2 min read January 2022 — Michael Shumer, CEO of Crucial Care, spoke to Invest: about the trends and challenges affecting the healthcare market in Jacksonville. He talked about the measures that are keeping Crucial Care ahead of the curve, such as 24/7 access to care and ensuring the staff is well looked after.
What were some of the key strategies Crucial Care deployed to overcome the challenges of the pandemic?
COVID was obviously a big challenge for everybody in our local healthcare community, our state and across our whole nation. I think the biggest lesson we learned was the value of having everyone in our organization working as a team to serve the patients. Ultimately, that was what allowed us to be nimble, react to the challenge and provide the services that were needed. I’ll give you an example: because keeping our medical teams safe is one of our values, someone in our procurement department identified in January of 2020 that obtaining enough personal protective equipment might become a challenge for those of us in the healthcare industry. We started instantly sourcing our protective equipment for our staff members from all over the world. When the pandemic reached its most difficult days a few months later, we were confident we had sufficient supplies for our team members because, at the end of the day, if our team does not feel safe, they’re not going to be able to provide adequate care for our patients.
What are some of the challenges in healthcare in Jacksonville at the moment?
I would say that staffing challenges are here to stay because of increased demand for healthcare, coupled with the phenomena of baby boomers retiring. Generally, there is a dearth of workers as a result of these influences. We want to get the best people to care for our patients and that is something we’ve always paid attention to. We’ve always been the emergency health provider of choice and we’ll continue to place a heavy focus on maintaining that reputation moving forward. One element that has us excited as we are coming out of the more serious days of the pandemic, is our observation that the healthcare community is starting to work more in concert together and there is a lot more collaboration amongst the various stakeholders in healthcare. That’s better for everyone involved.
What is the reasoning behind your clinic offering 24-hour access to healthcare?
Our founder, Dr. Nicholas Dodaro, had a hypothesis that for most patients, visits to the emergency room start 90 days prior to the visit actually taking place. We have proven this by allowing our members 24/7 access, either at one of our facilities or virtually. We then have an opportunity to have a relationship with our members so we can facilitate them receiving the care they need as they go through their care journey. Of great benefit, our care orchestration activities help reduce hospitalization for our members by well over 30%. This translates to a fantastic financial reward for everyone including the patient but, more importantly, we’re helping patients and our members get appropriate care when they need it most. The market has started to demand that, so we now offer this service directly to businesses across the state of Florida.
What are the best ways to retain talent?
In healthcare, having a safe working environment is paramount. If our team is not safe, they cannot provide the healthcare that they otherwise should be providing. We’re really proud of the fact that we’ve been ahead of the PPE curve. Second, because we’re in healthcare, we’ve been developing some innovative service offerings for the last four or five years, including giving our team access to our emergency facilities and 24/7 caregivers with no required payment. What we have discovered is that if patients get the right care, at the right time, and in the right place, their healthcare costs go down significantly and we’re also able to give those savings to our team members, something that has helped in recruitment and retainment in these interesting times.
How have you addressed the impact that COVID has had on mental health?
Access is the key. Our patients deserve the opportunity to have a warm and safe encounter with somebody in the healthcare system who can help them either with their crisis or their journey moving forward. It’s no secret that access to mental health is something a lot of people are talking about, and many are working to make the situation better each day. In the meantime, we have very robust services and care orchestration abilities in our system that we use to help patients seamlessly get the care they need and deserve.
For more information, visit:
