UPSTREAM REHABILITATION

“Whether you are looking for a partner to help accelerate your growth, to provide leadership and professional development opportunities, or to begin developing an exit strategy, aligning yourself with the right one is critically important.

“We have more than 600 partners that chose Upstream because they recognised the value of the resources we provide to help them achieve their goals. We’re flexible in how we approach each partnership, and we understand that each of our partners may have different goals depending on their stage in life and future plans.”

The Upstream mission is to inspire and empower the lives they touch, to serve its communities, and lead with purpose-driven passion, says Kuerbitz: “We work diligently with our partners to provide excellent patient care, create more access to therapy in our communities, and ensure that therapy services are at the forefront.”

Technology partners helps Upstream discover new technology

Upstream has grown more than 700 percent in the time Petet has been with the company. “When I joined, we had roughly 1,100 associates in fewer than 200 locations. Today, we have almost 8,000 associates and more than 1,200 locations. That has been a great deal of growth, in terms of technology to keep up with, over the last eight years.”

Upstream employs several company-wide initiatives to continually improve efforts to collect, measure, and deliver the best clinical outcomes across the company. These include clinician development programmes, continuing education courses and resources, and independent and group learning opportunities that include grand rounds, physician shadowing, and journal clubs.

Upstream’s Committee of Clinical Excellence – composed of Senior Therapists who lead panels in education, mentor support, professional engagement, student programmes, and outcomes – helps the company ensure all clinical associates provide world-class patient care and deliver best-in-class patient outcomes.

JEFF PETET VICE PRESIDENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, UPSTREAM REHABILITATION

“We also have great working relationships with our technology partners,” says Petet. “I would say that we operate with them as true partners, not just vendors. Our partners help us discover new technology, expand our technology expertise, and increase our business performance by improving our associates' performance with that new technology.”

MCA Technology Solutions has been a partner of Upstream prior to Petet’s joining the company, but he says 2019 saw MCA become a strategic partner. “At that time, we were actively going through the largest merger in company history that began in 2018,” he says. “We were experiencing a lot of turnover on our Tier 1 Service Desk team. I learned that MCA had a lot of experience in managing service desks for other large organizations and the great customer service they could deliver.

Petet made the decision in mid-2019 to outsource his Tier 1 Service Desk team to MCA and describes it as one of the best decisions in his tenure at Upstream. “We saw immediate improvements across the board on our Service Desk metrics,” says Petet. “Again, our clinicians and back-office associates may not even be aware that we have outsourced our Tier 1 because we treat them as Upstream associates, and they represent themselves as Upstream associates. It has truly been a great partnership.”

Cybersecurity a challenge as healthcare industry targeted Petet says he faces many challenges in his role, but a number of them loom large each day – including staffing issues (“Find the right people at the right time,” is his mantra) and interoperability when working with both partners and third-party service providers. “We're doing a lot of joint ventures, so we have to ensure that our systems can integrate with each other,” he explains.

The ongoing digital transformation of the business also keeps his team very busy. “We’re using technology to optimise processes for our associates, so they can better serve our patients,” says Petet. “And, unfortunately, cybersecurity is a challenge due to healthcare continuing to be the target of bad actors. Cybersecurity – and information security in general – is very important to me.”

Petet continues: “I'm always here to be a proponent for the information security field, especially in healthcare, because we need to keep our systems online”

Technology is embedded throughout the Upstream ecosystem of companies, explains Petet, thus producing a large amount of internal and external data sets. “And the integration of that data allows us to see how we're doing compared to our appearance in the industry, how our patients feel, and how we're doing against our internally-set benchmarks,” he says.

“Having this data available in near-realtime allows our leaders to make quick data-driven decisions that support and improve the patient experience, while also previewing a clinician experience with better outcomes for our patients at lower costs.

“When it comes to digital transformation, we’re using technology not just to modernise existing processes, but also to revamp the processes. It's all people-process technology, so you're using technology to automate things where you can,” says Petet. “And that's one of the things that we want to do: we want our clinicians to operate at top of licence by automating as much as possible.”