Last week, Steve Jobe and I traveled to Alpharetta, Georgia to meet with our Community of Practice Healthcare group at Dekalb Office. Our group takes turns hosting at our dealerships across the United States. Our community of practice is about sharing, learning, and building networks to help us profitably grow our businesses and make a difference in the healthcare world. Our group is now up to 94 members, but this particular meeting was about 25 members.
We started with a Tour of the Dekalb Office Client Experience Center.
We then moved into a discussion of the Healthier Hospitals Initiative, followed by breakout sessions with small groups. Our small groups allow us to share best practices and new ideas around three important topics. This time around, the topics were: Healthcare A&D Strategy, Dealer Healthcare Marketing, and Ambulatory Strategy.
That afternoon, we visited the Georgia Tech Simtigrate Lab. Simtigrate is a word they came up with to combine Simulation & Integrate. The 5,000-square-foot lab allows for re-creation of medical spaces. Working with architects, engineers, medical personnel and others, this group helps come up with ideas for spaces and environments that are more efficient, offer patient safety, decrease chances for acquiring infections and increase collaboration among staff. The approach involves evaluating existing research, conducting research, testing proposed solutions in simulated medical environments, validating the solutions in a living lab and translating the solutions for broad applications. The group develops tools, data sets and evidence that influence design, health IT and healthcare products.
From there, we shuttled to the Steelcase Worklife Center in downtown Atlanta. We had dinner, toured the space, and saw a preview on the Steelcase Health product update.
The next day started with a guest speaker. We had the privilege to have an intimate conversation with John Bardis, the founder and former CEO of MedAssets. The objective was to gain healthcare industry perspective through the lens of one of healthcare’s most influential people.
To round out our session together, we had two more presenters. Daryl Dunn, Vice President of Healthcare IDS, discussed the top issues facing hospital CEO’s today. Then, Diane Dimel, Project Manager IDS, discussed the unique design objectives that face those that consult in the area of behavior health.
It was two days crammed with lots of learning, and it sent me home feeling energized and inspired!