Sponsored by Downtime Trace
Riding on the coattails of your favorite ride-share apps, food-delivery apps, home-task apps, and Amazon … Downtime Trace is a mobile app that instantly connects healthcare providers with all medical equipment maintenance and repair options for the specific make and model of equipment requiring service.
Q: WHAT’S YOU STORY, WHY DOES DOWNTIME TRACE EXIST?
A: Early in their careers, hospital executives and frontline workers poured into two brothers, Jason and Danny Mobley, the founders of Downtime Trace. Jason had the idea many years ago when he was working as a biomed department manager while also delivering pizzas, working as a Lyft driver, and other side-hustle jobs in the evenings to make ends meet. While working his side-hustle jobs, his hospital would call for after-hours service and pay thousands per hour to outside vendors for equipment Jason could fix himself. He thought … if only the hospital knew people like him (with the proper skill set and experience to work on their equipment) were available and open to work, and if these competent technicians could somehow know that hospitals were in need of service. His idea was to use the Lyft, Uber, Domino’s, Amazon, and DoorDash model to instantly match a hospital’s need for medical equipment maintenance and repairs with all of the vetted and available service options.
To pay their success forward, the brothers raised investment money and tapped into their unique experience in the niche medical equipment maintenance and repair field to make jobs and lives better for these wonderful “Humans of Healthcare” that poured into them early in their careers.
Q: WHAT DOES YOUR MOBILE APP DO TO HELP MAKE MEDICAL IMAGING EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR BETTER THAN A HEALTHCARE PROVIDER’S CURRENT PRACTICES?
A: Downtime Trace uses a web-based and mobile app technology to instantly connect a healthcare provider to all available service options, at once, and facilitates a bid from every service option that has the competency to service the specific make/model, giving the healthcare entity the data to choose which option is best suited for every service event … all at their fingertips and on their smartphones.
The web portal and mobile app showcases all three types of service providers – ISOs (independent service organizations), OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and introducing “gig technicians” – in a familiar Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook-style profile to make it easy for healthcare providers to see; pictures and videos of service technicians, technical competency scoring and experience on specific makes/models, and ratings and reviews.
With a single press of a button, our technology BLASTs a healthcare provider’s service request (known as a “Trace Ticket”) to all pre-matched service provider options.
Downtime Trace app notifications look just like the notifications/alerts you receive on your favorite mobile apps.
Only vetted service options that are pre-matched by make/model receive the BLASTs and return bids (in a standard bid format) that contain the following:
- WHAT they estimate the problem/solution likely is, WHEN they can begin service (estimated onsite arrival time), and HOW MUCH they will charge. Providers choose a bid based on the service option’s profile, availability, response time, price, etc.
Finally, like AirBnB receives payment from the buyers/renters and pays the home owners, and like food-delivery apps receive payments from the customers through their app and distribute payments to their delivery drivers, restaurants, and stores, Downtime Trace technology serves as the trusted, single-point of payment for healthcare providers. We receive approved payments and quickly distribute the payments to the service labor and parts entities (within days, not weeks or months). We track all service expenses in the app to allow providers access to their historic spend on any asset, like seeing past rides on Uber.
Q: HOW DOES YOUR COMPANY STAND OUT IN THE IMAGING SPACE?
A: Downtime Trace pays the service options really fast and keeps it simple for providers, which should stand out quite-a-bit compared to the 60 to 120 days it takes healthcare institutions to pay. We piggy-back off of mobile app technology that has been around for 10+ years to give healthcare provider’s visibility of and easy access to service options that already exist. We actually have the audacity to try something new that might create more service options for healthcare by making the service options easy to find, easy to get connected to, paying them more, and paying them fast. Our technology stands out most for speedy and easy access to all of the imaging equipment service options and for the savings that naturally come with competition, but I hope we also stand out to the radiology technologists and staff for the fact that we set a single standard that makes their jobs easier and lessens their anxiety when their equipment breaks.
Q: HOW CAN A SINGLE STANDARD MAKES THEIR JOBS EASIER?
A: When a healthcare provider chooses Downtime Trace over the current and antiquated methods for ordering and tracking service, it signals their desire for a single standard of service that is far less complicated for their staff than learning hundreds of different policies from hundreds of different service vendors. Providers can easily access, see on their phones, and measure the following relevant service data: response time, downtime/uptime, performance against repair estimates, ratings/reviews of service technicians, and financial information.
Q: WHAT IS ON THE HORIZON FOR YOUR COMPANY? DO YOU HAVE ANY GOALS YOU WOULD LIKE TO ACHIEVE IN THE NEAR FUTURE?
A: Downtime Trace has launched! So that’s pretty big for us, but we are especially excited for the gig service technicians and independent service organizations that are getting opportunities to earn supplemental income and some flexibility (choice of which jobs they want to bid on). A healthy Downtime Trace means we have created more income or freedom for imaging service technicians and companies while saving the healthcare providers more than 30% of their current spend on imaging equipment maintenance and repairs.
Q: IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WOULD LIKE ICE MAGAZINE READERS TO KNOW?
A: Consider that the best things often seem to be the simplest, and that this technology is a baby-step towards the AI that is coming. Our team cannot believe that no one else has brought this idea to market yet. It has been percolating for many years and we know how fortunate we are that the stars have aligned in a way that has allowed us to build this helpful tool. We feel extremely accountable to the service technicians and healthcare providers to make sure it gets to market and utilized. It likely won’t be easy, and it will require providers to have a little bit of courage, but it can easily work.
Kindly also visit us at DowntimeTrace.com and on YouTube, where we have created commercials and some videos that give an overview of what Downtime Trace is, how you can describe it to others, how service technicians interface with the app, and how healthcare providers interface with the app.
