The boom-or-bust lake town of Petoskey isn't known as a technological epicenter. Nestled on Little Traverse Bay, business here is more about the charming downtown and coastal white sand resorts.

But a recent influx of cash from federal COVID-19 funds and wealthy Up North donors have made the local hospital one of the most technologically advanced in the state.

In 2015, McLaren Health Care embarked on a $158 million renovation project for its McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital hospital, which included $37 million in private donations to expand and upgrade the facility. The project added 182,000 square feet of space as well as technology modernization to improve patient safety and experience.

"With the construction project, we knew our future was now," said Rich Reamer, regional manager of clinical engineering at Grand Blanc-based McLaren Health Care. "We had people in the area who wanted to give toward a project like this, so we had the opportunity to come together and create the best-integrated system we could."

Reamer's goal was to get all of the hospital's digital systems to communicate. So his team invited nine tech system vendors to meet and told them to create a way for the systems to work together — or the hospital would find other vendors.

"Most systems aren't able to integrate and we knew that was a problem," Reamer said. "It took a lot of time, but we weren't buying a system unless they worked together and we ultimately convinced them to try."

Danelle Harkonen, a registered nurse, left, and Diane Wenninger, chief nursing officer at McLaren Oakland Hospital, wear the Vocera, a “Star Trek” like device that can put all the controls and communications at the hospital on one device on Thursday, June 23. 

The result is nine different communication systems in the hospital operating in concert to streamline operations and improve health care, Reamer said.

The systems, including a virtual nursing platform, smart beds, digital whiteboards, bedside patient tablets and more, communicate through the hospital's Vocera Smartbadge. The badge is a "Star Trek-esque" communication device that allows staff to call one another without having to actually know who is working that day. A call to the nursing shift supervisor will go to the current nursing shift supervisor, for instance.

But the tool also communicates with patients and smart beds. If a patient falls out of bed, the bed will notify the nearest staff member to the room via the Vocera. If the patient needs more pain medication, the bed will communicate to find the closest doctor or nurse able to administer the drugs, removing a nursing assistant or a staffer who can't administer drugs from taking the call first and slowing down operations.

"Vocera alerts us very quickly," said Miranda Lahaney, a registered nurse at McLaren Oakland in Pontiac, where they are rolling out the device, but do not have all the systems integrated yet. "It cuts down on pain management and fall issues and allows us to get a hold of labs and specialists quickly. It's made our lives easier."

The health system completed the technology integration in Petoskey in November and the results were almost immediate, Reamer said.

In initial reports, the integrated system captured 1 million safety concerns in the hospital, most of which were not catastrophic but nonetheless important. The issues included improper bed adjustment, side rails being down, or fall hazards, Reamer said.

When the new system launched, hospital operations were 60 percent safety non-compliant at any given moment, but within two weeks noncompliance dropped to 20 percent, Reamer said.

"We completely changed the safety environment of the hospital," Reamer said. "Some issues were corrected in three seconds. The longest it took to fix a compliance issue was 17 minutes. The system allows us to operate more efficiently and more safely, which is what we set out to accomplish."

Beyond safety, health systems around the nation are seeking out ways to parlay technology investments into backstops against its shrinking workforce.

There is a 17 percent job vacancy rate at Michigan hospitals, leading to about 1,300 fewer patient beds available for the sick across the state compared to last year, according to the Michigan Health and Hospital Association.

In response, Detroit-based Henry Ford Health is going to launch a job called "virtual sitting" in the fall at two of its hospitals. Often in the hospital, patients suffering from dementia or another mental episode will require a nurse or medical assistant to watch the patient for their own safety. That chews up an expensive resource that could be assisting other patients as well as reducing the number of available caregivers, said Eric Wallis, chief nursing officer for HFH.

"If I am a nurse close to retirement, maybe working a 12-hour shift isn't attractive anymore," Wallis said. "But if we can use cameras, we can employ staff from anywhere who can visualize and watch those patients and speak to them via a speaker and interact with a team that's on site if they do something that isn't safe. That will help reduce the bedside stress on our nurses."

John Jones, managing director of advisory firm Willis Towers Watson's employee experience unit for North America, said managing patient loads with appropriate work schedules is the industry's greatest focus — and technology is the ultimate leveler.

"Being able to use technology to make it easier on a nurse to cover a larger patient load and, in some cases, improve care even with staffing shortages is paramount," Jones said. "Necessity is the mother of invention, so health care is looking at things very differently right now."

But technology implementation at the scale the 202-bed McLaren Northern did isn't easy or cheap, even for other McLaren hospitals — though the system is in the process of $1 billion in upgrades.

"Not everyone is at the same opportunity point," Reamer said. "Most don't have the funding to do everything all at once like we did. Most hospitals are going to add technologies piecemeal. But we believe these technologies improve care and patient experience, so I don't see McLaren slowing down and I expect other systems to ramp up efforts as well.

"This is the future of care."

Readers are invited to submit a letter to the editor or connect with us on social media (we're on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram)

Staying current is easy with Crain's news delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge. Click below to see everything we have to offer.

With a Crain’s Detroit Subscription you get exclusive access, insights and experiences to help you succeed in business.

Helping you succeed in business since 1985.

1155 Gratiot Avenue Detroit MI  48207-2997