Welcome to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health.

So when you go to the hospital for care, you accept that the outcome isn't completely under your or your doctor's control. Even with textbook healthcare, bad things can happen for a variety of reasons and your health can decline. Put another way, it's hard enough when good care results in a bad outcome. But what about when a preventable error occurs?

It can seem incomprehensible, bewildering.

This idea that mistakes can happen in the hospital – mistakes that can take an already tenuous situation and make it even worse – and yet to err is human and hospitals are full of humans, so mistakes happen.

Thankfully, there are brilliant people out in the world working to reduce these preventable hospital errors in creative ways like our first guest on today's show: Fox Holt, CEO of Vigilant. This startup – which joined StartUp Health in 2022 – is digitizing medication tracking by doing away with handwritten medication notes.

No more scribbling instructions on the side of an IV bag or, worse, on a syringe. With Vigilant’s easy-to-launch system, nurses can immediately start labeling and tracking meds in automated ways. This ensures patients get the right dose every time and no preventable medication errors occur. As a bonus, hospitals reap the benefits of all that medication data on the back end, data they were missing with handwritten labels.

Our second guest is also streamlining operations in the hospital, but with more of a mind towards provider satisfaction versus direct patient safety. Although it's easy to see where the two intersect downstream.

Sanji Silva is the Chief Product Officer & Chief Technology Officer at Mocingbird, a startup upgrading and streamlining the provider credentialing process.

If Mocingbird  – which joined StartUp Health in 2020 –  has their way, gone will be the days lost to credentialing paperwork and hospitals having to scramble to find qualified workers as these standards shift from state to state. It will all be one unified system that keeps providers up to date with continuing education and keeps hospitals fully staffed.

It's not just about paperwork, as onerous credentialing processes lead to burnout which push providers out of the profession entirely, leading to poorer quality care due to fewer available physicians.

Listen in to this week’s podcast to hear these vastly different approaches with one goal: improving healthcare.

 

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