Kris Kaull

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

With a Strategy as Sticky as Their Product, Pulsara Aims to Fax Its Way into Healthcare History

BOZEMAN, Mont., April 1st, 2024 — In an audacious pivot that industry insiders are calling "a stroke of mad genius," Pulsara, the titan of digital healthcare communication, has announced its intention to acquire a leading sticky note manufacturer StickIt Solutions and fax machine giant RetroComm Innovations. This groundbreaking move seeks to blend the digital with the decidedly analog, capturing the near-retirement team's hearts (and notes) while confounding millennials and zoomers.

This initiative is part of Pulsara’s ongoing commitment to bridge the technological divide and foster a more inclusive communication environment for all generations. Dale Pearson, President of Pulsara, emphasized the company’s forward-thinking strategy, stating, "Our mission has always been to connect teams across healthcare entities seamlessly. Today, we reaffirm our dedication to digital innovation and the tangible, personal touch that comes with paper. There’s a unique reliability and simplicity that resonates deeply with tradition. This initiative represents our renewed commitment to ensuring no one is left behind in our journey towards improving healthcare communication."

To bolster this new direction, Pulsara is incorporating these tried-and-true communication methods into its state-of-the-art platform. This integration aims to offer a hybrid solution that respects the preferences of all users, combining the immediacy of digital alerts with the physical presence of sticky notes and faxed documents.

Editor's Note: On August 1st, 2022, EMS1, Fitch & Associates, and the National EMS Management Association released their fifth annual EMS Trend Report, proudly sponsored by Pulsara. Because the articles and advice found within contain such critical subject matter, we've elected to publish each segment one at a time here on our blog. Read, enjoy, share, and take to heart the following information brought to you by the most prestigious thought leaders in EMS. Today's entry is written by Pulsara's very own Chief Growth Officer, Kris Kaull, NRP, CCEMT-P, FP-C, and Sara Kaull, M.Ed, Executive Director of SIM-MT.

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Challenge yourself to make room for the great in your career and life by abandoning toxic behavior

My wife, Sara, is a reforming perfectionist. For much of her life, she was obsessed with control, and presenting a “perfect” version of herself to the world. Starting with gold stars in kindergarten and accolades in her professional life, Sara added more and more to her calendar, executing every commitment to perfection until life took an unexpected turn when her father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and she could no longer control what was happening around her.

As helpers and caregivers, how many of us can relate to carrying too much? It’s in our DNA. We pride ourselves on busyness and selflessness. As clinicians, we’ve taken care of others to our own detriment. We say yes to protect ourselves from the judgment of others. We say yes because we feel guilty if we don’t.

But what if saying yes stops us from becoming the best we can be?

Editor's Note: On August 11th, EMS1, Fitch & Associates, and the National EMS Management Association released their fourth annual EMS Trend Report, proudly sponsored by Pulsara. Because the articles and advice found within contain such critical subject matter, we've elected to publish each segment one at a time here on our blog. Read, enjoy, share, and take to heart the following information brought to you by the most prestigious thought leaders in EMS. Today's entry is written by Pulsara's very own Chief Marketing Officer, Kris Kaull.

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As COVID-19 continues to shape the landscape of healthcare, many profession-altering changes are here to stay. The most impactful of these is the paradigm shift to the “connected worker.”

While this may be a new term in healthcare, it has been covered extensively in manufacturing. As Natan Linder wrote in Forbes, “For years, we interpreted poor manufacturing outcomes to poor human performance (as much as 70% of mistakes in factories occur on human-centric processes). But things changed with the fundamental insight that humans aren’t actually the problem. Badly designed or overly complex work systems are.”

Healthcare faces even greater challenges. There was a time where a healthcare professional may have shined based on their clinical expertise alone. But this is no longer the case. I met with a neurologist in Seattle who told me that she makes, on average, 17 phone calls before she sees a stroke patient. Consider the time-sensitive tasks and coordination that need to be completed by a team in order to properly treat a critical patient: multiple phone calls, pages, answering services, handwritten notes, and radio communications.

Why has the healthcare system resisted telemedicine as a solution for so long? 

Telemedicine offers a world of opportunity for innovation and improvement in healthcare communication. Clinicians can use it to assess patients remotely, advise medical care without having to be on-site, and consult with one another to bring patients the highest possible quality in medical care. We rely so heavily on technology in every other area of life, it seems counterintuitive that old, outdated technology dominates the industry where saving time can save lives. 

Up until now, that potential has mostly gone untapped. Why?

GROWING UP IS HARD.

As a young industry, EMS had its cute years. We were the baby of the family. Our oldest brother, Police, followed Mom and Dad’s orders to a T. Police was a rule-following perfectionist who aimed to please. Then, there was the middle child, Firefighter. She was similar to her brother, following in his footsteps and enjoying the attention of being the baby of the family ... until we came along. Then, she started taking on a new role – differentiating herself from her older brother while at the same time, nurturing us.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Last month, EMS1, Fitch & Associates, and the National EMS Management Association released their fourth annual EMS Trend Report, proudly sponsored by Pulsara. We invite you to read, ponder, and share the following information brought to you by the most prestigious thought leaders in EMS.

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On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I wandered into Houdini’s Magic Shop and watched as a performer razzle-dazzled each patron and then upsold them on a dream that they, too, could be part of the secret club of illusionists.

A few days later, my magic talent hit me ... I have a (nearly) supernatural ability to see the future of EMS. In essence, you could call me a clairvoyant EMS psychic. My career has positioned me as an expert squarely at the intersection of EMS, technology and the human factor.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This past April, Pulsara's Chief Marketing Officer, Kris Kaull, had the honor of being selected to present a TED talk at TEDxBozeman. A practicing Flight Paramedic, Kris chose to share one of his most memorable calls, and his top three tips for bringing order to chaos -- as learned by a career in emergency medicine:

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It was early October. The fall leaves had turned colors and the air was brisk. Bob and his family finished dinner, watched TV, and scooted off to their own rooms for the night. They were all in bed by 11. A calm normal night, until it wasn’t.

[NOTE: Pulsara recently spent at day at the FirstNet Innovation Lab in Boulder Colorado where Pulsara is now installed. The Lab is a centralized location to showcase the capabilities of FirstNet. Pulsara is collaborating with FirstNet to showcase the importance of real-time team communications that crosses healthcare entities. Thank you @FirstNet for your hospitality. — Shawn Olson & Brandon Means]

This past week at the International Stroke Conference in Houston, Mission: Lifeline Stroke released two documents related to prehospital LVO care.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was originally pubilshed on EMS1.com. EMS1 serves as the largest site for paramedics and EMTs to find expert industry-relevant content.

With EMS and hospital professionals looking at different clocks—different timelines—for the same patient, it’s surprising that there aren’t more issues. And that’s not getting into other related information that is transmitted along the line: patient records, ECGs, and other miscellaneous documents. When every second counts, that type of miscommunication can be dangerous, or even fatal.

The future of healthcare is in bridging these gaps and creating a single protocol that encompasses the entire process from first contact to definitive treatment and includes all the stakeholders involved. The idea itself is a simple communication protocol that:

• can be used regardless of patient location
• unifies all acute care processes in one common workflow
• and is available to anyone who has a smart device … i.e. everyone.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to our guest blogger, Bob Sullivan. Bob Sullivan, MS, NRP, is a paramedic instructor at Delaware Technical Community College. He has been in EMS since 1999, and has worked as a paramedic in private, fire-based, volunteer, and municipal EMS services, and is an ally to Pulsara.

1. There's little room to spare in the cranium.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was originally pubilshed on EMS1.com. EMS1 serves as the largest site for paramedics and EMTs to find expert industry-relevant content.

Medical professionals are always pushing to discover better methods to improve patient outcomes. Nowhere is this more true than in acute care situations, where communication is critical and every second counts.  

But up until now, there hasn’t been a great one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of sharing information—benchmark times, patient information, etc.—between emergency response team members, due to great variation from place to place and organization to organization.

One company looked for a way to put a method to the madness. By pulling together people, alerts, and information in a single platform that’s available to everyone, the days of “who knew what when” can be put firmly in the past.

Here’s how Pulsara works, along with five reasons it is quickly becoming the leading technology for improving patient outcomes.

Who are you?

Like … who are you REALLY? When no one is looking. When you’re by yourself. Who are you? What principles guide your decisions?

Welcome to the final, and Part 4, of our series that asks the question: “Who is Pulsara?”

At Pulsara, our Vision is our future roadmap, the answer to the question: “Where do we see ourselves in the future?”

In Part 1 of our 4-part series about who we are as a company, we definied our mission, the answer to WHAT do we do at Pulsara. We unite and empower people to improve health by simplifying care coordination.

In conjunction with our mission, our purpose statement answers HOW. How will we accomplish our mission? Or more specifically, how is Pulsara going to simplify care coordination?

We care about what we’re doing.

We care about the latest in stroke research. We care about streamlining and maximizing efficiencies in STEMI cases. We care about building Regional Systems of Care. AND, we care about people.

How does that fit into the big picture?

One of the challenges in any organization is direction. At Pulsara, it’s critically important that we focus on the right core projects at the right time with the right level of concentration. How do we accomplish that? By defining who we are.

Over this 4-part series, we’ll be reviewing our mission, our purpose, our vision and our non-negotiable set of values.

It’s not that doctors are technologically averse. Instead, it’s because technology has become another mandatory hurdle in providing quality patient care. More and more physicians are becoming frustrated with the subpar usability of Health IT Tools.

What should be simplifying the process and providing meaningful data is increasingly becoming a headache. Systems aren’t comparable. Technology is evolving at a pace that is costing facilities in unusable “tech debt.” Doctors can’t pull basic reports. And the “IT guy,” whose responsibility centers around printing woes, is now required to screen policies & procedures, configure personal mobile devices, maintain interoperability standards — all while staying HIPAA compliant.

“Do you want to speak to the doctor in charge … or the nurse who actually knows what’s going on?”

I hear it all the time … “We already have a great system.” or “Our processes are already streamlined.”