Mark This! is a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark’s varied lines of business. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them--building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
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Mark This! Podcast, Episode 10, Healthcare+ and PEA
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Bart Kaericher, President and CEO, Aramark Healthcare+; Jeff Moreland, CEO of Patient Engagement Advisors
It is time to Mark This, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business.
I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's communications team, I see and hear amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
Today we are exploring our healthcare plus community. I say community because it is so much more than a business, but also a caring group that espouses a philosophy that makes a tangible difference in patient healing, recovery, and satisfaction.
Our guests are Bart Kaericher, president of Aramark Healthcare Plus, and Jeff Moreland, CEO of PEA, or Patient Engagement Advisors. Together, they're working to change the way patient care is delivered.
Bart, can you let the guests know a little bit about yourself?
I'd love to. Good morning, Heather. Hey, Jeff, how are you doing? It's good to see you again.
So about myself. So I grew up all over the United States of America. My dad was an aerospace engineer for NASA, so similar to a military child, we traveled to all the hubs where all the different research projects were going on. So I will say, though, I'm primarily from the Midwest, which is really great.
I went to school at Marengo, Ohio, but really, honestly, I've lived now in the Northeast for the last 30 years of my life. I currently live in Wilmington, Delaware, which is about a 45-minute ride from our headquarters at 2400 Market. So it's really great being in the area.
So I've been in healthcare for 35 years. I'm embarrassed to say that because it sounds really old, but I'll tell you what, I've seen so much change within healthcare, the different trends, the tendencies, the payment structures, and, really, that's the beauty of being in healthcare. It's always something different.
I've been in healthcare since day one. I've worked for three different companies since I graduated from college. I've been with Aramark Healthcare Plus now for two years. I also love the journey. I love the healthcare calling, and honestly, I love Aramark Healthcare Plus, the impact that we're making to patients, families, and caregivers every single day.
Thanks for that, Bart. Jeff, let's let our audience know who you are and how you came to create PEA.
I, first off, like to start off with, I'm a proud father and got a wonderful wife, and I reside here in Birmingham, Alabama. So Roll Tide for those fans out there.
My background is really focused, definitely on the clinical space. I was a nurse by major out of college, played sports, and always very competitive, but always incredibly interested in the business aspects of clinical care. So I spent most of my time past college in the electronic medical record space, spent some time working on payers, spent some time in supply chain and software application development.
So it was an interesting amalgamation of different experiences. But I got involved with the Cleveland Clinic research project around the 2000 timeframe, and they were doing a research project on why do patients readmit. At the same time, my grandmother had congestive heart failure. So there were some really interesting epiphanies that came to my life.
So as you think about the experience a patient has inside the walls of the hospital, and my grandmother, in the case, didn't graduate from high school, very challenged financially, was discharged with 13 medications, and was somewhat of a belligerent type personality where there was compliance issues or adherence constraints. But, long story short, she passed away. So when you think about where Cleveland Clinic popped into this equation, it was really focused on medications, nutrition, and follow-up care, and there were some real aspects there that really hit me.
Long story short, in March of 2008, I started this endeavor with patient engagement. It took me a couple of weeks to come up with advisors, but PEA was born. It's a long name, but it's been a point of focus for us. So we're 16 years in, it's been a crazy ride. We've learned loads of things and have made, I think, a profound impact on care. So I stand here today and proud of what we've done, proud of where we're going, proud of the being part of the Aramark Healthcare Plus team. But that's a little bit of the background of why I created PEA.
Excellent. Bart, you came on board with Healthcare Plus in 2021. What drew you to lead this particular team at Aramark?
Oh, that's a good question. So really, I wanted to make a real difference in healthcare. As a student of the industry, I've been studying Aramark and their healthcare line of business for many, many years, and I really saw so much amazing potential within this healthcare line of business.
As I said to you earlier, my father was an aerospace engineer. What I didn't tell you was, my mom is a retired critical care nurse. So seeing, growing up, hearing all the stories, similar to what Jeff was saying about, once you get the calling of healthcare in your blood, you really just can't go any other way. So really, I knew I was a healthcare guy. I saw what Aramark was doing in the healthcare space, some of the challenges, some of the great opportunities, some of the things that were trying, some defeats, I thought, "You know what? We could really take our talents and our ambition and energy and really make this Aramark Healthcare into an amazing line of business for the organization."
So with that, I mean, I saw the Aramark overall, the hospitality, the heritage, the history. But honestly, what really drew me was I saw what was going on in the field, what Aramark Healthcare was delivering to the clients, that dedication for driving patient outcomes and patient experiences. I always saw Aramark as the company leading the edge with innovation, technology, analytics, doing things with data that no other companies were doing. I thought, "You know what? If we could actually get in there and enhance the culture with all these other great foundational things, we could do some amazing things together." And I can tell you honestly right now, we're on this journey, and we are on the right path doing some great things. I'm so excited to be here.
You made some immediate changes to the way that Healthcare Plus thought of its role in healing institutions. Can you elaborate on that for our audience?
Yeah. So the first thing I did was, that when I came on board, I immediately recognize the need to shift from just being a service provider. What we want to do is actually transform ourselves and truly being a partner to the clients that we serve. This meant prioritizing patient-centered care, foster environment that supports employee engagement and growth, and being a professional home for all of us. This is where we can actually grow, we can thrive, and be a partner for those that we serve.
I can tell you, though, the first thing that I had to do was really create a new laser focus on our culture. A culture that where you take care of your people, they will take care of the business. In turn, our world, which means patients, caregivers, and clients, and, of course, each other, will take care of ourselves and be taken care of by the clients.
So we've really done some extraordinary things. We rebranded ourselves. Remember, we used to be Aramark Healthcare. Now we're Aramark Healthcare Plus. Really seeing what the Plus has done for really transforming and really bringing our life out in public where we can actually make a difference for patient care and patient experiences, we now empower our teammates with that plus to really be the difference. We actually now trust our employees to actually make a difference in providing that care. What's crazy is what happens when you trust your teammates, and they feel that trust, they go above and beyond to really make a difference for all the caregivers that are out there, all the teammates that are out there, and for the patient, and guests.
So really, for me, to see all of us at Aramark Healthcare Plus, all 20,000 of us, really lock arms and all of us be chief cultural officers together has been extraordinary. Living the brand every single day, day in, day out, has been really fulfilling for me.
Jeff, where does PEA fit into this? What's the technical side of your business? How does this all integrate?
Yeah, it's a great question. There's a lot of different touch points, but when I think about more of the technical aspects, I think the biggest thing to think about is how to have access to data and information that resides within these electronic medical record systems. So you really have to think, "How are we working with Epic? How are you working with Cerner? How are you working with Meditech?" There's a lot of disparate systems out in the market in the physician space, so you've really got to get your arms around how do you get access to this. And I think the evolution over the last 5, 6, 7 years is, there was a lot of what I consider more discreet data. How old is the patient? Why are they here? What's the diagnosis? Things like that. But now we're starting to move into a whole new paradigm shift where you start thinking about patient preferences, customized experiences.
You've got new topics such as social determinants of health and social drivers. You've got all these interesting little data points that are really impactful to the patient, to the family, to the caregivers. How hard it is for you once you leave the four walls of this facility? How do we, as a health system, impact that? So you've really got to get some focus around data infrastructure.
Then I think the second thing is, how do you collaborate with the EMR system? So you really can't work within an island of information. You can't be just another third-party system sitting over here in a particular space. You've got to be able to move information in and out. You've got to collaborate where nursing and physicians, everybody's on the same page. So I think the history of healthcare has been incredibly verticalized or siloed. I think as you kind of break down the walls and transform the approach to care, to whether it be hospitality or whatever the focus may be, you've really got to start thinking through a more longitudinal type of approach.
Then I'd say, moving past that, you need to start thinking about how do you automate certain aspects of these processes. How do you do them faster? How do you do them more efficiently? How do you save money? How do you impact new ways of thinking? So the adoption of artificial intelligence, machine learning, these are certainly hot topics if you watch the news medias and things like that.
So these are all different tools that we've adopted and we put them in work, whether it be something more on the clinical support areas, such as nutrition or post-discharge, or even helpful in some of the non-clinical support areas that are more core to Aramark Healthcare Plus's business, whether it be EVS categories as well.
So there's a lot of different infrastructure areas that we have. Of course, all organizations need an ability to look at data, react to that analytics, be both predictive in real time and retrospective. But I think we take some interesting approaches about real-time information and collaboration with the EMR systems and not only culturally integrate, but you've got to operationally and technically integrate. They all have to go together. If you can find some magic in pulling culture, data, infrastructure, and operations all into one red bow, if you will, then I think you've got something. So that was one of our attraction points to Aramark Healthcare Plus.
That's a really nice tee up, actually, to my next question, which was to turn back to Bart and say, "Why was this integration between vision, philosophy, and data important to you? How did you and Jeff connect?"
Yeah, that's a great question. So if you go back and recall what is the purpose of Aramark Healthcare Plus, it really comes down to five different things. It's all about what we do for the patient. It's what we do for our caregivers, it's what we do for our employees, it's what we do in terms of being world-class problem solvers. The fifth one is, what do we do to help support our communities?
So patient engagement advisors actually was a perfect bolt-on. It covered all five of the pillars of where we were going as an organization. So ideally, too, we were following patients in the four walls of the hospital, and we realized that that's not where the healing actually begins and ends. Yes, the hospital has a critically important function, but there's so many times now that patients will leave the four walls of the hospital and they go home, and they don't have the right resources to heal at home.
They don't have the right food, they don't have the right pharmaceuticals, they don't have the right primary care physician, they don't have transportation. So we said to ourselves, "What can we do to be part of that caregiving healing environment where we follow the patient from a hospital that's a patient outside the hospital where the patient then conforms and being a consumer?" Which really fits nicely into the community programs that we have. It really is that commitment of bringing innovation, bringing that patient-centric care, and bringing it to life.
Heather, I know you and I have talked about that. When I wake up every morning, one of the things I do is I'm always looking for ways that we can add value to our clients. What can we do to differentiate Aramark Healthcare Plus from a self-operated model versus a competition? And once again, the Patient Engagement Advisors is such an amazing tool when you integrate it. It's the one plus one equals three scenario, and that's what Jeff and I work every single day just trying to integrate these two, that really can be a powerhouse combination that nobody else in the marketplace has. So it's exciting times, for sure.
It certainly is exciting, but I'd actually like to ask each of you, and I think I'll start with you, Jeff, to provide a concrete example of how this kind of partnership has affected somebody. I know in previous discussions that you've had really fantastic stories of how patients have been touched through this process. Jeff, could you share one of those to start?
Yeah, absolutely. We call them wow stories. We've adopted some of the methodology from the Ritz-Carlton back in the day. I really like Bart's articulation of those five points. So as you thread through many of our wow stories, you can see how this intertwines together.
But I'll give an example of an 18-year-old paraplegic kid that came into one of our hospitals and he was actually readmitted for a urinary tract infection. So our teams engage with the hospitalists. We're up on the floors. We're with the nurses. We're having dialogue about what's going on, why is the patient here, what are the aspects of social determinants, et cetera. We actually get into the room and start discussing with the family, and you could start seeing the stress and the anxiety. Come to find out, it was really more this feeling of guilt by the mother about the challenges related to adult diapers.
They could not afford the adult diapers for their child. So it was an affordability constraint and something that they just felt very guilty about. They're actually trying to get a little bit longer usage out of the cloth diapers, which led to the anxiety. So when you look into the technical infrastructure and our connection into the community, you've got to start thinking about the patient in context, the family in context, and start looking at what's going on within the community. We have 37,000 programs that we have access to, but even despite how robust that might sound, there was actually not an adult diaper bank within a two-hour drive of where we were physically at this particular hospital.
So the team scours the county, scours the city, scours the state, we find out that there's another diaper bank up in a two-hour drive. So the team actually got in their car, drove two hours, convinced the leadership up here at this non-for-profit to give us a car full of adult divers so we could at least give some sense of help, at least on the short term, to the family. But at the same time, we started working with the Moose Club locally, created our own diaper bank, and now operate our own diaper bank in the Highlands of Hardy County in these particular areas of Florida. So as you start kind of enrolling that family into this new support mechanism where they can now maintain a level of care and compassion for their child to help with not readmitting, if you will, is a big stress relief. The reaction of the family was profound. So on top of that, we've expanded that program to now support 13 hospitals in that region.
We actually distribute these adult diapers, and these are pallets and pallets and pallets worth of supplies that we distribute to all the hospitals. So all of these other hospitals have the same type of issues. So when I sit there and think about how does this connect back to those five areas that Bart was talking about, is the impact, obviously, to the patient and the family was significant, the ability to allow the caregivers to focus on their top of licensure, the impact of culture to our employees, the idea that the administration thinks of us as problem solvers, and to solve some of these really complex scenarios that take time, they're hard work, you've got to roll up your sleeves, and sometimes there's not a quick answer, you've got to really think out of the box and be tenacious, and then the impact to the community.
So a lot of these things really require a connection, a relationship, to the community. You've got to be able to get out to their homes. You've got to get out into the streets. So I think a combination of all those things expands the idea of not only improving the service experience inside the walls, but we're now starting to improve the service experience outside the walls. I think what's measurable is creating an experience that maintains loyalty. Every hospital administrative teams that we're talking about are interested in loyalty and market share, this idea of eliminating readmissions, this move towards value-based care.
Then I'd say this idea of doing things super efficiently in a way to reduce labor spend or length of stay. So those kinds of threads across the cultural elements that Bart drives across Aramark Healthcare Plus and the things that we're intertwining together, I think, are pretty satisfying to be a part of.
Yeah. That ripple effect is just amazing to watch. You have a singular patient coming in with an issue that's deeply affecting him or her, and then the next thing you know, it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows and it grows because of what you are able to see with your expertise in there. Bart, do you have a wow story you can share with us?
I have so many wow stories, I could consume this entire podcast, so I'll pause, but I just want to say it's so great to actually partner with Jeff, and I'm not going to elaborate too much more on what he said because he and I are completely in sync around the value of this partnership. Really, for me, when I look at this partnership, it's just benefits on top of benefits. Heather, to your point, I love a good wow story. It's actually what we're doing. We're traveling the country right now, building culture around how we behave and how these wow stories create our new golden standard and how we operate as a company. But once again, though, it all comes back to the patient in those wow stories. Heather, I'm looking at you. I don't know if you've ever been with a loved one and they get discharged from the hospital. How scary, how intimidating, how crazy that experience is.
So really, we bring tremendous real value to patients, family member, and guests who are actually experienced that whole discharge from the four walls of the hospital, giving them complete comfort and peace of mind so they can go home and heal in a stress-free environment. So the wow story just continue to come one after another because we're making such a true difference to the patients.
That's why I love when I wake up in the morning once again. Why do we exist? Because we can make a difference in human beings lives. We can make a difference in driving clinical outcomes, really what drives us. I will say from the nurses, an amazing downstream benefit is that we all know what's going on with the nursing staffing crisis. The reason why hospitals are having such a difficult time right now with their budgets is because they're spending so much money trying to actually staff, and even though they have a 1,000-bed census, they can't run a 1,000 bed. They can run a 700-bed census because they can't get caregivers.
So what this PEA-Aramark Healthcare Plus relationship does, it actually helps us take a rock out of the backpack for a nurse by doing task for them, non-clinical task. Even watching the Patient Engagement Advisor ambassadors really work with the patients and alleviating the nurse's to have to go and deal with certain things, even borderline, on the clinical side, so the value that we're bringing for the patients, the value that we're bringing for the caregivers, and then from the client's perspective, Jeff touched on a few, the biggest issue right now is staffing.
As I mentioned, the length of stay for a hospital across the United States continues to go up. You don't get reimbursed another penny more if your patient stays longer. So we're helping actually reduce the length of stay for our hospitals. We're reducing the readmission rates. So if a patient gets discharged from the hospital and they go back in the hospital, the hospital does not get reimbursed for that stay. They do not get reimbursed for the consumables. So that's all on the hospital's nickel.
So we provide an incredible role of actually helping patients go home, stay home, get healed, get healthy, and become from a patient to once again a consumer. In terms of clients seeing real value, Jeff touched on it, we are actually creating loyalty for these health systems because we're taking such great care of them with the four walls of the hospital and then getting safely at home that they become brand loyal to that health system, which is a terminology called network integrity. We can help our health systems actually have that brand loyalty, so those families, for all the procedures, proactive reactive emergencies, or just a general checkup, they will go back to the health system because they had such a great patient experience throughout that entire journey.
Bottom line, for me, it's making a difference for human beings, and actually, it's changing the way healthcare is going to be delivered for the future. It's almost like Jeff and I talk all the time. It's like when we all didn't have an Apple iPhone, we didn't know we needed one until we got one and said, "We can't live without it." That's where we are right now. This is such an emerging technology, what we're doing with Patient Engagement Advisors with Aramark Healthcare Plus, we're actually reshaping that way. Healthcare is going to be delivered for the future. And with that, it's part of building a legacy of what's going on for Aramark and Aramark Healthcare Plus, and, of course, Patient Engagement Advisors.
Okay. So again, Bart, thank you. These comprehensive answers really make all the difference for understanding for our audience. But before we go, I do want to give you each a chance to cover anything I may have missed in my questions, what you really think is essential to understanding the relationship between PEA and Aramark. Jeff, do you want to jump in here?
Yeah. I think for us, it's been an exciting journey. We were on our own for 15 plus years. In the last year, our relationship with Aramark Healthcare Plus has been a really rejuvenating, I call it a highly caffeinated experience. I often get asked by some of our employees like, "Why did we pick Aramark Healthcare Plus?" And I quickly say, "That's an easy answer because the first thing was wrapped around people and culture." I enjoy the leadership. I enjoy the focus on culture. I think it's an imperative part, and I think our DNA, at least for us, we're a smaller company growing, is being very entrepreneurial, being very disruptive, being unafraid to think differently. I think Aramark Healthcare Plus, Bart, has embraced the idea to take somewhat of maybe a stagnant historical industry and how do you flip it up a little bit. How do you change the game a little bit?
So I think for us, that's really exciting. There's a tremendous customer base. There's tremendous customers that they have that we're engaged with. So there's a lot of growth, excitement, and cultural contribution, and things like that as part of it. I'd finish with how our people view Aramark Healthcare Plus. It represents a career path. It represents professional escalation. A lot of the people we hire are lot long healthcare professionals where their viewpoint is empathy, care, and connection to patients. They just have a real interest in it. The idea to be able to be a part of something that's more transformative or changing, you look back on it in time, go, "Wow, that was just great to be a part of that." I think that's really just what excites us every day and what gets me out of bed and puts a smile on my face.
Thank you for that. Bart, let's give a last minute elevator summary here for audiences to take away.
How am I supposed to follow that? Oh my gosh.
It's a real honor and privilege to work with Jeff and his entire PEA team. They are so dedicated, so smart, and so on page with us relative to taking care of patients, caregivers, and employees. So really, since I've been here the last two years, I can tell you that seeing the wow stories, seeing our teams in the field, our engagement that we have with Healthcare Plus Solutions Group as a partnership out there for patient experience, and of course what we've done with Patient Engagement Advisors really just continues to excite me in terms of where we're going.
It's always interesting when a lot of people ask me, as a leader of this wonderful organization, "What keeps you up at night?" And honestly, for me, it's the pure excitement of what lies ahead on a journey. I'm so eager to chart our path to see what happens next because what we've accomplished in two years is really a lifetime for a lot of other companies. So we are on pace. We are disrupting the marketplace, and we're doing it with 20,000 of us standing shoulder to shoulder to make a difference for the patients, nurses, doctors, and caregivers that we provide every single day. So thank you very much for having us.
Oh, it was truly my pleasure. Would you like to know more about Aramark Healthcare Plus? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. I'd like to offer a huge thank you to our guest today, and I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in to Mark This.
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