We asked Jim, our Commercial Advisor, why infection risk is a board-level question and not only an IPC one.
NEX Health Intelligence
Jim Gabriel has spent years helping hospitals solve operational problems at executive level. When an infection outbreak hits a hospital, the Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) team is on the front line, but the consequences reach every
part of the organisation. We asked Jim, our Commercial Advisor, why infection risk is a board-level question and not only an IPC one.
From Patient Flow to Infection Intelligence
Jim has spent his career in startups, some of them his own, across several countries and technologies. A significant part of that career has been in healthcare technology. Most recently, he and his colleagues built a patient flow management business from the ground up. They sold it into numerous acute hospitals and took the business to a successful exit. That experience taught him how hospitals decide what to buy. Selling to a healthcare provider means selling to the whole organisation, and the case has to hold up with the people who run it.
"Healthcare providers only ever buy things that solve problems or challenges."
Jim and Ash, our founder, crossed paths long before NEX was funded. Ash asked him for advice on a range of topics, and it quickly became clear how much NEX had in common with Jim's last business. In both cases the hospital's executive team makes the decision, the product is highly innovative, and the company is built on a founder's vision and a commitment to technology for good. Those early conversations were pro bono. When NEX secured the funding to execute its plans, Jim joined as our Commercial Advisor.
His years in patient flow also shape how he sees infection. For Jim, an outbreak is a clinical problem, and it is also one of the fastest ways for a hospital's whole operation to break down.
Built for 85%, Running at 100%
For Jim, a healthcare provider's business is to do the best job it possibly can and to run a tight ship operationally, clinically and financially. Patient flow, the way patients move through a hospital from admission to discharge, is where he has spent much of his working life.
Patient flow theory holds that hospitals need bed occupancy of around 85% to cope with whatever might happen, including infection outbreaks. Modelling of an acute hospital found that the risk of having no bed available for an emergency admission rises substantially once occupancy goes above 85% (Bagust et al., 1999).
In Jim's experience, very few hospitals have that margin. He says "pretty much every hospital in the world is churning away at one hundred percent occupancy levels, every bed full." It is rare to find a hospital with 15% of its beds available.
The result is an incredibly complex operation with no spare capacity, which outside events can knock off course very quickly. An infection outbreak is one of the most disruptive of those events. Everyone involved knows more could and should be done, but the system is already running at its limits.
"Infection control issues tend to cause the wheels to come off the car."
Why Executives Are Right to Worry
Executives at the top of the hospital are rightly worried about infection outbreaks and about whether they can deal with them properly.
The stakes are financial as well as clinical. In Jim's view, handling infection well or badly adds up to very large sums of money. It can decide whether a hospital stays on track or loses money, falls into deficit and, in the worst cases, faces bankruptcy.
This is why he sees so much value in giving executives the tools, the data and what he calls a "control room" view of infection risk. That visibility helps them keep the wheels on.
Why Jim Believes NEX Can Raise the Game
Jim's view is that hospitals struggle to get ahead of the curve.
"Predicting and preventing infections is much, much better than controlling them. It's better for patients, better for staff, and better financially and reputationally for the healthcare provider."
He describes this as the space where NEX can make its greatest contribution. Many hospitals are locked into responding to outbreaks once they have started. NEX aims to help IPC teams and executives see risk building earlier, so they have more time to review it and act.
Jim is also confident in the team behind it. He describes the people at NEX as highly intelligent and learning very quickly, and says that "despite everybody having a brain the size of a planet, there aren't huge egos getting in the way." He sees a real hunger for success and technical excellence, the qualities he has come to value in high-growth startups.
Nothing is guaranteed, he points out, but having the right team at this stage matters. He believes NEX has the potential to change how hospitals around the world prevent and control infection, and could become the new normal in this space.
For Jim, the measure of success is simple:
"I know NEX works when hospitals are preventing infection outbreaks before they even happen."
