Statum Systems- Secure Medical Communications

Statum Systems- Secure Medical Communications Fred Lizza

Communication is the key aspect in any and every system. Especially in the healthcare industry, good communication helps you gather the patient information in the most efficient manner. This comes in especially useful when a patient is being transferred to another team or care-provider. An efficient communication between the two involved parties makes sure that all the relevant information of the patient is included and is made easily accessible. 

Not all medical communication is efficient. A study states that the hospital employees relied on synchronous methods of communication, that included unexpected meetings with fellow employees and phone calls too. 

Featuring for the Cover Story of The Enterprise World’s The Top 10 Medical Communication Systems to Watch is Statum Systems, a company dedicated to eradicate these errors in medical communication and make the entire process smooth and errorless! 

The Company-

“We founded Statum Systems to solve a significant problem plaguing healthcare: inefficient and unreliable communication among doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, social workers, medical support staff, patients, and more.”

Poor communication is a major preventable cause of clinical errors and the most common cause of preventable disability or death.

Patients are not the only ones to suffer. Inefficiency – wasted time and rework – costs hospitals more than $11B per year, or $1.75M per hospital. It robs attending physicians an hour per ten-hour shift, nurses up to two hours per eight-hour shift. The associated legal, regulatory, and public relations risks are staggering.

Despite the one-way and limited-length messages of pagers, 80 percent of hospitals in the United States rely on them. There are multiple reasons: pagers offer ubiquitous signal penetration, cellular and WiFi often can’t penetrate hospital environments or cover long distances, and traditional SMS and email fail HIPAA patient confidentiality.

“That’s why we were driven to develop a medical messaging and collaboration platform that streamlines communication and information access in real-time through a single mobile device with the utmost reliability.”

Statum Systems is a healthcare technology start-up founded by healthcare professionals in the Boston medical community. Concerned about the fragmented state of medical communication systems in hospitals and medical centres, and especially with the continued use of traditional pagers and other single purpose applications and devices that require care team members to constantly juggle from one system to another. 

To address the issue, Statum Systems created a unified medical communications & collaboration (UCC) platform, StatumHEALTHtm, that simplifies workflows for care team members with a focus on improved patient care. Statum also invented an optional device in the form of an ID badge holder that captures pager signals and sends them via Bluetooth to StatumHEALTH on the user’s smartphone. This device, StatumCONNECTtm, eliminates traditional pagers without losing the reach and reliability of pager-frequency messages. 

StatumHEALTH also collects comprehensive data regarding medical communications, and analysing it to identify opportunities for workflow, patientcare, and financial performance improvements. This data-driven component of our solution will grow in importance as StatumHEALTH collects more data and applies AI-based tools and predictive analytics to the data in future releases.

Growth in Challenging Times-

The COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020 just as Statum Systems was getting ready to go to beta test with their StatumHEALTH solution.  Hospitals and medical centres hunkered down under the influx of new patients from this unknown virus, making it impossible for Statum Systems to get an audience with prospective clients. They finally broke through in 2021, getting their system into medical centres such as Baystate Health in Massachusetts to conduct the beta testing, which is currently in progress.

“Statum Systems is poised to explode in 2022 as we move from beta testing to commercial release of StatumHEALTH.”

Statum Systems initial market response has been overwhelming.  Every physician, surgeon or medical professional who sees their solution wants it.  This is because, for the past two decades, hospitals have accumulated many special-purpose and single purpose communications systems.  They don’t interface with each other, only address one or two aspects of providing patient care and require care team members to jump from one system to another. 

Statum Systems leadership team is the perfect blend of medical professionals and technology executives.  Several co-founders have deep medical experience while our CEO, SVP of Corporate Development and Advisory Board members bring many years of success in launching and growing technology-based enterprises.

As COVID has taxed hospital staff to the limit and identified a clear need for medical centres to upgrade their IT infrastructure. The medical UCC platforms will streamline care team workflows, reduce communication-based errors and delays, turn beds faster and enforce HIPAA and security compliance. Like many other industries, medical communication infrastructure is evolving from disparate point solutions to integrated platforms.  

“Statum Systems is all set to lead the market in this industry-wide transition.”

The Products and Services-

StatumHEALTH’s competitive advantage comes from three distinct capabilities that the above-listed competitors cannot match: 

  1.  Delivery of low-frequency broadcast pager messages directly to the smartphone 
  2. A patient-centric architecture 
  3. An enterprise scale unified medical messaging and collaboration platform – not a single purpose messaging system.  

The Service Directory-

Low-Frequency Pager Messages Directly To Smartphone

Pager service providers broadcast their pager messages over low-frequency bandwidths, providing greater reach and coverage and higher reliability.  That’s why over 80% of US hospitals still use pagers – so critical messages can be received immediately in all areas, even places like radiology suites, where WiFi, 5G and cellular signals are not reliably available. Statum Systems uses multiple communications modalities, including direct receipt of pager messages by StatumCONNECT, to ensure efficient message receipt while not losing reliability. 

“By using our patented technology, we maintain the reach and reliability advantages of low frequency pager messages, but deliver rich messages directly to the users’ smartphone without store and forward delays.”

Patient-centric Architecture

Given that many of Statum’s founders come from the clinical world, the team has built their architecture from the ground up to focus their communications around the patient. Their “patient sessions” function deliver a communications forum that allows for synchronous and asynchronous communications across care providers. 

Competitive solutions do not facilitate a patient-centric method of communications that allow for all the patient’s care team members to have instant insight on patient interactions and data. Instead, competitors rely on standard peer-to-peer communications that lead to siloed communications, necessitating repetition for those not included.  

“Our patient session design enables all of a patient’s care team members to share the same dialogue and be alerted to any changes or updates to the patient’s condition.”

By unifying communications around the Patient Sessions, Statum Systems facilitates efficient communications and create a natural hub for communications data collection that provides insights never-before seen by hospital administrators/executives. 

Enterprise UCC

Statum Systems believes that after years of investing in limited, single purpose medical communications systems, the healthcare IT market is entering a cycle where these disparate systems will be gradually but consistently replaced by a unified medical communications and collaboration system.  The move to UCC’s will simplify learning and onboarding of team members, streamline workflows and improve communications – all resulting in better and more efficient patient care, faster bed turnover and few errors.  This is consistent with cycles in other maturing markets, where single purpose systems were replaced by integrated suites and platforms. 

Statum’s Team- An Integral Part of its Success!

Software is a people-based business. The company’s most important assets are its team members, and they are presented with many alternatives every single day.  Showing the team that leadership and ownership are interested in and appreciate their specific contributions is critical to keeping the team engaged and committed.  

“As a small team, we know each other and even though COVID has prevented as much in-person interaction as we would like – it is still a close-knit team with a lot of mutual respect.”

Statum’s leadership team is a unique blend of medical professionals bringing deep domain knowledge and technology professionals bringing experience and industry know-how to the company.  The two complement each other and result in a solid team that is equipped to successfully scale the company.

Fred Lizza- Leading the Way-

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new”

To say the least, Fred is a serial CEO. He has previously held the role of a CEO at six other software based-technology businesses. Fred is typically introduced to an organization through the investors/owners of a business, either early in its life cycle to launch and scale the business or at a later stage to re-position the company to better achieve its potential.

Fred has led multiple companies to successful exits by acquisition and he has also grown a company and led it through its IPO and secondary public offerings.  He has launched new products into the AI, ERP, eCommerce and supply chain markets.

The Future of Healthcare Systems-

As far as health care technology is concerned, COVID19 highlighted the need for medical centres and hospitals to improve their IT infrastructure to streamline workflows and reduce the administrative burden on already-stressed medical workers. 

In additional to telehealth initiatives, medical centres should focus on consolidating and unifying their many single-purpose systems, replacing them with more flexible, easy to learn and use systems that reduce the administrative burden on care team members, eliminate errors and miscommunications and enable already over-burdened care team members to focus on patient care without a lot of administrative overhead.  Unified medical communications platforms like StatumHEALTH are one example.

There are not enough skilled medical professionals, especially after reductions driven by COVID19 stress, illness and regulatory compliance.  Medical Centres need to be better places for care team members to work, and they can start by reducing the frustrations of administrative overhead and enabling care team members to give input before IT makes software decisions – not after.

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