After several years in development and more than a year of
initial trials, ThinkThroughTools has released its 365 Air Medical™ on-demand
software to the air medical transport industry. It is an innovative, customized
tool to help Air Medical Transport programs increase Safety,
AMRM,
Customer-Centricity, Outreach Effectiveness and Referral Development.
The suite of productivity tools include 365
CriticalCUSTOMERCare™ (365 CCC), 365 Safety AMRM™, 365 AOLS™ (Advanced Outreach
Life Support) and 365 OutreachU™.
The cornerstone of the 365 suite is 365 CriticalCUSTOMERCare -- a hybrid that
blends the most essential elements of Safety, AMRM, Customer Centricity and
Outreach . It is customized for each
mode of critical care transport.
Each day, crew members are provided learning lessons, scenarios
and quizzes related to their duties. The process takes 8-10 minutes and is
integrated into each shift brief to assure daily consistency and to make it part
of the daily culture and operations. This tool serves as a key recurrent training
process for staff.
MedCenter Air
crewmembers: (L-R) Mike Gearing (RN), Ed Heike (RW Pilot),
Dwayne Potter (IT specialist) log on to begin 365 AMRM lesson
and scenario.
Three programs were selected by ThinkThroughTools and were
provided special preference to help use, evaluate and adapt the initial version
of the software during 2007: MedCenter Air (based at Carolinas Healthcare
System, Charlotte, NC), Northwest MedStar (Spokane, WA) and LifeLine
Critical Care Transport (based at Clarian Health in Indianapolis, IN)
“I want to commend all three programs for their leadership to
take on this initiative,” said Rich Obertots, CEO of ThinkThroughTools.
Obertots said that they chose programs that demonstrated a
history of innovation and leadership.
“We did not want to involve any organization that we sensed
wanted to maintain the status quo,” he said. “We took a great deal of thought as
to whom we believed would take the lead and lift off and fly with this. We knew
that the only hope was to work with individuals and programs that we felt were
industry leaders.”
Steve Johnson, Director of Business Development for Clarian
Health, was appreciative that ThinkThroughTools selected LifeLine as one of the
three programs. Because ThinkThroughTools worked with LifeLine on enhancing its
marketing and outreach initiatives in the past, this previous working
relationship convinced Johnson to accept Obertots offer to become a test site.
“Based on the experience that I have had with Rich over the
years, and the work that he did with our marketing and outreach efforts, I felt
it was a good product and a good tool to augment what we're doing with our
transport services,” he said. “I was pretty excited that Rich wanted to choose
our organization as a potential beta site. It made us feel good he trusted
our assessment of it over anyone else he could have chosen.”
Eveline Saltmarsh, Director of Northwest
MedStar, said that her program started testing
365 Safety/AMRM last
year.
“What sold me was the concept itself,” she said. “We would
always do our shift briefs and come up with the safety tip of the day. But it
seemed that there could be more to it, and what Rich was working on seemed
perfect for us. There was more meat to it. It included an actual
scenario and it prompted discussion among the crew.”
Saltmarsh said she also liked the fact that the software could
be used daily.
The key to 365
is discussion and engagement. Here MedCenter Air staff: (L-R)
Mike Gearing (RN), Ed Heike (RW Pilot), Al Cantrell (RW Pilot),
Dwayne Potter (IT specialist) discuss the questions that the
on-demand software prompted.
You do your AMRM once a year,” she said. “You spend the entire
day to work on AMRM but many do not maintain as high of a focus on this the
other 364 days a year. I like the idea that this is continuous. AMRM is supposed
to be every day. Doing it only once a year but not maintaining high focus on it
each day the rest of the year is not a good idea. With Rich’s solution, we can
keep it fresh and alive daily.
MedCenter Air has been using 365 CCC since launch trials from
early 2007 and this past fall, they asked ThinkThroughTools to customize the
program and adapt it for its United Way
campaign. MedCenter Air set a goal of 100 percent engagement of staff
participating in the United Way.
Obertots customized 365 CCC to devote a week of lessons,
scenarios, and quizzes to launch its campaign. Each day, all staff on duty,
during their briefings, went through lessons about philanthropy and the United Way, and how this applied to their
jobs.
“We had been using 365 CCC for a few months now, along with
365
Safety/AMRM on a daily basis with our crews,” said Jason Schwebach,
Administrative Director of MedCenter Air. “Everyone is required to do it
here.”
The Healthcare System selected Schwebach as one of several
cabinet members for this year’s
United Way
campaign. It was his idea to incorporate 365 CCC to the United Way Campaign.
“What better way to educate people than with the 365 scenarios
that directly relate to the United
Way
versus trying to call a staff meeting together?” he said. “You can’t really
relate to it in one day. We also wanted to try to relate United Way to their
jobs.”
Schwebach said that they wanted to take it one step further and
incorporate what the United Way does into
what they do for a living. They brainstormed and came up with true stories
about how they teamed up with the United Way after Katrina struck Louisiana.
“People asked if we could bring water and Gatorade so we called
the United Way up and through a few of the United Way
agencies, they had a crate ready for us to deliver the next day,” he said.
“So we practiced using scenarios like this and how it related to Katrina.”
MedCenter Air has been using 365 since last February.
Schwebach said it’s been working great for his crew.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “We were one of the beta sites
for it. One of the best things that the crew enjoys about it is that it
came through on its promise. It’s a quick process to go through and it
does what it was designed to do. This gives the crew an opportunity to do
a scenario and then walk through it and talk about it with each other. It
creates a very good discussion among the crew.”
Schwebach said 365 CCC and 365 Safety/AMRM is mandatory for his
staff. He also makes it part of their performance evaluation and makes
sure they average 12 scenarios a month.
“You typically do a class twice a year on
Safety/AMRM and then
many cannot sustain the daily focus necessary,” he said. “Rich threw this
idea at me. He came up with a great product right out the box and we saw a
lot of potential with it.”
Schwebach recommends 365 to other managers.
“365 is probably one of the best tools a manager in air medical
transport can have – the side benefit is to have it customizable like we did
with the United Way,” he said. “This can be
customized to whatever your specific team would need. Our healthcare
system puts a lot of emphasis on the
United Way. Now we know we can use this short
term for other things.”
ThinkThroughTools daily monitors the industry for circumstances,
events and relevant content that they can rapidly deploy into the system if
there are any notices from the FAA or any incidents that occur.
“We can convert them into content and deploy it nationwide
immediately,” said Obertots. “We have a capacity for a rapid deployment of
content that is relevant to the program. When any program has any incident that
arises, we can take it and adapt it to a scenario.”
ThinkThroughTools is also working aggressively to include
content that includes rotor wing, fixed wing and ground and content that links
to accreditation standards.
“This is not just for rotor wing,” added Obertots.
365 testing is sufficiently complete at this point and Obertots
said they are going to continue to make modifications and use these three
programs as the primary innovation sites for the new iterations.
“We have an on demand service that is
effective that we now plan to deploy nationwide,” said Obertots. “These three
programs were extremely helpful to provide us with input and we want to continue
that process with them. We couldn’t have done this if we didn’t have complete
candor and authentic feedback on what works and what is challenging and we want
to maintain it.”
