Midmark’s Experience Center brings together vendor, distributor and end user to map out physician office design and function
Since February 2021, Midmark’s 21,000-square-foot Experience Center in Versailles, Ohio, has become a place for customers to “learn about operational and clinical workflows and – combined with healthcare technologies – design their own best practices,” says Kurt Forsthoefel, Midmark’s director of medical marketing.
This spring, Repertoire asked Midmark executives to talk about the Experience Center and its impact on customers and distribution partners. Offering comments in addition to Forsthoefel were Brian Vierra, senior director, medical sales; Nate Williams, national accounts executive; and Ian Rodenberger, region director, medical sales.
Repertoire: How does the Experience Center differ from a traditional showroom?
Kurt Forsthoefel: The experience center is a hub for collaboration among distribution partners, forward-thinking customers, industry leaders and strategic partners from around the world. It is designed to help Midmark healthcare customers make informed design decisions when it comes to the advanced technologies and solutions they need to continually improve clinical outcomes. It offers them an interactive opportunity to learn best practices and understand how Midmark solutions will perform and provide value in different healthcare settings.
Our research and design teams apply customer insights and interactions to build upon our understanding of their challenges and opportunities. This collaborative approach fuels the innovation needed to best serve our healthcare customers and their patients.
Repertoire: Midmark is a provider of medical, dental and veterinary equipment and technologies. Repertoire readers are particularly interested in the medical venue in the Experience Center. Can you describe it?
Forsthoefel: In the medical venue, our customers see how technology, design and workflow come together to create better healthcare experiences for patients and staff. The venue is comprised of 12 rooms focusing on the following workflows:
1. Better BP® (Blood Pressure): Patient positioning during blood pressure acquisition can make all the difference for consistent, repeatable measurements. The Better BP exam space focuses on how technology and connectivity come together to improve blood pressure capture.
2. ADA: Since the inception of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), accessibility has become a legal requirement. More importantly, accessible design is instrumental in providing better care to all patients regardless of disability. In this room, we explore how spatial layout in the exam space comes together with equipment and technology to create a safer, more accessible care experience.
3. Patient + Staff Safety: The facility and equipment design features in this room focus on helping ensure a safer space for all.
4. Instrument Processing: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) outlines five critical steps of instrument processing. Following these best practices helps keep patients and staff safe and maximizes the efficiency of the instrument processing operation.
5. Lab: Infection prevention is an important part of the clinic lab. The lab workflow can be used for testing, packing and shipping for same-day or overnight results.
6. Podiatry: Taking an evidence-based-design approach when establishing or renovating the podiatry space elevates the strategic importance of equipment, room layout and design decisions. This approach can help our customers and their design partners create care environments conducive to achieving better outcomes through enhanced patient/caregiver experience, standardization and interaction.
7. In-Office Procedures: The number of in-office medical procedures is increasing. This general procedure room was designed to enable physicians to better meet patient demands and contain procedure costs.
8. Dermatology: We have reengineered the dermatology room to combine three key activities effectively in one space – consultation, counseling and procedures. A seamless, flexible and efficient design can help enhance the caregiver-patient relationship and ultimately improve outcomes.
9. Diagnostics + Connectivity: Midmark’s connected diagnostic devices and software solutions support adherence to clinical standards for intended clinical outcomes. Midmark Diagnostic Devices work seamlessly with many of today’s top EMR systems to help improve workflow, save time and eliminate manual transcription errors.
10. Dual Access: The culture in today’s healthcare delivery systems is shifting to a lean, integrated care model to help improve collaboration between healthcare providers, medical technicians, schedulers and patients. The use of two entry points improves workflow by providing separate flow paths for the patient and clinicians.
11. Dedicated Zones: This workflow design provides clear separation between the care zone for caregiver interaction and the family/visitor zone with guest seating.
12. Midmark RTLS: The Midmark real-time locating system, or Midmark RTLS, gathers automated, accurate data to improve the experience between patient and caregiver. All Experience Center guests receive an RTLS badge upon entry. The entire facility is outfitted with RTLS sensors, with the medical venue and the RTLS rooms being more heavily sensed for higher accuracy.
Repertoire: Describe the visitors you typically host at the Experience Center.
Brian Vierra: Typically we host a cross-functional group of stakeholders representing key personas in the client’s organization. They collaborate early in the planning and design process – often two to three years in advance of the clinic opening. This group includes clinical operations, facilities, architect/design, process improvement, quality, clinical leadership, procurement, IT and more.
Repertoire: How long does the typical visit last?
Vierra: The Midmark Experience Trip is typically two days with a one-night stay at Hotel Versailles, owned by Renaissance Corporation, a subsidiary of Midmark Corporation. This provides ample time for travel to and from western Ohio and a productive educational schedule.
Repertoire: Do you offer a routine “schedule of events” for Experience Center visitors?
Nate Williams: Every trip has its unique itinerary to best meet the customer’s distinct project needs and branding expectations, and to facilitate a collective learning environment for the team. We balance classroom learning with interactive product demonstrations, create collaborative design sessions with our design team, and provide a factory tour so customers can understand the importance we place on quality.
Each customer’s buying journey is different and we do our best to educate customers on industry trends to reframe their thinking about exam room design, provide a vision for what the risk to their business could be when designing around disparate product categories, highlight how their peers are approaching design to reach operational goals, and showcase how Midmark products help support their desired workflows in a mobile, flexible and connected environment.
Repertoire: How should visitors prepare for their visit? For example, how much research would you prefer they complete prior to the visit?
Vierra: Our sales professionals are highly engaged with the client to best prepare for their visit in three ways.
1. First, our sales teammates conduct pre-trip presentations and trip-planning discussions with the client to tailor the experience to their specific goals.
2. Second, clients find it beneficial to share project floorplans and project lists in advance so that our designers can best prepare for the live design session during their visit.
3. Most important, our sales teammates visit one or more existing clinics to conduct a “gemba walk,” which is a Japanese lean principle describing the act of observing where work is being done. During a gemba walk, we capture firsthand knowledge of the client’s current clinic layouts, equipment and workflows as well as feedback from frontline staff to uncover gaps and opportunities. When clients are engaged in this type of preparation, they ensure they get the maximum value out of their Midmark Experience.
Repertoire: What should visitors expect during their visit?
Forsthoefel: Several things, including:
Insights into clinical workflow, equipment, technology and design that set a solid foundation for the Quintuple Aim of healthcare – to improve patient outcomes and the patient/provider experience while reducing cost/waste and advancing health equity.
Voice-of-customer exercises to capture a current-state gap analysis and the desired future state of the clinic.
Clinical solutions that enable care delivery and the seamless transfer of patient data to the EMR as healthcare shifts from a fee-for-service to value-based care model.
Cabinetry and exam room design consultation to optimize workflow and the patient/caregiver interaction.
Key considerations for infection prevention in the exam room as well as the five-step instrument processing workflow.
Hands-on experience with our products, colors, finishes and upholstery selections.
A factory tour to see how quality and innovation are built into our products.
Repertoire: After their visit, what work lies ahead for the visitor as well as Midmark in terms of building/renovating/expanding their clinic?
Williams: We create an Executive Summary document that ties together our pre-trip work, our live design consultation, ideas and concepts from our exam room vignettes and additional ideas that resulted from the trip. We then work with our channel partners to present our overall delivered and installed pricing packages, secure purchase orders for the project, and become part of their journey for equipment setup and product installation as well as clinical education for the medical staff and IT department.
A year after the project is complete, we perform a Post Occupancy Evaluation at no charge, which allows us to help customers continuously improve their designs and workflow. We visit new clinics and interview key customer stakeholders to find out what design and workflow improvements they prefer, what they would change, etc. We compile data from this site visit and consult with their leadership team so we can make adjustments, changes, etc. for their next project together.
Repertoire: Since the Experience Center opened for customer visits in 2021, what changes have you made to improve your customers’ (and Midmark’s) experience?
Ian Rodenberger: We have added a flexible learning lab area, which allows us to recreate the customer’s current clinical workflow. This space is a starting point to fully understand the “why” behind their current room design, document important checkpoints throughout the patient’s visit, and uncover any potential risks to patients or staff. To drive consensus around the customer’s new way forward, we come back to the learning lab at the end of the trip to compare their existing room layout with their vision for future workflows and designs.