Medi-Dyn: Ahead of the Game - Health Executive - RedCoat Publishing - Inside Healthcare

Patient satisfaction has become more of a critical focus for hospitals as, to some degree, their scores can influence their revenue streams. But for hospital support management company Medi-Dyn, ensuring its hospital customers have strong patient satisfaction scores has been a focus throughout its 29-year history.

“Our clients are highly motivated, and, as a result, so are we,” said CEO Scott Brown. “We do everything we can to enhance the patient experience, and we continue to get better at positively impacting their perception of our clients’ facilities.”

The success of the Colorado-based company lies in the fact that it partners patient satisfaction with infection control—another focus the company has had since day one. In the past two or three years, and particularly in the past few months, infection control has received more attention from the media and the general public as strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria rear their ugly heads.

“There was a lot of press last fall regarding staphylococcus infections that not only impacted patients in hospitals but also infiltrated colleges and secondary schools,” said Brown. “Although we’ve always focused on it, and hospital infection control practitioners have always focused on it, now it’s gotten the public’s attention.”

The majority of the problems, said Brown, are with hospital staff. With agency oversight, most hospitals have the right policies in place; they’re just not consistently followed. As a result, Medi-Dyn closely follows CDC guidelines when training its managers. It also works closely with its chemical manufacturers to ensure its employees use high-quality cleaning agents that will most effectively disinfect hospital surfaces without posing a risk of harm to its staff or its clients’ patients.

“They do the testing, but we work with them to ensure we have cleaning products that are both effective and safe to be used in hospitals,” said Brown. “We also want to ensure our cleaning chemicals won’t destroy or damage the hospital furnishings.”

Consistency is key
When it comes to infection control, said Brown, the most critical piece is training front-line staff on good techniques. Typically, hospitals get into trouble when the environmental services staff hasn’t been given the tools to get the job done. They also often lack the know-how and technical expertise on how to clean a patient room or an OR in the most effective manner.

“We emphasize our training techniques so they become ingrained in our front-line staff,” said Brown. “As much as possible, they’re hitting every surface and sterilizing the highest areas of risk in terms of potential contamination when they go about their daily routines.”

Understanding that consistency starts from the top, Medi-Dyn dedicates a lot of time and resources to manager recruitment and development. The company looks for managers with practically no industry experience and trains them on its specific protocols, systems, and techniques. “We don’t want to have to un-teach bad habits,” said Brown. “When we start with a fresh slate, we know all of our managers sing from the same sheet of music, which means the line staff is going about their daily routines consistently.”

In addition, Medi-Dyn’s management staff is trained on the technical aspects of infection control and oversees the cleaning staff at each client facility to ensure the best techniques are applied consistently. Management is also trained on best practices to improve client patient satisfaction scores, and Medi-Dyn developed a patient satisfaction specialist position to gather patient satisfaction results from each facility and analyze them for best practices.

“We drill down to the various techniques and best practices we’re using at our highest scoring facilities,” said Brown. “We take that information and implement many of those best practices across the board to take full advantage of our collective expertise.”

Productivity improvement
Although Medi-Dyn can’t always guarantee cost savings when coming into a client facility, the company does guarantee the greatest value for its clients out of the resources they’ve dedicated to their support service departments. With 29 years of experience in efficiently operating hospital housekeeping and/or laundry services bundled into its training programs, the company gets the highest level of productivity out of the staff its managers oversee.

“In our business, labor is roughly 75% of the cost of operating the housekeeping or laundry department,” said Brown. “If you can ensure labor is deployed in the most productive manner, you’re making the greatest impact on the department.”

According to company materials, Medi-Dyn made a tremendous impact on a client hospital that, after signing up for the company’s services, reduced its FTE environmental services staff from 72 to 46, reduced its managerial staff from eight to four, and saved an annual figure of more than $350,000 while improving the quality of its services. “When we come into a facility, we get the most out of the labor pool without sacrificing quality,” said Brown. “Nine out of 10 times, not only are we improving the productivity, but we’re also improving—often dramatically—the cleaning results we achieve.”

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