Newt Gingrich Video Transcript

Center for Health Transformation

I was very impressed when I was briefed on the StatCom approach and what I was able to see in this room, how you could have a system that services all the different patient activities of a hospital simultaneously and enables you to schedule patients with maximum visibility. So you are able to use the hospital as the most effective possible tool to maximize the rate at which patients get well.

By eliminating waste and by eliminating waiting time, by minimizing the number of unused beds and by making sure that the right patient is at the right place at the right moment, StatCom is a new use of technology that really improves the efficiency of hospitals. It can get as high as a twenty percent improvement in the throughput capability of a hospital which means, you are not having patients stacked up with nowhere to go. You're not having rooms that don't have anyone in them. You don't have nurses who are under-employed while at the same time somewhere else in the hospital, you have others exhausted because they are being stretched too thin.

The StatCom model brings the best of what we have seen in other parts of American life, the kind of traffic control and logistics control capability that uses information technology to service all of the information for you the manager, so that you are able to make the best possible decisions in the most recent, real time capability and really be on top of how to use the hospital effectively.

This really helps the patient because it means they are going to have a much more dramatic approach that gets them right in, gets them taken care of correctly, gets them to the right room for the right treatment and gets them back out again. It enables you to serve more people, more effectively, and that helps your bottom line because it means that you are both not wasting money, and it means you are maximizing the use of your facility in a way that maximizes your revenue opportunities.

So, we've been fascinated with StatCom. We believe it is going to be one of the major tools in the future in helping all of the forward looking and well-managed hospitals maximize their capability and maximize their use of information so they can serve the patient better, the community better, use their doctors and nurses with greater effectiveness so they have higher professional satisfaction and do all of it with the most modern information technology. So, if you get a chance to get thoroughly briefed on StatCom, you'll be as impressed as I am with what they are doing right here at Jackson Health and how it is a remarkable step into a twenty-first century healthcare system.