Pointing a Camera at Smart Facility Software and CarolinaEast Medical Center

Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware con­duct­ed inter­views at Car­oli­naEast Med­ical Cen­ter high­light­ing the role of Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices in com­bat­ing COVID-19. The filmed inter­views demon­strate CarolinaEast’s intense EVS process­es and how soft­ware (ES Opti­miz­er, Ser­vice Opti­miz­er, and Sur­vey Opti­miz­er) and tech­nol­o­gy stream­line hos­pi­tal clean­ing.

Telling the EVS Story

As EVS work­ers are on the front lines of fight­ing COVID-19, Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware saw a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell their sto­ries. “EVS is an under­rec­og­nized depart­ment, so we loved paint­ing the pic­ture of how mas­sive and crit­i­cal EVS respon­si­bil­i­ties are, while talk­ing about how our soft­ware sup­ports them,” says Jodie Mowrey, mar­ket­ing direc­tor of Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware.

There were three ideas Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware sought to com­mu­ni­cate in the video:

1. Fight­ing an infec­tious dis­ease is twofold—stopping the spread from per­son to per­son and from the envi­ron­ment to a per­son. Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices tech­ni­cians are the heroes pro­tect­ing and ster­il­iz­ing the envi­ron­ment each day.
2. Clean­ing a hos­pi­tal has always been a mat­ter of life and death. Noth­ing has brought that fact to life as much as the cur­rent COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic. But, it is noth­ing new for EVS depart­ments. They have always been prepared—always study­ing, train­ing and inno­vat­ing on how to clean a hos­pi­tal and know it’s clean—keeping patients safe and infec­tion free.
3. To clean a hos­pi­tal and know it is clean, you need a sys­tem. For many hos­pi­tals, that sys­tem is ES Opti­miz­er from Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware: a soft­ware that builds a sol­id clean­ing pro­gram, gives man­agers the tools to acti­vate the work­force, and pro­vides mech­a­nisms to assure, doc­u­ment and report on the out­comes.

Filming at CarolinaEast

The video shows how Car­oli­naEast man­ages work assign­ments, con­ducts qual­i­ty inspec­tions, pro­vides employ­ee feed­back, and tracks project work using the soft­ware. It fea­tures inter­views with Car­oli­naEast EVS staff, includ­ing David Snook, EVS direc­tor. “David is real­ly metic­u­lous in his work, and every time we vis­it Car­oli­naEast it’s an incred­i­bly pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence,” says Mowrey. “They have a good rela­tion­ship with their EVS staff. David relies high­ly on soft­ware to pro­vide the reg­i­men he wants.”

Inter­views were con­duct­ed before film­ing the rest of the footage on the shot list. EVS staff were ini­tial­ly ner­vous about the inter­views, not used to being in the spot­light. “They’re just doing their job with­out the expec­ta­tion of pub­lic­i­ty, so this was a change of pace for them,” says Mowrey.

Shawn Wright, pres­i­dent of Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware, drew on his own expe­ri­ence in Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices dur­ing his inter­view to relay the incred­i­ble chal­lenge of man­ag­ing a com­plex net­work of EVS tasks, espe­cial­ly dur­ing a pan­dem­ic.

How Software Supports EVS

In pre­vi­ous Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware videos, the focus has been on describ­ing the fea­tures of the soft­ware. “This time we were pas­sion­ate about the sto­ry of EVS,” says Mowrey. “Stop­ping the trans­mis­sion of COVID-19 and all infec­tious dis­eases through the hos­pi­tal envi­ron­ment is an incred­i­bly com­plex job. With hun­dreds of thou­sands of tasks to man­age, soft­ware helps to reign it all in.”

In his inter­view, Snook describes the software’s abil­i­ty to man­age the mul­ti­tude of tasks an EVS depart­ment must com­plete every day. This frees up time EVS techs can use to devel­op rap­port with patients, which accord­ing to Snook’s phi­los­o­phy is part of patient care.

John­son Bridges with Smart Facil­i­ty Soft­ware explains the software’s QR code capa­bil­i­ties, and how giv­ing patients and vis­i­tors the abil­i­ty to sub­mit ser­vice requests on their mobile phones allows EVS staff to respond imme­di­ate­ly. This improves not only the clean­li­ness but the over­all impres­sion of the hos­pi­tal.

EVS tech Lisa Bank’s favorite aspect of the soft­ware is that it tells her where she needs to be and when, and what she’s sup­posed to be doing. Bank cov­ers dif­fer­ent areas of the hos­pi­tal every day, so get­ting clear-cut plans in a mobile app cuts down time spent receiv­ing direc­tion. It allows her to take her focus off a to-do list and pay more atten­tion to the needs of patients, and the clean­li­ness and safe­ty of their rooms.

Where to Watch

The full video is avail­able to watch here and on Smart Facil­i­ty Software’s YouTube chan­nel.