Vail Health is an independent, nonprofit healthcare system serving Eagle and Summit counties in Colorado. Vail Health’s Mission is to elevate healthcare across our mountain communities. My name is Bill Adochio and I'm Vice President of Facilities Services. Vail Health provides medical services to this community that require many different products that have to be protected in a very specific environment. If we can't have that protection and we can't provide the care that's necessary for our patients, the next nearest hospital is on the other side of Vail Pass, which on any given day could be half-hour drive or it could be a 5-hour drive, depending on the weather.
When we initially considered a system to provide temperature and environmental monitoring for our organization, the criteria we used was the robustness of the solution and whether it would work in our environment. We needed access to 24/7 technical support for any issues that come up because a healthcare organization like ours is a 24/7 facility. And we wanted to work with an industry leader that has already partnered in this space and has proven that they have the capability to understand the technical challenges and the risks and safety associated with the technology.
Our previous solutions had challenges remaining connected given the fact that we are remote in the mountains here in Colorado. As a result of that, we would have scenarios where we would have to go physically check the devices to ensure that they were still functioning, and we would have to engage at a technical level to ensure that we were in the right space for care. Our temperature and our environmental monitoring included alerts that weren't related to the temperature or the environmental monitoring. It was more of a technology issue. And that was something we wanted to reduce, so we could focus on things that were affecting the products.
When we first considered SmartSense, we were looking for a product that had good customer service, that had the approval of our organization for use given all the technology challenges that we have, and that allowed us to maintain the appropriate level of compliance for data storage and for alarming to our staff and to our backup health services.
SmartSense has improved our daily operations by helping us reduce our alarm fatigue with previous systems. We manage vaccine refrigerators. We manage all of our lab refrigeration needs. We manage the environmental factors in our sterile processing department and in our pharmacies. We also manage our dietary needs with the SmartSense system. We manage the environmental conditions in our operating rooms and in all of our critical areas where we're required to ensure that we are in compliance. If anything fails in this scenario, we are unable to deliver care and it can lead to delays which are not acceptable. Vail Health found that in areas we previously didn't have good telemetry or weren't able to effectively communicate with devices, that this technology allowed us to have robust signal strength and allowed us to place devices in strategically important areas.
The training and onboarding aspects of it were simple and easy to follow. We were able to get together with the teams, show them the front-end interface, and engage with them on how they would respond to an alert and how they would escalate strategies as needed.
We've been through other technologies, and we've seen challenges associated with connectivity. We've seen challenges associated with reliability, and we have not seen those challenges since our implementation of SmartSense. Given the previous experiences Vail Health has had with other IoT solutions, we wish we would have gone to SmartSense a long time ago. We truly value the partnership and look forward to continued engagement to ensure that we're managing all the safety and compliance for the facility.