Authority Medical Group
Robust Mobility Aid Solutions for Compliance

"You can have the greatest solution, but if no one is using it, your solution is useless,” says Bill Shields, Partner, Business Development, Authority Medical Group.

The issue of compliance within hospitals raises this concern almost every day. Although there is a number of innovative mobility aids at the disposal of the care facilities, they are unable to leverage them as the products often fail to meet the required compliance level. The typical compliance rate throughout hospitals for mobility aids being used by nurses is around 20 percent. Addressing this challenge is Authority Medical Group.

Authority Medical Group is a textile based medical device company. It is an expert in textiles and concentrates efforts on solving complex problems that hospital partners deal with on a daily basis. The company talks and works with ergonomic professionals, safe patient handling teams, nurses, Chief Nursing Officers (CNO), transport teams, and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) within its hospital clients. “We work with these people on a daily basis asking for real time data, issues they face, and feedback on the solutions we supply. Once we understand the issues these teams face we begin to build a solution, or solutions,” says Shields.

A perfect example of this collaboration is Authority Medical Group’s Mobility Aid solution— SlideTube. The company was made aware of the fact that the number one injury in hospitals and nursing homes related to moving patients is back and shoulder injuries. Authority Medical Group directly worked with nurses for six months to develop this best-in-class solution that has the Lowest Coefficient of Friction (CoF). SlideTube today reduces the risk of injuries to all caregivers. In fact, it has an average compliance rate of over 75 percent within all of Authority Medical Group’s partner hospitals.

With a focus on making SlideTube the status quo solution for every department within the hospital, Authority Medical Group offers comprehensive training to every new hospital partner for four days. They also operationalize three to six months of follow-up training after the initial training, which ensures that nurses or transport team members are trained in every department.

To put things into perspective, a premier hospital increased its compliance rate from 15 to 80 percent after using SlideTube throughout the entire hospital for one year. They also had a reduction in YoY back and shoulder injuries by 56 percent. In 2018, the same hospital contacted Authority Medical Group and raised a concern. While they found it very effective in helping reduce injuries, the nurses were using it all the time, and as a result, the hospital was purchasing over 1,000 SPU units per month. This was becoming an issue for them, both from a cost as well as logistic and storage perspective.

After reviewing the data, they came to the conclusion that SlideTube could not be replaced but needed to work with Authority Medical Group to develop another even more cost-effective solution. Authority Medical Group worked with the system CFO, hospital CFO, and CNO of the hospital.

“The goal is to help the hospitals increase compliance rate and decrease costs,” informs Shields. “Something, we achieved in this case and will continue doing in the near future.”