Earlier this month, KLAS Research recognized LeanTaaS as Best in KLAS and the only fully rated solution provider in Capacity Optimization Management. LeanTaaS provides AI-powered and cloud-based capacity management, staffing, and patient flow software and services for 185 health systems with over 1,000 hospitals and centers.
In this Q&A, LeanTaaS President and COO Sanjeev Agrawal discusses why capacity management is so critical for health systems in today’s landscape, and how healthcare organizations are leveraging AI-powered technology to optimize it.
Question: Why is capacity management such a critical priority for healthcare leaders now?
Sanjeev Agrawal: Every day, healthcare executives are forced to make tough decisions in order to keep their doors open and lights on. Tight margins, ongoing shortages of providers as well as other staff, and an aging and expanding patient population place enormous financial pressures on hospitals. If they cannot adapt to patient demand and resource constraints, they may be forced to close, merge with competitors, or just else barely survive, operating in a way that impacts patient access, experience, and safety.
To safely and efficiently accommodate increasing numbers of patients in a variable flow, using limited staff and constrained assets, and also reduce costs and generate revenue, they must do more with less through sophisticated capacity management. If you do this right, it can increase EBITDA by 5 percentage points.
Health system and hospital leaders have no time to wait — and many are already on this path. Demand for our AI-powered solutions is high, as LeanTaaS now serves as the trusted partner for capacity optimization management to over 1,000 hospitals and ambulatory centers throughout the US.
Q: Can you explain more about how capacity management ties into profitability?
SA: Hospitals and health systems have to make their assets sweat. They have to get the absolute most out of these precious, expensive resources, and the only way to do that effectively is by using AI-powered solutions. But while AI is the beginning, it’s not the end.
This understanding led us to create our “magic equation”: we bring AI-powered automation, workflow integration, and change management services all together to fully optimize resources, create long-lasting change, and generate ROI. LeanTaaS’ iQueue suite of solutions – iQueue for Operating Rooms, iQueue for Infusion Centers, and iQueue for Inpatient Flow – is the AI and automation engine. Then every customer gets a dedicated team responsible for working hand in hand to implement the technology, enable process change, train end users, establish required systemwide governance, and deliver promised outcomes.
What does this look like when all put together? Health systems perform 30-50 more OR cases annually, earn an extra $10k per inpatient bed and $20k per infusion chair annually, and optimize schedules to reduce delays in care by 80%. To optimize health system staff, automation can also help health systems eliminate 500,000 hours of repetitive tasks.
Q: What does being Best in KLAS mean to you and your customers?
SA: Nearly a decade ago, we created the category of capacity management optimization in the healthcare IT market. We’ve got a ten-year head start on this, and that’s why the KLAS report shows we are still the only fully rated vendor in this space.
Our Best in KLAS recognition is based on direct feedback from across our large customer base. In their own words, customers described outcomes like seeing more patients than ever before, achieving higher first-year ROIs than projected, and being well-supported as flexible, evolving organizations seeking new ways to meet capacity needs. They noted decreased wait times in infusion centers and ORs, more efficient use of the OR, greater staff satisfaction, reconfigured workflows, and higher numbers of self-scheduling physicians. All these point to expanded healthcare capacity and better use of existing resources, for the benefit of providers, staff, and patients alike.
By the numbers, 100% of customers who responded to KLAS’ survey said that they are satisfied with their investment in us. This is an incredibly rare feat. Every single customer who responded said that our iQueue product suite is part of their long-term plans, that they would buy the suite again and that LeanTaaS “keeps all promises”. We’re honored to be considered long-term partners to our customers and are relentless in our pursuit of helping them continue to optimize capacity for their staff and patients.
Q: What does the “next phase” of capacity management optimization look like for health systems?
SA: Emerging technology, especially generative AI, has enormous potential to advance health systems’ capacity management even further. Combined with full automation, and deployed with human oversight and expertise, generative AI’s promise to drive efficiency and ROI is unprecedented.
LeanTaaS envisions a future where this technology makes real-time, intelligent adjustments to schedules, resources, and staffing, optimizing their use based on continuously updated data and running these historically manual tasks on autopilot. To save time and reduce burden for staff, generative AI can also eliminate tasks like transcription, parsing information from handwritten notes, scanned images, and PDFs to autofill form fields. The Form Automation tool we’re releasing this year as part of iQueue for Operating Rooms will use these abilities to automate surgery booking requests, even pulling insights from clinical notes to flag special needs and equipment requests.
We further see generative AI as a high-powered assistant to staff, delivering intelligently-worded capacity alerts, predictions, suggestions, and answers. Both leaders and frontline staff can leverage this technology to make informed decisions and take action to optimize capacity. With generative AI automating redundant work and augmenting their expertise, staff will be empowered to act strategically and surface opportunities to unlock capacity, reduce costs, and drive revenue like never before.
We look forward to this future, with more and more health systems seizing this moment to transform their operations and generate immediate ROI with AI-powered solutions. We’re very proud to be seen as the trusted partner in Capacity Optimization Management and honored to help deliver better care and access to thousands of communities across the US.
Learn about LeanTaaS’ technology and service offerings here.