Transcript Generated by AI 00:05 Mark Parkinson back with Park Place and excited today to announce that Norra has 00:09 become our most recent thought sponsor on the site. 00:13 A big part of what we want to do is bring you great products and services that can 00:17 improve your chance of success and operation, 00:19 and Norra definitely fits that category and here's the reason why. 00:24 The nursing homes have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment in them. 00:27 Just think about it. 00:28 Between rented equipment, leased equipment and equipment that you 00:32 own, there's an awful lot of stuff in the 00:34 buildings. 00:35 Up until now, we have not had a great way to manage 00:38 that. 00:39 As a result, often times we have rented equipment that 00:42 we needed at one point but don't need any more. 00:45 Other times we'll have multiple copies of the same piece of equipment and up until 00:49 now there hasn't been a great way to manage it. 00:52 Ben Rubin and his partner at Norra have come up with a solution. 00:56 And while Norra is just getting started, I think they're going to have a big 00:59 impact on our sector. 01:01 Today we're super happy to announce that Norra has become our newest thought 01:05 sponsor and we're very glad to be joined by Co-founder Ben Rubin. 01:09 Ben, welcome to Park Place. 01:12 Great to be here. 01:13 Thanks for having me, Mark. 01:14 Now, Ben, like a lot of startups, you and your partner are very smart, 01:18 and you're very young and have really impressive backgrounds. 01:22 You met while working at NASA on space missions, the moon mission, 01:26 and you both have a background in AI. 01:29 Tell us what the problem is that you're solving with Norra. 01:33 Yeah, so as you mentioned, nursing homes have thousands of pieces of 01:37 equipment, from the beds and wheelchairs to 01:39 concentrators and even, like, specialty respiratory equipment. 01:43 And all of this moves around constantly. 01:45 And so nursing homes have no way of tracking all of this. 01:48 And what this leads to is countless hours of staff time wasted looking for all this 01:52 equipment, auditing and hunting things down. 01:55 And financially, it turns it into a bit of a black hole 01:58 because facilities are just paying for invoices without actually knowing if they 02:02 actually need the equipment that they're spending on. 02:05 Well, and I, I know this is no, not a small issue. 02:08 I mean, back from when Stacy and I operated, 02:10 there's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment in these 02:13 buildings. 02:14 Where do you see the waste? 02:16 Yeah, so over and over again, we commonly see two sources of waste in 02:20 all the buildings that we've been live in and that we talked to. 02:24 The first is through rental overspend as you mentioned, 02:27 and the second is with under utilization of the equipment they already have. 02:32 So with the rental overspend example, for example, 02:34 let's say you have an admission and they need a specialty wound care relief 02:38 mattress because they developed a pressure wound. 02:41 And when that patient gets discharged, a new admission might occur right after. 02:46 And somehow a new resident ends up on that exact mattress and the invoice just 02:50 keeps getting paid and nobody even knows where it is in order to return it because 02:55 there's no visibility into this. 02:57 So invoice is getting paid for no reason. 03:00 I can totally see that happening, Ben, because I remember back when Stacy and I 03:03 had our buildings, we had that exact same situation. 03:06 You'd order a special mattress, the post acute person would come in, 03:09 they'd be on the mattress grate, they'd get well, they'd go home, 03:12 but then you wouldn't do anything about it. 03:14 So that mattress stayed on that bed until somebody realized, oh my God, 03:17 we're paying a ton of of extra rent that we don't need to be paying. 03:21 Where 03:21 Where's the second area of waste? 03:24 Totally. 03:25 We see that all the time. 03:26 And with the second area on the flip side, with the owned equipment, 03:29 it's very hard for facilities to properly utilize everything they have in the 03:33 building because it's scattered throughout an entire building moving 03:36 around constantly. 03:38 So take for example with concentrators. 03:40 Let's say you have an admission and needs like a 5 liter concentrator. 03:44 There might be plenty of them scattered throughout the building that aren't being 03:47 used, maybe in random storage areas or even 03:49 potentially in patient rooms that aren't being utilized. 03:52 And a nurse might make take a first pass sweep around the building, 03:55 try to find one, and if they can't find one on 1st 03:58 inspection, they'll just order or rent another one. 04:01 So the ones that they actually own are just sitting idle for months while 04:04 they're paying for ones they don't actually need. 04:07 So Ben, how do you how do you solve this problem? 04:10 Yes. 04:11 So what we do is we actually put these small wireless tags and all the equipment 04:15 in a building. 04:16 And this allows us to track in real time where everything is moving throughout the 04:20 building down to the room level accuracy. 04:22 And we combine this with just centralized with the centralized sort of information 04:26 where we have information of what's rented versus what's owned, 04:30 what's idle versus what's in use. 04:31 And combining this with this location data, 04:34 it allows our AI agents called Norra to properly track everything and surface 04:39 these autonomous insights for the facility without adding any workload to 04:44 the staff. 04:45 Norra takes in the EMR data from MatrixCare and PCC to see the admissions, 04:49 discharges and transfers and is able to like surface all these insights in real 04:54 time. 04:54 So take, for example, with that rented air mattress example, 04:57 Norra could see that a discharge occurred, see that there's a air mattress in a room 05:01 that's being paid for, but there actually isn't a need for it 05:04 and would just surface it for the relevant staff. 05:08 That's great. 05:08 Now I know that you've got some real world experience. 05:11 You've had this in some really great buildings for almost a year. 05:14 What results are you seeing? 05:17 Yeah. 05:17 In the buildings that we've been live the longest, 05:20 we're seeing a reduction in rental overspend by 50 to 80% and that's just 05:24 amongst the rentals alone. 05:26 Once we start quantifying other sources of waste for improving utilization of 05:30 what they have, reducing purchasing and preventing asset 05:33 loss from things just walking out the door, 05:36 we see that in a typical 100 bed facility, there's over $100, 05:39 000 of recoverable waste. 05:41 And as we keep keep staying deployed, we're finding more and more sources of 05:45 waste that are just hiding. 05:47 And, and one of the things that I've been 05:49 impressed by is that the buildings that you've been, 05:52 have been four and five star buildings, even buildings that are really well run 05:55 have this problem and you're saving them 10s of thousands, 05:58 sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. 06:00 I mean, it's super, super impressive. 06:02 If somebody wants to get involved with Norra, what should they do next? 06:07 Yeah, totally. 06:08 And we find that this problem is super universal, 06:10 even though we're deployed in these four or five star buildings. 06:13 We talked to operators of all sorts of buildings and see that everybody just has 06:17 the same solution as using pen and paper and random binders and spreadsheets. 06:21 And it's frankly impossible to track thousands of things moving every day like 06:24 that. 06:25 So in order to get started, we're right now offering a free on site 06:29 ROI assessment where we'd go into one of your buildings and see first hand 06:33 actually the source of waste specific to that building that are recoverable 06:37 through Norra. 06:39 And also we're having a few slots for pilots in Q4 where you could show the 06:43 results in Norra in a few buildings across the network before deploying 06:47 across an entire portfolio. 06:50 Ben, this is really exciting and it's a great, 06:52 it's a, you know, very glad that you and Yining have come 06:55 to the long term care sector. 06:57 You're going to add a lot and the, the early work that you're doing is 07:00 fantastic. 07:01 And I would just say to everybody watching this, why wouldn't you do this? 07:03 I mean, these guys are very smart. 07:05 They come up with a great product for free. 07:06 They'll analyze what sort of impact it will have in your buildings, 07:10 and I hope you give them a call and take them up on it. 07:13 It's so much fun to have these guys on our side as new thought partners, 07:16 and I can't wait to continue to work with them in the future. 07:19 Thank you for watching this video and thank you for your continued support of 07:23 Park Place.
