BD Advanced Patient Monitoring and AdventHealth engage in transformative collaboration
If there’s an anecdote that proves partnership is literally at the heart of healthcare, it’s the collaboration between BD Advanced Patient Monitoring (formerly part of Edwards Lifesciences) and AdventHealth to improve cardiac outcomes for patients undergoing heart valve surgery or coronary artery bypass graft.
The first step for AdventHealth was identifying and standardizing the right device to provide the right care protocols at the right time (and with the right cost savings) for its cardiac pilot. BD Advanced Patient Monitoring offered up its hemodynamic monitoring system.
The collaboration ultimately resulted in a decrease in complications, ICU days, length of stay and direct costs.
“Collaborating with industry leaders in this way allows us to bring innovative solutions to the forefront of patient care,” said Gordon Wesley, vice president of the Heart, Lung and Vascular Institute at AdventHealth. “By building strong partnerships, we can create new opportunities to advance quality outcomes and meet the evolving needs of the communities we serve.”
It’s a prime example of how more suppliers are stepping up to build deeper and increasingly sustainable collaborations across the continuum of care. In fact, over the past few years, BD Advanced Patient Monitoring has added clinical specialists to its teams, all with advanced degrees and Six Sigma certifications. Once the sales team cements pilot participation, it’s the BD Advanced Patient Monitoring clinicians who take the lead from the supplier side.
“That enables us to come together and look at the providers’ challenges and identify the areas of opportunity that exist,” said Mark Schreiber, vice president of national accounts at BD Advanced Patient Monitoring. “At the end of the day, these relationships are going to improve outcomes for patients. It’s ensuring the best use of the technology and all the possible resources that you have.”
Clinical Data Base provides objective insights
Schreiber is the first to tell you he’s been around the proverbial block in healthcare. He recently marked his 50-year milestone with the company, where he honed his expertise through stints in distribution, as VP of sales and as head of the organization’s med/surg group.
Anyone who’s spent five decades at one of the world’s top medical technology companies knows the healthcare landscape like the back of his hand. He also knows it’s an ecosystem that has at times fallen victim to distrust. Historically, many hospital and supplier relationships were transactional, built mainly on cost negotiations.
How do you convince potential provider partners that your intentions run so much deeper than a simple sales pitch?
“The answer,” Schreiber said, “is data.”
Both AdventHealth and BD Advanced Patient Monitoring wanted to build their collaboration on clear, unbiased and irrefutable insights and the answer, they agreed, was the Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB).
Both entities work with Vizient, especially for data and analytics to bolster performance. By also looping in the insights provided by Sg2, a Vizient company, they could objectively analyze the hemodynamic monitoring system’s effect on the pilot.
“At AdventHealth, we’re committed to standardizing best practices to improve outcomes and ensure patient safety,” said Daniel Peach, executive director of clinical communications at AdventHealth. “Leveraging our clinical database is just the beginning — our vision is to expand this model nationwide, enhancing care delivery across the healthcare continuum.”
Suppliers must ‘think differently’
For BD Advanced Patient Monitoring, the collaboration with AdventHealth was not a one and done. After all, Schreiber emphasized, relationships count.
“If you go down the trust curve,” he said, “you never come back up.”
That’s why moving forward, the company will seek to deepen its collaborations across the continuum of care. While many medtech suppliers have built strong relationships with clinicians in acute-care settings, BD Advanced Patient Monitoring understands the importance of continuing to partner with Vizient to strengthen its presence with administrators, as well as to gain a foothold in the ambulatory space.
“You have to start investing in locations that are more cost effective for patients to have short-term procedures,” Schreiber said. “We’re developing new products and adapting some of the products we have now to fit that space. There’s an unmet need there that we intend to address.”
In addition, identifying opportunities to improve market share and patient outcomes is one of the biggest benefits of creating a triad with Vizient and provider organizations. Doing this means shifting away from the “business as usual” mentality.
“Look beyond what you’ve always done traditionally,” Schreiber said. “Think differently. Think creatively.”