With a perfect storm of economic conditions set to put even more financial strain on hospitals, Eric Rosow sees opportunity for his Farmington-based software company.
Rosow, chief executive officer of Premise Corp., built his company around the knowledge that hospitals struggle with the management of patient placements and that an efficient system can free up hospital beds, increasing the number of patients and hospital revenue.
Since creating the technology specifically for Hartford Hospital in 2001 when he was its director of biomedical engineering, Rosow has built a company that now has a presence in nearly 70 hospitals across the country, including several in Connecticut, as well as one in Singapore.
Premise’s technology creates a hospital map, allowing those in charge of managing bed space to see in real time what rooms are open what space can be made available.
The technology was put to its toughest test on Sept. 11, 2001, just months after it was installed at Hartford Hospital. On that day of terrorist attacks, the hospital was able to free up more than 100 beds in a matter of hours. That would have been nearly impossible had the hospital been relying on a manual system to keep track of its beds.
“Our technology completely moves the [bed-management] system to what’s like an electronic air traffic control tower,” Rosow said.
Demand for the technology made Premise the 71st fastest-growing technology company in the nation in Deloitte’s 2007 Technology Fast 500 for its five-year growth rate of 2,265 percent.
In just the past few months, Premise’s bed management system has signed contracts with Children’s Hospital Boston, Hospital for Special Surgery and the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. The client list reads like an all-star roster of U.S. hospital systems.
Premise is now in five of the top eight hospitals in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of the country’s best hospitals.
Narrow Margins
As hospitals, which tend to operate on narrow margins, face mounting financial challenges, Rosow thinks his company’s technology is even more relevant in these dire economic times.
“Systems like ours are probably even more important now in this economy, and I don’t say that to sound like a marketing guy,” he said. “It gives them virtual capacity, getting more patients through the system without having to spend the capital dollars, which are harder to come by, on bricks and mortar or by adding beds.”
Michael Lesser, spokesman for American Hospital Association Solutions, which endorsed the bed management system earlier this year, said hospitals will have difficulty finding the credit and capital for expansion plans.
“Hospitals have to ask how they can increase capacity and not tap into capital budgets,” Lesser said. “One great way is to make more use of what they already have.”
The technology costs hospitals between $100,000 and $1 million, depending on the number of beds. While there’s no definitive way to determine the actual value of the technology, a study conducted by an Arizona hospital using Premise’s bed management system found that admitting one additional patient each day amounted to about $1 million in revenue.
Premise’s bed turnover product alerts the cleaning staff when a bed needs to be cleaned.
Before signing up for the system, Christiana Care Health System, a Delaware-based network that includes a 290-bed and 900-bed hospital, needed to make several phone calls to make sure a room had been cleaned and prepared for the next patient. Christiana found in its own study that Premise had cut bed turnover from hours to 40 minutes.
Steve Hess, Christiana’s chief information officer, said it’s hard to nail down the precise financial value to the hospitals. But he added that the Premise system, introduced in 2006, has streamlined the process and improved hospital efficiency.
“Before, in essence, we had no idea how long it took,” Hess said. “A bed would sometimes sit uncleaned until the patient was ready to go in, and all of a sudden there would be a mad dash to get that bed cleaned.”
For all the promise of efficiency and turnover, the needs of the patient have not been forgotten in the process, said Lesser of AHA Solutions. Lesser said the technology has greatly reduced the number of hospital-acquired infections.
“The bed management system positively impacts the ability for the cleaning people to know when they need to be there, and that’s where the efficiency happens,” he said.
Popular Conference
For the past five years, Premise has hosted a client conference in Hartford aimed at improving the technology. This year’s conference brought in more than 200 people to Hartford over several days. The healthy attendance is a great source of pride for Rosow and CFO and COO John Hannon. Both men grew up in Connecticut and received millions in early venture capital funding from Aetna Ventures LLC and Connecticut Innovations Inc.
“That’s what I get most proud of, is seeing all these people from all over the map coming into Hartford,” Hannon said. “I like being a small piece of the puzzle that is making Hartford something.”
