAGNOS. Sheila is driving innovative healthcare solutions for TAGNOS clients, and ultimately the patients they serve, with 15 years of experience within the healthcare industry and an extensive background in computer science and data analytics. She has implemented numerous technology solutions and healthcare systems in organizations. Sheila, thank you so much for talking with us today.
Sheila: Thanks Laura. Thanks for having me.
Laura: So let’s jump right into our conversation. To begin can you share your impressions about where healthcare stands in terms of achieving broad interoperability?
Sheila: Yeah, that’s an awesome question to get started with. I think that essentially healthcare organizations are doing a lot of things to try to achieve broad interoperability, but are having a really hard time figuring out kind of which end to grab it from. There are so many components and parts and pieces to achieving broad interoperability that it’s a difficult task to kind of boil that down to where should we start and where should we focus? I’ve also noticed a bit that there tends to be at times a hyper-focus on the technology and the various components of the technology.
We look at the problems that operating rooms deal with on a daily basis with workflow and patient throughput… we’re leveraging data from EMR, RTLS, voice command data, door sensor data, and we’re doing HVAC integrations to help promote the quality, safety and ultimate efficiency of how our ORs operate.
Sheila Minton, President and Chief Executive Officer at TAGNOS
I think that that sometimes leads healthcare organizations to sort of not see the forest for the trees, which I think can then lead to not seeing real results with all the work and the investments that healthcare organizations are making in trying to achieve interoperability. So with that being the case, my big push is to start with the end in mind, think about what it is that you want to achieve and work backwards from that.
Laura: That’s a really great point, you know, where our health systems still running into challenges with regards to interoperability and what can the leaders do in order to help their organizations overcome these challenges?
Sheila: So there’s the part where some of the electronic medical records are pretty complicated. It’s, difficult to inter-operate with them and there are some real challenges there, but I think the other part is that there’s just so many components to stitch together in the whole interoperability puzzle. There are so many parts and pieces, like I mentioned before. And so really figuring out where to start or where to focus can be quite a daunting task.
So what I think is that if you, like I mentioned before, start with the end in mind, choose some really key problems or opportunities that you feel like you can achieve by implementing components of your overall interoperability strategy. I think that a lot of healthcare organizations will really be surprised if they choose a particular problem or opportunity and solve that problem completely or implement the technology to support an opportunity completely.
There’ll be surprised that what they really end up with at the end. An example would be we at TAGNOS, we have a set OR solutions that do just that, they start with the end in mind. We look at the problems that operating rooms deal with on a daily basis with workflow and patient throughput and what not. And we’re leveraging obviously data from electronic medical record, real-time location data, voice command data, door sensor data, and we’re doing HVAC integrations to help promote the quality, safety and ultimate efficiency of how our ORs operate. And when we implement that, in the end, we have some pretty major pieces of the puzzle that are in place that can now be leveraged to address a variety of other issues that a healthcare organization might be facing.
So I think that, just kind of getting started and picking something that you feel like you can address and starting to get the pieces in place is the biggest challenge, but also the biggest reward at the end to finally have some of those things in place.
Laura: That’s great to hear, and I think really great advice for health system leaders as they jump into this next step and journey into interoperability. Now, I know most health systems are swimming in data, but might be struggling to really leverage it in a way that truly benefits patients and operations. Can you talk a little bit about the power of truly actionable data?
Sheila: I think before I talk about the power of the truly actionable data, one thing that I want to just kind of mention, is that a truly actionable data really requires context. And I think in the interoperability game, if you will, there’s sometimes a hyper-focus again, like I said before on the technologies and the actual clinical context and the data that can allow us to understand what’s really going on might get overlooked.
So I just wanted to mention first that having context, particularly clinical context about the patients who they are, why they’re there at the hospital or the clinic, is a really important piece of the inter-operability puzzle. And ultimately is what’s gonna lead to truly actionable data. But the power of that truly actionable data is that we would be equipping healthcare workers with the best information that they can possibly have to make decisions about patient care, and that’s ultimately going to drive better outcomes and hopefully a reduction in costs and that can flow to patients as well.
So I think the other thing though, with that, you know, less exciting, but still really super valuable, is that with truly actionable data, you can really start to get clarity about where you can automate things within a healthcare organization. And there’s a lot of information that we can use to understand where automations can occur to kind of take the burden off of healthcare workers and and automate the data flow that needs to happen.
So I think that kind of gets overlooked too, that actionable data, can also lead to automation, which is something that’s really, really required in healthcare right now, given the burden of the amount of work that healthcare workers are kind of up against these days.
Laura: Absolutely. I know executives across the board are looking at ways to just make sure that their workers are efficient and effective and not feeling too overwhelmed and stressed, especially over this past year. So that’s great to hear. Before we wrap up our conversation, what advice would you give health system leaders that want to get more of their organization’s data?
Sheila: I Know I sound like a broken record, but just get started, pick some problems, pick some opportunities, start working them. But in addition to that, I would say, you know, look at the investments you’ve already made in technology and try to get a better understanding of how you can leverage those investments to get more value out of them by pulling data that can be used to provide even more context to workflows and other operational things that are happening in your healthcare organization and start with what you have too. Start with the investments you’ve made.
And like I said, I think a lot of healthcare organizations will be just surprised at how much value they’ll get and how much progress they’ll make by just leveraging the use of data that they already have within their own organizations.
Laura: Thank you again Sheila, for your time and insights today.
Sheila: Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you for having me.
Laura: And I’d like to thank TAGNOS as well for sponsoring this episode, find their website link in the description for more information. You can tune into more podcasts from Becker’s healthcare by visiting our podcast page at Becker’s hospital review.com.
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
On behalf of the TAGNOS team, we’d like to extend a warm thank you to the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast for providing us with the opportunity to share our clinical solutions with the world. Becker’s Healthcare Podcast is an exciting new podcast from Becker’s Healthcare which features interviews and conversations with the latest in thought leadership in the healthcare industry. We look forward to the opportunity to collaborate again in the future.
About TAGNOS
TAGNOS is a Southern California-based MedTech company that combines an array of services and technologies to solve complex problems in hospitals and healthcare facilities. We provide these interoperability solutions by connecting infrastructure systems and utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower healthcare providers with the ability to focus more energy on caring for patients.
Our mission is to illuminate, automate, and orchestrate healthcare results within operating rooms (OR Orchestration), emergency departments (ED Orchestration), and asset management systems (Asset Orchestration). Our platform assists clinical care teams, patients, and their families by orchestrating very important, but dispersed and tedious aspects of the care delivery process. The byproducts of our technology are real time intelligence and automation that enables systemwide orchestration to reduce cost, generate revenue, and empower clinicians.
TAGNOS Connect – Interoperability Platform
TAGNOS Connect is the interoperability platform that connects to various disparate systems within the hospital, centralizes the data from those systems, and makes that data available back to those data sources and out to other systems for consumption. Some of these critical information systems include RTLS, temperature and humidity monitoring, hand hygiene sensors, communications systems, HL7 and advanced ESB systems, and more systems with endless possibilities.
TAGNOS Solutions and Products utilize TAGNOS Connect’s system interfacing and data modeling to facilitate operational workflows using data analytics and artificial intelligence, empowering staff to focus on delivering high quality patient care and more. TAGNOS Solutions transform care in Operating Rooms, Emergency Departments, and in the area of Asset Management, to name a few.
Contact Us to schedule a demo and see how TAGNOS can help your organization run more efficiently, generate more revenue, and deliver better care to your patients.