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Introduction: Riverside Healthcare puts the health and wellness information you need. Well Within Reach.

Sean O'Connor: Welcome, I am Sean O'Connor. I am my marketing communications rep here with Riverside Healthcare. I'm joined by Kyle Benoit, Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer at Riverside. Kyle, how you doing today?

Kyle Benoit: I'm doing great, Sean. Thanks for having me.

Host: Excellent. Now that we get through Kobe, I thought it was a good time that we kind of talk about cleanliness and what Riverside is doing for sanitation. And so with all this talk about COVID, Riverside has made a special commitment to sanitation. What are we doing to really step up our cleanliness at the hospital?

Kyle Benoit: Yeah, that's a great question. I can tell you even before COVID Riverside was very much committed to the cleanliness at the hospital, but essentially since COVID came, we really had to make some changes to really enhance what we're doing. You know, standard methodology, cleaning of wiping down high touch surfaces has increased frequency. For example, all our waiting room furniture now is wiped down on an hourly basis across the campus. We have spaced out our chairs so that people could be socially distanced while they are waiting for their loved ones. If during a clinic visit or procedure, visit high touch services, like a countertop, as well are also wiped down on an hourly basis. Same thing with the floor cleaning. We've been much more diligent in that and wiping down areas like elevator buttons and the escalators and the doorways. You know, our housekeeping all did a phenomenal job, but now there's this heightened awareness of the contagiousness of COVID. You really need to wipe down those high touch areas at a high rate. Other areas, you know, in a lot of people may not know this, but pre COVID there's such thing as terminal cleaning. So when all your procedure rooms are terminally cleaned once a day, and what that means is after the procedures are done, the crew goes in and wipes down everything. The floors, the walls, the high touch services, just a really deep, thorough cleaning which is called terminal cleaning. And we do that every day in every procedure room throughout the organization.

Host: Excellent. And so between each procedure, they're given a clean, but that terminal cleaning is a thorough, deep, deep, clean every time.

Kyle Benoit: Yeah, absolutely. There's strict guidelines in the procedure rooms, especially in terms of what you have to do between a case and then what you have to do in a terminal cleaning. So both occur every day. And then again, patient rooms as well, even if a patient's in the room, we have our high touch cleaning service that we do in addition to when a patient is leaving before the next patient comes the strict cleaning guidelines that we have to adhere to.

Host: And that kind of benefits, not only the patient, obviously, but it also benefits us as a hospital because we get measured on readmission from infections and stuff like that.

Kyle Benoit: So, yeah, healthcare is one of the most heavily regulated industry in the country. And one of those is hospital acquired conditions. So again, if someone were to come to your hospital and all of a sudden they developed a C-diff or any infection that's acquired wire at the hospital is something that is heavily regulated and you're essentially deemed, and the public knows what is your rate of hospital acquired infections. So that just puts even more of a heightened awareness to make sure that you are cleaning everything as diligently as you can, as well as you can, to keep your patients safe, but also to keep the staff safe as well from them spreading transmission amongst themselves or to other patients.

Host: Yeah. And that brings up a good point. Riverside's had a very good track record with cleanliness throughout our tenure. I mean always, but especially during COVID, we've really stepped up our commitment. Especially even with visitors coming in and out and what have we done for allowing visitation for a while there, we had dialed it completely back. Are we allowing visitors now?

Kyle Benoit: We are allowing visitors now started about the second week of May. All visitors have to wear a mask, all visitors have their temperatures taken upon arrival. They're asked to remain in the areas that they're going to, so they can't really navigate around and say like they would in the past. We also go through a screening questionnaire with the visitors now. So when they come, we ask them different questions. Are you feeling these kinds of symptoms of? Had he been in contact with someone who had these kinds of symptoms? Again, we want to welcome people back and let them know that it's safe to get their care Riverside. It absolutely is, but we also want to go about it smart and make sure that they're safe, staff safe, and the guests are safe as well.

Host: Yeah. And what are we doing for staff as far as making sure that the staff are in optimal condition for working everyday and keeping our patients safe as well?

Kyle Benoit: Yeah, so the staff goes through the same process. They have to wear a mask. Everyone is temperature screened every day. Again, they know what the symptom criteria are and they are working with employee health. If they're experiencing any of those symptoms and being put off of work. We also, again have the PPE, the mask, the eye goggles that the staff is wearing as well to protect them. And I think it's really helped keep the rate low amongst our staff of those who developed symptoms during this stretch of the pandemic, it's kept them safe. It's kept them at the bedside and that's where they need to be providing that great care for our patients.

Host: Yeah. And one other well, I guess two other items that we have in our arsenal is our Xenex robots. And, and when I first found out about the Xenex robots, I kind of envisioned like from loss, from space, like an actual robot, they're not really an actual robot, but they are kind of a machine of sorts.

Kyle Benoit: So yeah, it's a little robot. It has little wheels. They get wheeled around by our housekeeping staff, into our respective room. So really it's, our staff goes through and cleans everything, wipes down the high touch services, changes the bedding, cleans the floors, the UV light, the Xenex robot is the last step. And it's almost like an added safety component to cleaning our humans. Our housekeepers are always going to clean it, but then the robot comes in after them and they use ultraviolet light technology to then really spread through the room. It's a pulsating light. And the technology is very interesting in the sense of it infiltrates the bacteria, the superbug, the microorganism, and destroys that via the UV light. So to us, it's a added safety component. It's kind of having a belt and suspenders, if you will, to make sure you're taking the necessary steps to make sure it's as clean as possible. The Xenex robot, we had around for a couple of years, we have two in our arsenal now. They get into put in the procedure rooms, they go into patient rooms. They even go into our senior life communities. They're across the continuum. And about on average, we'll do about eleven hundred rooms a month. Last month in may, just to kind of tell you this heightened awareness of cleaning, we did our record high of close to 1500 in one month. So again, I think that's going to continue at that high rate, given the importance and added benefit it has.

Host: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think if anybody's ever been on Kennedy drive at night and they kind of see like one room that's flickering, that's the Xenex robot going and doing its job kind of making sure. And it's interesting because when it's done with the room, it really does kind of have a smell in there that it's like a ozone kind of fresh smell in there that you can definitely tell, it's basically eliminated any organism, anything that's in the air, in the room completely. We, as humans, can't be in the room now. We have to close the door and it's neat to see not in the room, but kind of see how it gets set up by housekeeping. They park the robot in the room and stop me if I misspeak, but they, they park it in the room, they turn it on, it kind of beeps for a couple seconds and then they close the door and that's when it kind of goes to work. And that's, it's amazing kind of piece of technology.

Kyle Benoit: It really is. And depending on the size of the room, they may have to position it in two spots in the room just to make sure they're really canvassing the entire room. So again, it runs its cycle. And even after the cycle has done, they have to wait to so many minutes before they can safely enter the room. So again, our housekeeping staff has been well trained on the utilization of this Xenex robot, and we really have seen tremendous benefits. And I talked about earlier, the hospital acquired infections. A lot of these areas, we haven't had any, you know, cauti or clabsi in years. And again, I think it just speaks to Riverside's commitment to the cleanliness and providing a safe care environment.

Host: That's excellent. Well, thank you. Anything else that we should know about Riverside cleanliness now in the scope of time, or?

Kyle Benoit: I think just on top of cleanliness, but just really the pandemic in general. I think for a long time, people were told to stay away from the hospital and in early going, it was, you didn't want to overwhelm the healthcare system. We didn't know how bad this was going to be. Thankfully in this area, the prevalence has been low. The acuity has been low, and I think it's safe to say that care can't wait. I think more people are being impacted by staying away versus coming. One of our physicians said it best just last week, the safest he feels in this community is when he's at Riverside. Right. I think people are out and about it stores, restaurant and not discreet. Everyone's doing the safety protocols, but I think the steps we're taking of temperature checking, mask on, hand washing, the cleanliness that I just described, we are really creating a safe environment that you can come to Riverside to get your care and you will get the best care and really safe care given, you know, the pandemic environment that we're living in right now.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So we've set up negative pressure rooms too. I think a lot of people are worried about the chance of infection prom COVID, but we've set up negative pressure corridors. We've set up negative pressure rooms to kind of benefit people. Patients who come in, we suspect may have COVID or patients who do have COVID, we have dedicated areas for them.

Kyle Benoit: So, yeah, absolutely think it's important that we have set up, we'll call it, say two different processes for those that are exhibiting symptoms of code versus patients that are just coming in for something else. So I'll talk about the, ER, we have someone triage you immediately for your symptoms. And if you are exhibiting those COVID like symptoms, you are placed in the negative pressure area of the ER, if you're not, you're routed to another area, right? So it's essentially providing separate and distinct environments to get the necessary care that those patients presenting with those conditions need. And that example in the ER, carries throughout our entire continuum. On the inpatient unit, as you referenced, we have a whole negative pressure wing and 5 East, it's now 20 beds. The rest of the hospital is not. And so that's those patients that need to be hospitalized for some other condition, whether it be a cardiac related or ortho related are safely getting that care in another area of the hospital, not intermingling with those that have COVID. So again, we've taken the necessary steps to make sure that all patients are cared for those with COVID or COVID, non COVID like symptoms, even in our RMG clinics, same thing, right. With what we're doing necessary protocols and steps that if someone was with COVID like symptoms, they are separated from those that don't, or even routed to another area that they're never even co-mingling with anyone else. So again, a lot of people need healthcare that don't have COVID like symptoms, and we got to just continue to spread the word that you can get that care at Riverside.

Host: As we've been saying your, your care, can't wait, we've got to get you back into what you expect. As far as the care you always come to expect from Riverside and two, if you've been seeing your doctor on an annual basis, a monthly basis, a bimonthly basis, you need to get back into that system because, or that habit, because it's important that you maintain your care because otherwise you're going to have some type of risk coming down the line from delaying your care.

Kyle Benoit: Absolutely.

Host: Well, Kyle, thank you very much for coming today. We appreciate you stopping in and we hope to have you again sometime soon.

Kyle Benoit: All right. Thanks for your time.