Quick Summary
Vizabli’s acute care engagement platform addresses healthcare staffing shortages by offering an integrated technology solution that weaves together data from multiple systems into an elegant, seamless, integrated presentation.
Whether displaying information on a mobile device, door board, in a patient’s room, or at a nurse station, Vizabli makes overworked staff more efficient and patients safer by delivering relevant real-time data.
Vizabli’s technology improves communication between caregivers, patients, and families, making sure no party is left in the dark regarding a patient’s status and future needs.
Vizabli’s platform is highly customizable—after it’s been installed, customers can thoroughly test it to make sure it delivers what they asked for, then make adjustments or additions as needed.
With staff shortages an ongoing concern among healthcare facilities, there’s an urgent need to find ways to ease the increasing burden on care teams and their patients. Vizabli’s Acute Care Engagement Solution (ACES) addresses this need head-on by offering a single, integrated technology solution that connects caregivers, patients, families, and facility visitors while making sure each has access to the most relevant real-time data.
Designed from the ground up to deliver a secure integration environment that funnels data from clinical systems such as EHR, RTLS, Nurse Call and others, Vizabli processes that data and presents it across a variety of interactive displays—from wall-size digital whiteboards at nurse stations to patient door boards and wall screens to virtually any mobile device. This frees up nurses from having to update dry erase boards multiple times a day, saving countless work hours.
According to CEO and co-founder Ron Nelson, this aligns with an industry-wide need for greater efficiency. “Today everybody is looking for technology...not as something to add other steps to the clinical workflows,” he says, “but as an enabler to save time.”
Filling a Clinical Engagement Gap
Vizabli came into existence when Nelson and his business partner, Richard Schramm, simultaneously had parents experiencing extended hospital stays. The two men were faced with a string of obstacles that made timely communication and accurate information hard to come by. This included everything from not knowing who the charge nurses were or when medications had to be given, to difficulty tracking down the right staff or getting basic info about their family member’s condition. Even communication between shifts was a problem, with crucial patient information not being relayed from one shift to the next.
As Nelson tells it, “There were so many different small items that we lived real-time [that] made a huge impact on where we were going to take the company.”
Where it took them was to devising their own layered approach to acute care management, with clinical engagement being placed front and center.
Sharpies Become Ones and Zeroes
The first order of business was to replace standard dry erase boards with digital whiteboards—automating the information-sharing that clinicians historically did by hand throughout the day.
“The clinicians today don't have time to really keep dry erase boards and labels up to speed,” Nelson explains. “And that is not really good for patient communication, family communication or clinician communication.”
Even in facilities that may already use digital whiteboards, Vizabli’s ACES performs an important function by consolidating devices and saving valuable wall space. “We're seeing four or five different devices on a single footwall of a patient,” says Nelson, “all with different functionality that we're trying, with our technology, to bring to one platform.”
Mobile applications were also devised, along with virtual access to the patient room—assisting clinicians with virtual rounding, discharge rounding, telemedicines, interpreters, and other clinical engagement functionality.
Keeping Families Connected
A large part of the platform’s early development was dedicated to making sure real-time notifications on key patient care plan items could be shared with family members—not only in the hospital, but all over the world. Bringing family members into the care plans was essential to Nelson. Because clinical staff have little time to reach out to family members or involve them in care plans, he says, “Family has been isolated from patient care for years now.”
In addressing Nelson and Schramm’s frustrations while caring for their parents, Vizabli’s platform included a dedicated family communications platform—a feature that moved it beyond traditional patient engagement offerings such as entertainment, education, food ordering, and environmental controls. Virtual access to families was also key, allowing care teams to bring family members together into the same room with the push of a button.
“We've really invested in making sure family members can have visual and speaking abilities with the patients themselves,” says Nelson.
Working Closely with Each Customer
But Vizabli is more than just its technology. Equally important is the way the company works closely with each customer at the start of a project to figure out which problems the facility hopes to solve. During this discovery phase, the hospital is asked what kind of integration it prefers—whether EHR, RTLS, Nurse Call, or others—and what data from each of those systems it wants populated and where it should be displayed.
“It's just a really close knit and detailed discovery process,” says Sarah Cannon, the company’s VP of Operations. “We go into these deep conversations with them to really figure out how they want things laid out. We even do fun things with them like figure out what kind of background they want displayed, what colors they want to use—and then we build all of that out with them.”
Even after it’s installed, customers have an opportunity to thoroughly test the platform to make sure it’s providing the output they expected and is serving their stated purpose, at which point they can make any adjustments or additions.
“We work with them to make sure it's exactly what they need,” says Cannon. “One site can be very different from another site. It's very customizable.”
Bringing Better Visibility to Real-Time Data
Going forward, Vizabli plans to continue standardizing ACES and building out virtual care models, while tightening its focus on virtual access to patient rooms.
“We have been very fortunate to have had a couple of very large projects that have pushed us to the technology edge and beyond,” says Nelson. And while that has allowed Vizabli to surpass its competition, an overall refinement of the product and further enhancements to its digital whiteboards are on tap in the months to come.
Whether displaying information on a mobile device, door board, in a patient’s room, or at a nurse station, Vizabli will continue to weave together data from many systems into an elegant, seamless, integrated presentation, making sure that patients, family members, and care team all share a common understanding of the patient’s condition and needs.
As co-founder and CEO of Vizabli, Ron Nelson is an accomplished, high-performance executive sales and marketing leader. He has an established history of success in driving overall company performance in global sales organizations by embedding proactive change, building motivated sales, marketing, and sales operations teams, and generating game-changing business models in competitive markets.
Sarah Cannon, the VP of Operations at Vizabli, is an experienced business and sales operations manager with a demonstrated history of working in the medical device industry. She is adept at growing small businesses, being agile and working with ambiguity, as well as being knowledgeable in HR, finance, legal, logistics, fulfillment and production.