Reflecting on 'The Best Day of the Year': FUSE 2024
By Jessica Robinson, Chief Platform Officer
Earlier this month, we celebrated Fuse 2024, The Garage's most anticipated event of the year. This annual tradition, which dates back to The Garage's inception, was held at the beautiful Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, Florida. Our valued customers, partners, and prospective customers joined us for a day brimming with dynamic discussions, rich networking, and a showcase of our newest innovations. Fuse 2024's overarching theme was "Growth is Life," celebrating the vitality of our customers and partners in the healthcare ecosystem.
How Collaboration Changes Healthcare: Insights from Pranam Ben's Keynote
The day started with a powerful video paralleling the Tree of Life and Healthcare. Just as a tree needs soil, water, sunlight, and air to thrive, healthcare needs interconnectedness, balance, growth, diversity, sustainability, and stewardship. This metaphor highlights the importance of each stakeholder working together to create a more sustainable healthcare ecosystem that will change healthcare for good. During Pranam's keynote, he referenced the historic moon landing on July 16th, 1969, which was the most-watched event in television history of its time.
His message was clear - the urgency and ambition required to change healthcare are as extraordinary as those that brought mankind to the moon. He emphasized that we must become faster, better, leaner, smarter, hungrier, and wilder to achieve the Quintuple Aim, which focuses on enhancing patient experience, improving population health, reducing costs, improving the work life of healthcare providers, and advancing health equity. During his keynote, he was joined by Bill Haas, SVP, Northeastern US and Canada of Labcorp, Steve Yaskin, CEO of Health Gorilla, Niren Gandra, CEO & Co-Founder of Trovo Health, Adam Boehler, Founder and Managing Partner of Rubicon Founders, Scott Mancuso, CMO of Honest Medical Group, Peter DiFondi, CIO of CDPHP, and Himadri Sarkar, CSO of Teleperformance, who spoke on the collaborative efforts between The Garage and their respective companies and the impacts that have been made.
Pranam also showcased The Garage's All In efforts from the past year, resulting in more than 11,000 meals provided, over 25,000 hygiene products packaged and shipped, and partnership with 23 charities.
"The keynote was powerful..." - Darcy Shepard
JR's Innovations Studio Lab: A Glimpse into the Future of The Garage
FUSE 2024 marked the first time our Innovations were showcased to our audience live in person. Designed to resemble a garage setting, this interactive session showed live versions of four of our newest innovations throughout the day. Crew Members Alex Marich, Chandler Douglas, and Tasha Yew joined on stage, speaking to the audience about the creation process and how it will empower organizations to streamline workflows and provide better care. Customers were invited to interact with the technology themselves, offering a hands-on experience unanimously praised as one of the key parts of the day.
Insightful Dialogues with Industry Visionaries
We were honored to host the brilliant Dr. Geeta Nayyar as our Ben's Den LIVE guest, whose episode will be released July 2024. Dr. Nayyar's passion for leveraging technology to safeguard the provider-patient relationship is something that our audience could resonate with. Drawing insights from her book, "Dead Wrong," she dove into the need to combat misinformation and mistrust in healthcare, a critical mission in today's digital age. She addressed the alarming consequences of misinformation and spoke on a personal experience she had in which the patient was insistent she was incorrect in her diagnosis due to the misinformation presented online of the disease.
"I recently had a wonderful time at The Garage In's annual user conference, #Fuse2024. It was excellent to join Founder & CEO Pranam Ben in a live podcast episode of Ben's Den! We talked about where we are as an industry, what progress needs to be made, how we can combat misinformation and mistrust in healthcare, and what we can do to better prepare for the future. #GrowththisLife..." - Dr. Geeta Nayyar
The Garage Impact: How Collaboration made a Difference for our Customers
Senior VP of Customer Success Emily Barlow introduced five of The Garage's customers, Middletown Medical, SOMOS, Forward Leaning IPA, Community Care Physicians, and Community Care Collaborative, who spoke on the challenges faced by their respective organizations and how a collaboration with The Garage resulted in impactful solutions.
Director of Customer Success Audra Browning spoke with Darcy Shepard, CEO of Middletown Medical, about how Bridge has helped her organization transition from disjointed to EMR adjacent with point of care intelligence, financial growth, increased patient engagement, and positive ROI.
Phillip Marrett, Vice President of Data Analytics, and John Dionisio, CIO of SOMOS, spoke on The Garage's Genome Data Warehouse, how it streamlines processes with complete and comprehensive data, fully automates and optimizes the process, and how it has helped SOMOS achieve more than $2.5 million in annual cost savings.
Kim Do, Director of Customer Success, was joined by Mary Zelazny, CEO of FLIPA. They discussed how the Communicator application was utilized to help patients with required Medicaid Recertifications reminders and improve digital engagement, ultimately reducing no-shows and cancellations, timely medication management, and increasing patient satisfaction.
Lastly, Joe Taylor, Executive Director of Community Care Collaborative of PA & NJ, joined Kim Do on stage to discuss how CCC's partnership with The Garage helped provide additional information and insights needed to identify potential DME Fraud and the creation of a focused PowerBI dashboard for ongoing monitoring across all their contracts.
A Resounding Success and a Vision for the Future
There was a resounding agreement among attendees that this was the best FUSE yet. The event started and concluded with a 'Big, Fat Thank You' to all our guests who work tirelessly to keep our communities safe and healthy. Attendees were reminded that now is the time to transform the industry and that healthcare is at a crossroads, and the only way to rectify it is to work together with The Garage, keep patients at the center of the conversation, and fuel a sense of urgency to avoid wasting time.
The enthusiasm and energy from FUSE 2024 continues to resonate into what we call "the FUSE hangover," and our team is already hard at work preparing for next year's event. We are committed to making it even better, building on this year's success to foster further innovation and collaboration in the healthcare industry.
Key Takeaways from FUSE 2024
- The Importance of Urgency and Innovation: Pranam Ben's keynote set the tone for the day, emphasizing the need for urgent and innovative approaches to empower the Quintuple Aim in healthcare.
- Hands-On Experience with New Technologies: The Innovations Studio Lab provided guests with a unique opportunity to see first-hand The Garage's newest technologies and how they will streamline workflows in their organizations.
- Combating Misinformation: Dr. Geeta Nayyar's insights highlighted the critical role of technology in protecting the Provider-Patient relationship and what approaches can be taken to combat misinformation in the industry.
- Community and Collaboration: The event reinforced the importance of community and collaboration to driving meaningful change in healthcare. The collective effort of healthcare stakeholders and The Garage team is crucial in shaping the future of the industry.
Looking Ahead to the Future
As we reflect on FUSE 2024's success, we are filled with anticipation and excitement for what lies ahead. We look forward to continuing this and driving forward our mission of changing healthcare for good...one community at a time. Together, we can create actionable change in healthcare, and the time to act is now. Thank you to everyone who made FUSE 2024 a remarkable event-we couldn't have done it without you!