US Med-Equip eases hospital pain point with AI, RPA

Antonio Marin and his IT team at US Med-Equip have given nurses at several hospital and healthcare systems what they have long been pleading for: a simple solution for ordering rental hospital beds easily and efficiently.

The ability to rent hospital beds gives healthcare organizations added flexibility and scalability when caring for patients, but those benefits can be lost when the process for ordering them is less than ideal.

Houston-based US Med-Equip, which rents, sells, and services a range of movable medical equipment, including beds and therapeutic support surfaces, has developed a one-click solution for ordering hospital beds by retraining an existing machine learning model from accounts payable and adding Microsoft code and robotic process automation.

Marin, who has served as CIO since 2022, worked with Microsoft partner Resolute Consulting on the project, a cloud solution that took two months to develop. One key benefit of the solution, GoUSME Connect, is that it integrates with all leading electronic medical record (EMR) systems in hours, rather than days.

“I’m talking to nurses about how complicated and time consuming it is to rent beds and reconcile it with billing systems. They wanted a one-button solution,” says Marin, who previously worked as a consultant to the CIO of RPA vendor UiPath. 

GoUSME Connect, which earned US Med-Equip a 2024 CIO Award 100 for IT leadership and innovation, has been made available to nurses and staff at Prisma Health and the University of Colorado since October 2023. Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital in South Carolina was the first hospital to implement GoUSME Connect, and 16 hospitals have since followed suit, Marin says.

US Med-Equip, which has 93 locations nationwide, can now deliver rental beds for patients more efficiently. Beds available for rental vary widely, including inflatable beds for ambulatory patients being transported to emergency rooms.

“Before it could take up to 45 minutes to deliver beds,” says Marin, pointing out that each minute is critical in life-saving applications. “Because there’s no human interface from the time the nurse clicks the button to the moment our customer service representative gets the order and is ready to go, we were able to deliver it within 30 minutes.”

The solution combines robotic process automation and machine learning with electronic faxing. It consists of an eFax, Microsoft’s Power Automate RPA, Power AI OCR tool, and a retrained Microsoft Azure-based machine learning model to process the documents involved. (Marin had located a similar AI OCR tool in Germany, but HIPAA regulations restrict its use in the US.)

“It’s fully automated and the four pieces of the puzzle made the whole process flow,” says Marin, who says it took about 12 attempts to retrain the machine learning model, which was originally developed for an accounts payable application. “We use an ML model that was originally created with another purpose in mind, but we repurposed it to meet our needs. This in combination with the AI OCR are the ‘secret sauce’ to our solution.”

Helping to transform healthcare

Marin says healthcare systems have been hunting for such a solution for many years but would hire systems integrators whose proposals were too pricey and proprietary. With this solution, clinicians do not need to use a different system or learn new processes to order rentals.

The GoUSME Connect solution not only enhances patient care but increases US Med-Equip’s rental business. The current pipeline for integrations includes the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, North Memorial Health, one Kaiser Permanente hospital, Methodist Health System, and a few more in “discovery mode,” Marin explains.

US Med-Equip plans to expand the service for other types of medical equipment such as oxygen tanks, but customers wanted to start with hospital beds because it is one of the “highest spend” as it relates to hospital room rentals, he notes.

Analysts say the demand for systems such as GoUSME Connect is strong. Healthcare providers are embracing cloud services to support digital transformation (28%), No. 2 behind improving cybersecurity response (29%), according to the IDC Industry CloudPath Survey conducted in May 2023.

“Improving operational efficiency and reducing costs — while improving the quality of care and patient experience — are major healthcare provider goals,” says Lynne Dunbrack, group vice president for public sector at IDC. “Cloud-based solutions that accelerate the process of ordering medical equipment will be attractive to healthcare organizations given the wide range of medical equipment and number of devices used across the healthcare enterprise. These critical assets need to be managed, tracked, and maintained so they are ready to use when they are needed most — to deliver high-quality patient care.”

US Med-Equip’s Marin says the solution is a win-win-win for patients, the hospital staff, and his business — and it would not have been possible without the cloud. In addition to helping healthcare systems treat and release patients most efficiently, nurses and clinicians receive a report with all invoices from service providers. Previously, staff would have to match each patient to each invoice manually and reconcile the ledger each month. This made renting medical beds tedious, sending nurses to look for easier in-house solutions. 

“Number one, you create customer stickiness,” the CIO says, noting the simplicity and strong cybersecurity selling points enable growth for its own business. “You hear stories about hospitals and universities’ APIs getting hacked. This is impossible to hack and the worst thing that can happen is we lose our [rental] data instead of millions of records.” 

For now, US Med-Equip has no plan to license its innovative technology, which Marin describes as basic process automation, “which is entry-level AI, OCR, and machine learning.  This is one of our differentiators that we have and can do free for customers,” Marin says, noting the ability to get hospitals online with its service in days — a major selling advantage.

 “We’ve made it painless. Nurses preferred not to rent because of the paperwork and would put patients in whatever was available in the hospital. Now, they can have the patient in a better bed without the paperwork,” Marin says.