Professional
Senior Partner of SoftTech Health since 2004;
Prior to that; founded and led two firms,
one in finance software,
the other in healthcare software
Personal
Significant involvement in Sunshine Dreams for Kids, which
makes dreams come true for disabled or ill children; numerous
other good Corporate Citizen initiatives
through SoftTech Health;
long-distance boating; painting; piano
SoftTech Health helps clients meet today's challenges. Fundamentally, it's a case of ever-increasing expectations against decreasing resources. Government, insurers, regulatory bodies, and patients are all calling for faster, safer, and yet cheaper health services. But the funding isn't necessarily there, and the time resources certainly are not there. The healthcare professionals we meet have a genuine desire to meet and exceed patient expectations. We show them how to free up time from meeting regulatory expectations so they can do that instead.
How SoftTech has evolved to meet changing client needs. Our company is product-driven, so when our lab clients' needs change, that gets reflected in the design of our products. How we make them available has evolved, too; our software is now offered as a hosted solution, because labs realize that if they deploy hosted software they can avoid overburdening their IT departments. Also, as more labs transition away from paper-based Quality Management systems, we've expanded our staff and space to serve those clients.
How clients measure the success of SoftTech's solutions. We make available numerous ROI Calculator tools to help labs figure out the nuts and bolts. Often, they've been so busy just meeting those expectations I talked about, they haven't necessarily gathered a lot of metrics about just how much time they are spending on quality management tasks, especially document control-related chores. We help them pin it down. For example, we'll clock a tech doing a manual step and then the step using automated systems, and the time and money savings become obvious. But it's not just about the time saved; it's about the potential cost when things fall through the cracks using manual methods, which poses a real risk. We focus both on proving efficiency and enabling labs to meet tangible quality goals.
SoftTech's role in the global community. Currently the majority of our labs are in the U.S. and Canada, and we are expanding our operations into Europe, the Middle East, and South America. On the national front, the SoftTech Health/College of American Pathologists Strategic Alliance has far-reaching implications for all labs which are accredited through CAP. The key to this partnership is it allows the integration of any Document Control system directly into each checklist requirement as proof of compliance with the requirement. By partnering with CAP, the international gold standard for Laboratory Accreditation, we're providing significant lab quality improvement tools at a level which dramatically improves quality and safety. On the international front, we work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with the African Society for Laboratory Medicine, and have set up large-scale efforts to help labs in Africa on many fronts, including quality management. That was the beginning of an enormously exciting project that's taking us halfway across the globe.
Attracting youth to medical technology. Younger people are quick to question when something is being done in a manual, inefficient way. They expect, rightly, that any tedious task that can be automated through software, should be. So allowing the younger folks in the lab to take on a leadership role is a win-win for both the lab and the younger staff. And today's young people are looking to ally themselves, through work or volunteering, with stakeholders whose values match their own. We find that the folks on our SoftTech Health team, including younger staff, are proud to be allied with our Corporate Citizen projects.
