Christian Cox: Technology In Healthcare Management With Plumero #200

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we have a previous guest. If you haven't checked out our old episode, Christian Cox, Christian is back on our show today for our showcase of his new product. He launched his new company, his new SaaS company called Plumero Technologies, which you guys can check out at plumero.co. And we're going to share our screen, so it's going to be more interactive. We're going to learn more about what Christian has built today, what he's got to offer you guys, and why you guys should check him out. So before we get started learning more about your product, we got the screen up here, Plumero. Tell us a little bit more, Christian. Welcome to the show. I mean, where are you guys based? What's the size of the company? How far are you guys in development? Tell us more about the business before we get into it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, it's great to be able to connect with you again. We were just talking before the recording. Both of our little kiddos have grown up quite a bit since the last time we chatted, but it's always nice to be able to reconnect. Yeah, man, we are based in Orlando, where I have been living for the last few years. The size of this company is super small, super micro organization type vibes going on. So we built this with about 4 people, with myself acting as kind of like the product owner/business analyst/QA, Scrum Master, all that.

Mm-hmm.

My partner who puts together beautiful designs and workflows, he has worked in UX and UI for over 10 years now. So this is like his bread and butter. Gave him basically sandbox and creative liberty to do whatever he wanted based on some requirements that we talked about together, and 2 full-stack devs. So that's kind of how we have started out. This is a stable MVP that we built last year in 2022. And so yeah, we are in early stages of starting to do outbound a little more aggressively now here for 2023. Um, and yeah, seeing how many conversations we can have and where it goes.

Nice. And I'm assuming this has been completely bootstrapped, uh, kind of internally from your, your agency and yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So for a little more context for anybody who might be listening or watching, um, we had, uh, so I have another staffing company, um, that does, uh, we, we do software development Like on a custom level for clients. Although we've shifted to do mainly staffing these days, we did start out doing a lot of custom work for our clients. And we did a lot of custom development and consulting in this space in healthcare on backend operations. And as I talked to more people in the field, so like directors of operations and environmental services, in hospitals who typically would be using these types of tools, started to notice this pattern that you and I were talking about where on the back end there's a lot of people still doing things on paper. And on the front end in healthcare technology, as a patient, you see all the nice iPad forms and things like that, but there's still a lot of work to be done to kind of streamline things on the operational side of the house for hospitals. And so that's kind of what this does. It brings a lot of that off paper and centralizes into one space and get people some time back, do other things that are more productive as they're working and walking the floors.

Cool. And so you've bootstrapped so far. Are you looking to raise any kind of investment on this at this point or in the near future?

If the, if, if the opportunity, the right opportunity came up, We'd be open to that. And essentially that would be to kind of help with some initial sales as well as we onboard clients, start to kind of distribute some of the work that I had done early on. That would kind of help me and my partner focus more on strategic decisions about where we want to take the company and not be so much in the You know, the day-to-day.

Okay, sounds good. And maybe just anybody listening in, so if anybody, you know, investing more in the sales, is there an ideal profile of an investor you'd be looking for?

Probably somebody who, you know, and we've— we're pretty experienced in putting together a sales organization, but there's always some more stuff you can learn. Anybody who has done well at SaaS sales, Or has been exposed to that for long periods of time, probably way longer than I have, I'd be definitely open to having a conversation. Okay.

All right. Awesome. So ideal customer is hospitals, right? I mean, only working with hospitals across— where is your market? Canada, US? Is that your main focus?

Yeah, mainly Canada and US. And the ideal customer profile is a director of environmental services in hospitals or healthcare facilities. There's also a bed coordinator who tends to look at these types of processes, operational leads who work closely with nurses, and occasionally, depending on the size of the organization, you might see the chief medical officer involved a little closer to daily operations as well. So that's kind of the 4 main people we're looking to talk to. And yeah, trying to see if we can schedule some more demos throughout the year and close some business. Makes sense.

Okay, so now that we got the page up, maybe if you can just walk us through how you built this up, maybe talk about your features, talk about your packages, your plans, the prices, maybe just walk us through if I'm as a buyer, how do I know?

So yeah, I'll scroll down a little bit if that helps. So these are kind of our main Yeah. One of the main points of value here, where I talk to a lot of leadership that say that one of the biggest problems, and this is one of the terms in hospital and healthcare facilities that is used a lot when it comes to measuring productivity, is throughput. And basically what that is, is from the time that me as a patient, I get to your facility, How long does it take you to get me into a bed, get me treated, get me out, and then have that bed turned around for the next patient? So all that entire time is measured. And depending on your specific processes, it's either going to be longer or shorter. So one of the main challenges that a lot of hospitals have is nurses, when they When a patient gets discharged from their room, they're not always immediately able to notify that that bed is vacant and is ready to be turned around for the next patient. And that can have anything to do with they weren't able to close out that patient's chart for the day yet. They might be looking, tending to, you know, 10 other patients walking the floors. And so they didn't get to that room. And by the time they do get to that room and they are able to notify the environmental services team that the bed is ready to be turned around, I mean, you could have had easily another 2 or 3 hours pass by, and that translates to money being lost for the hospital. So these are— so Plumero is based on that premise of nurses being able to notify a vacant room immediately, even though they haven't closed out their patient chart. EVS can receive notification of that and start to work on those beds immediately. And when they're finished, these statuses, these dynamic statuses that I'll show here in a little bit, they will automatically update. So anytime the page is refreshed, the nurses will know which beds have been cleaned and are ready to— Accept another patient.

Okay.

So those are kind of our main value points. And then if we go down to pricing, I like having straightforward conversations. So this section says straight, transparent pricing, no tricks, just the numbers. For small and mid-sized facilities, it's $850 a month billed annually. For larger facilities, it's $1,750 a month, also billed annually. And then for multiple facilities, it's basically the baseline starts here and then, you know, can do tailored pricing based on how much that organization would need.

Okay.

It's a pretty basic tiered structure. Between these first 2, there's going to be, you know, mainly just a cap on how many units or rooms you can manage in the tool. And then there are discounts applied for additional users and additional units before you get to the next year.

Got it. Have you guys checked what the competition is in the space and, you know, what they're charging? I mean, top of mind, this seems— I thought it would be a little bit higher in terms of what you would charge, but I could be wrong. I mean, that could be the right pricing.

Yeah, we've seen similar pricing for similar tools. There are a lot of them, and this is kind of like very This is like super focused on one part of the process, really. A lot of tools out there, they kind of have this, this, this all-in-one solution where you can work on the patient chart and also have your EVS team members taking beds and turning them around and things like that. But the only challenge there again is that trigger that notifies the EVS team that they can work on those bids is dependent on the chart. So this allows you to work outside of that, have another option if it's viable and if it's really impacting your metrics. But generally speaking, you know, we've— for similar tools, we've seen prices more or less in that range, you know, give or take a little more. Got it.

Okay, cool. Well, let's get into the app if you want. Let's get into it. Maybe you can show how the product is used from a client's perspective. What can users expect? And then kind of the last point on that is why, if I'm a nurse, if I'm a hospital, why do I have to use this?

Sure. So here's our dashboard. One thing about the dashboard, like many other tools, everything that you see here is going to depending on your access level within the application.

Sure.

So for this demo, we're going to be looking primarily at 2 user types. I have a kind of like a super user who is the lead at the organization, so they can do everything. They can create rooms and buildings, and they can create assignments, daily assignments, quarterly assignments, things like that. They can create inspections, and then they can also interact with the bed board here. The bed board is essentially what's kind of driving all of the dynamic activity in the application. So if anybody interacts with the bed and the bed board, anybody who's working inside of this organization who has access to this application We'll see what has happened as a result of, you know, some other team member's actions. So a typical workflow would kind of look like this, right? So if I, as a— let's say I was a nurse and I went to any room here and I open it up and So, one of the things I'm going to see is, as a nurse, I'll have a more limited view, right? So, again, we are looking at an organizational lead view. But if I were a nurse, I would come into the room record and I would say, okay, the patient has left, so now I would like the team to start the discharge process.

Mm-hmm.

So, I'm going to hit Start Discharge. It's going to ask me, hey, are you sure you want to start the discharge? This is going to update the bed board again. So as soon as I do any action that is linked to the bed board, it's going to update for all users.

Got it.

So I'll hit yes. I can go back out to the homepage, and then I can just go about my business and do whatever else I needed to do. If I had the patient next door that I needed to go and talk to, check on them, I can do that as well, knowing that this bed is now with the environmental services team, right? So, and actually, as a supervisor, I can see that somebody updated that bed status from that room record, and now it has a status of dirty.

Hmm.

So that's kind of the first step in this process. I'm going to open up another window that is— I've shrunk it down a little bit to make it look like an iPad.

You guys do have the app as well, right? For iPad?

So we don't have an app yet, but it's been 100% responsive. It'll shrink down and re-accommodate to any screen size.

Nice.

Yeah, so it's 100% web-based, but we did do design with that in mind. There's a lot of people that are using iPads, mobile phones, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll just refresh this view really quickly. And this is a team member's view. So for example, if I came here, I'm walking the floor and I refresh my view and I see that this bed has been given a status of dirty.

Mm-hmm.

So what I would do is I would come here, I'm going to start working on it. It's going to ask me what assignment do I want to add it to. So I'm going to add it to my discharge assignment.

Mm-hmm.

So once that happens, the bed status is updated to in progress, and it's automatically assigned it to this user named Jimmy Tatum in this case. If I were also working in the in the supervisor view and I did something and I came back to this view, it's going to show me that Jimmy has taken that bed as well. So what Jimmy would do now is Jimmy would go up to his dashboard and it's going to show him what his assign— what assignments he has assigned to him today. That's based on this calendar down here. So today is Tuesday, right? Yeah, today's Tuesday. So he's got the discharge assignment assigned to him. So it's going to show what he's got here. It's going to show his discharge queue, things that are queued up for him to discharge that he's added to his assignment, his discharges that he'll be working on, and then discharges completed today. We'll see that after we complete the assignment. So what Jimmy would do after grabbing that bed is he would go into the assignment. So this is kind of like our digital worksheet, and this is where we start to take things off of paper. What you see in a lot of organizations is sometimes these discharges would be notified, like, Like by a beeper or like word of mouth, like, hey, you have to go do this, this, and this. And they would get clipboard or, you know, with paper and go walk the floor and then do their activities and then turn that paper back in. But here we have a digital worksheet where I have 2 actions on each bed, right? So for this example, I've only added 1 bed. And I'll hit start. Say that I'm going to start my discharge activity. I'm going to start cleaning it. And I get its timestamp.

Mm-hmm.

Timestamp is super important because it's going to impact my reporting metrics to my organization, right? So when my supervisor goes back and looks at how long on average it takes for the team to turn around a bed, they can know whether they need to increase staffing limits, you know, Or increase staffing or reduce staffing or whatever the case may be. With these metrics, they'll be able to take kind of more informed decisions about how the teams operate. Also, if Jimmy is taking a little longer than others, that's also a metric that we can get. I'll show that to you guys in the reporting in a little bit.

Okay.

Kind of support Jimmy if he's fallen behind. See, you know, hey Jimmy, why is it Taking you so long? Are there any steps that aren't clear to you in the cleaning process, et cetera, et cetera? So Jimmy finishes working on this bed. We'll just hit Finish, and it'll ask him again, hey, are you sure? Because this is going to update the bed board. So we'll hit Yes, and he'll get his second timestamp. Now, this one's only taken a minute to do. In real life, most people are turning around beds in about 20 to 25 minutes, depending on like the room size and things of that nature.

Okay.

But if I come back out to the dashboard now, what I can see is discharge is completed today. This was the bed that I was just working on. Tell me what time it was completed at and the date it was completed at. So if I come Here, this is again in the organization admin view. I also do see that here that this discharge was completed. So, as a nurse, I would be seeing a similar dashboard that shows me that this discharge was completed, and I would have that running list of beds that are now available.

Okay.

throughout the next 24 hours.

Got it.

Just by looking at this. So that's kind of the basic flow of, you know, like an actual workflow that hospitals are going through every day. I think we can probably— we can look at a little bit at the reporting just to kind of show you guys what our basic reporting looks like. Um, so my language—

what programming language are you using? Just because we're getting close to kind of end of the time here, but just to understand, what program language are you guys built— have you built this on?

So this is built in, uh, PHP Laravel framework, um, on the back. Uh, on the front it's Vue.js, and in the middle it's a basic REST API that connects The 2 applications together. So if I'm a hospital, I mean, we have about 5 minutes before we—

I think we're getting close to the end of that. But if you want to talk about more of the product or kind of what you want to go deeper in, feel free to share kind of last thoughts.

No, I was just going to say I can just show quickly this report and then we can kind of close it out with however you'd like to.

Sure.

But yeah, like I was saying, this is where I as a supervisor would come and make certain decisions about if I needed to— like, if I need to justify to my upper management about approving more budget for more team members, I would come here to know what the numbers are that my team is doing as of a certain day. So if you look down, so here we've, you know, it's pretty simple metrics. In our roadmap, we want to do some more things with this, but this is kind of like the baseline of what it's on average it's taking us to do a discharge, right? So a cleaning on a vacant bed, how many daily charges and transfers we're doing on average, and the average time it takes us to get that bed back to the nursing team from the moment that they hit that button and say, hey, this bed is ready to be turned around. And so we have that here. We have a visual representation of that, so how that will trend over the year, and you'll be able to make decisions based on how you see that trending for the team. And then down in this table below, it's an additional representation of that data, and you can look at that trend within the last 7 days, the last 30 days, 90 days a year, and then on an individual team member basis as well. So that example where we were saying, so in this case, Jimmy does have the lowest average discharge cleaning time compared to Chris Rock and Ron Smith. So I might say, hey Jimmy, how you feeling? Are you doing okay? Chris and Ron's time is a little higher than yours. Let's see where we can help you out and get that average up as well.

Love it. So this is great. So it seems like you guys have a working MVP product ready to go kind of commercial, and, you know, users to start using it. So if anybody's listening in who maybe works in the industry, who's kind of with health tech, who maybe works with hospitals or has some kind of partnership that they can, they can work with and reach out to Christian, or if there's any investors who are also interested in this and are looking to get in and possibly help, help them scale this out. So Any other asks or requests you'd like to ask from our audience before kind of telling them where to get in touch with you?

No, I think that's pretty much it. I mean, just super grateful and thanks again to you for reaching out and having me on the show again and grateful to anyone who's listening and yeah, always open to connect and see if there's any opportunity to work together.

Congrats on your first new SaaS. This looks amazing. I think you've done a great job for an MVP. I'm rooting for you and hope you guys do well. And where's the best place if people want to reach out to you? Where's the best place to get in touch?

Yeah, so like I said, I'll just go back over to our website here at the bottom of the page. If you like what you see, you can just schedule a demo here. I have to update this calendar, but you can schedule a demo directly here. You can send a message here through this web form, or if you prefer, good old-fashioned email, you can reach out to me at christian@plumero.co.

Awesome. Cool. We'll add these links to the show notes. If you guys are following along, this is all on our YouTube channel, so you can check out SaaS District, subscribe, and you'll see exactly what Christian's been working on. So thank you so much, Christian. Appreciate you jumping on and chatting again here.

Yeah, always glad to be here.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below And help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.

Bye.