This article was originally published in Medical Dealer Magazine, May 2012.
Richard Griffin has worked with some brilliant designers in his time. As an Air Force engineer, he was exposed to a variety of unique and innovative technologies from the development and testing phase.
But in his current professional career, Griffin hasn’t found a collaborator with which he enjoys working anywhere near as much as the product developers at Pronk Technologies of Sun Valley, Calif.
Griffin is project coordinator of the biomedical engineering center at Sutter Health of Sacramento, Calif., a 40-year-old in-house program that has expanded to support some 24 hospitals throughout the state.
As the Sutter biomed group grew, it also began to assume responsibility for programs at a number of other locations within the Sacramento region, and then at non-Sutter hospitals—and things sort of snowballed from there, Griffin says.
“One thing led to another, and pretty soon half of our business was non-Sutter entities,” he says; “surgery centers, doctors’ offices, some medical foundations. Then Sutter expanded into the Bay area and became the managing program fully for half those hospitals.”
The reason Sutter Health can support so many facilities beyond its own core group—about one-third of its business, Griffin says—is thanks to a two-tiered pricing system that helps to justify a reduced rate for its member locations.
“Our charter is that no hospital can find a cheaper source of a quality service than we can provide,” he says. “Right now we have 38 technicians, and we’re running a little bit different program than most hospitals do.”
About 15 years ago, Sutter entered the self-insurance business on the strength of the idea that it could out-compete manufacturer service packages, a program that is so successful financially that it underpins some of its other creative strategic endeavors. That savings generally amounts to about 16 to 18 percent of a manufacturer’s service contract— generally around several millions of dollars per year.
“We basically take their service contracts, discount it five percent, and at the end of the year, whatever money’s left in the pool, we rebate it additionally back to the hospitals based on their percentage of participation,” Griffin says.
So in addition to cutting costs by bringing work in-house (and farming it out), the biomed department also runs a radiation physics testing group that certifies radiology equipment as well as mechanical drawings for new constructions or renovations.
“The only thing that we don’t actually get involved in is nuclear medicine, CT and MRI,” Griffin says. “We just can’t find the quality technicians. The reluctance on the manufacturer’s part to train us on the newer systems is the biggest stumbling block we have.”
Such an innovative environment provided the foundation of the great relationship Griffin enjoys with Pronk Technologies. The companies have worked symbiotically for years, driving the development of useful products that are engineer-tested and competitively priced.
“I met Karl [Ruiter, president of Pronk Technologies] at this fair [where] I was listening to him talk about non-invasive blood pressure,” Griffin says. “I decided to go back to his next session, and ended up talking to him for about an hour about how they were developing this product.”
A couple weeks later, Griffin got a phone call from a nurse manager complaining that she didn’t trust his methods for preventive maintenance on her blood pressure monitors. Griffin’s technicians were checking the machines against their own levels six times daily; the nurse manager wanted them to calibrate the units against the $10,000 blood pressure simulator in his shop. Griffin pointed out that she would experience less downtime with his methods, which had been shown to work. They were at an impasse.
About three days after that, Griffin heard from Greg Alkire, vice president of sales and marketing at Pronk, inviting him to beta-test a prototype field blood pressure simulator that could potentially solve his problems. A month later, Griffin had in hand the device that became the Pronk SimCube NIBP simulator.
“I ended up buying five of them,” Griffin says, “serial numbers five through nine. Since then, we outfit all our technicians in the field with the SimCube. It’s the primary unit on our bench.”
The feedback Griffin provided was so valuable to Pronk that a year later, Ruiter and Alkire wanted to meet with him again to talk about the product that would become its SlimSim multi-parameter ECD simulator.
Griffin was dubious of the device, given its small form factor; yet he ended up buying the first ten ever produced. The same thing happened when Pronk developed its Ox-Sim pulse oximeter tester, which addressed an issue Griffin and his staff were having with sensors that failed at a high rate. After two years, Pronk developed a technology with which Sutter now outfits all its biomeds.
“So every year, we buy a Pronk product, and we’re slowly replacing all our test equipment with that,” Griffin says. “Our guys don’t want anything else. They develop a goodquality product that my staff loves.”
The symbiosis of that interaction is the keystone to their relationship: Griffin turns over a wish list based on his years in the field and the feedback of his technicians, and Alkire and Ruiter transform that feedback into good design. A truly mutually beneficial relationship benefits both parties: Pronk gets the input they need to be competitive, and Griffin gets a technology that’s adapted to suit the needs of his technicians.
“That’s what I like about Pronk,” Griffin says. “They listen to what we need, they understand how we work, and they develop and provide a product that meets that. It’s been an extremely successful relationship, and I think it’s because we listen to each other.”