Engaging HealthStream Customers to Solve Big Healthcare Problems: Living Labs

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

It’s not often that we get to turn the vision for healthcare improvement into reality, but that’s exactly what HealthStream’s Living Labs is doing. From reengineering how annual training is delivered and identifying rising nurse leaders, to innovating how we care for our aging population, HealthStream partners with our customers to understand and tackle some of healthcare’s biggest challenges.

In this episode, we spoke to Richard Galentino, Ed.D., Vice President, Professional Development Pathways & Living Labs, HealthStream who heads up the Living Labs program. Hear Richard explain why HealthStream decided to undertake these ambitious projects and how some of the findings are leading to real transformation in the practice of healthcare.

Below is an edited excerpt from the recording with HealthStream’s Brad Weeks, our host:

Brad Weeks:

Tell us about the genesis of HealthStream’s Living Labs program.

Richard Galentino:

The Living Labs program was formalized about two and a half years ago. But before then, when HealthStream’s CEO Bobby Frist, or other key HealthStream leaders would travel to hospital systems or different facilities around the country, they’d often meet frontline staff, nurses, prescribers, and doctors, and a lot of times they would strike up a conversation and think of an innovation that was needed or a problem that needed to be solved. Often, frontline workers would have the answers to those problems but their direct mandate is to focus on day-to-day care. So they wouldn’t have the time and/or resources to really think about how to solve this problem on a macro level. Bobby Frist would regularly say, “Hey, I can do something about some of these challenges.”

Brad Weeks:

What are some of the examples of things we’re trying to solve with this program?

Richard Galentino:

People in education and healthcare want to know that their healthcare staff is fully competent and trained up on certain key issues. Things like for example, hand hygiene. Healthcare leaders often wonder, “Do all my healthcare workers, as many as 30,000 healthcare workers, CNAs, nurses, doctors—are they all following the protocol with regard to hand hygiene? How do we test to make sure that’s being done?” So that’s a big challenge that we’re facing. Certainly you’ve heard of hospital-acquired infections and how we address that challenge. But how do you truly know that everybody is educated and knows the best process to do simple things like hand hygiene? So that’s one challenge for example that we’ve worked on in the last year.

Brad Weeks:

This is an example of a very simple problem seemingly, that can have drastic impacts on patients served, right?

Richard Galentino:

Absolutely. If hospital-acquired infections go down, that would be transformational.

Listen to the full podcast here.