ADVERTISEMENT
PrepMD’s Decade of Innovation in Training, Staffing, and Remote Monitoring: Interview With Matt O’Neal
In this feature interview, EP Lab Digest speaks with Matt O’Neal, Co-Founder and CEO of PrepMD, about their tailored services and new opportunities now available.
When we first met in 2010, we discussed PrepMD’s mission to teach, inspire, and connect talented individuals with the medical device community. Five years later, we interviewed one of your remote monitoring pilot sites (Harbor Medical Associates) and heard great things about your remote monitoring services (RMS). How has PrepMD evolved since then?
Our 2010 discussion was focused on our pacemaker school, as we had just founded the training program. Since then, PrepMD has expanded to provide training, staffing, and remote monitoring services — which together provide a wonderful symmetry of services in the cardiac medical device space. But before we go into the changes that have been made, I’d like to first talk about the things that haven’t changed. Now in our 12th year, we still provide the same highly regarded training program — we run three sessions a year and have now just graduated our 31st session. We have over 500 graduates that hail from 44 states in the U.S., and we have a 98% job placement rate. In fact, PrepMD has trained more device professionals in the CRM and EP space than any other entity in the last ten years. The faculty and staff here at PrepMD can feel very proud of the impact we continue to make — providing lifetime career opportunities for our students who attend the program, and a trained and talented workforce for the industry and healthcare employers who place their trust in our organization.
As far as what has changed, PrepMD is now licensed as a private occupational school by the Massachusetts Division of Professional Licensure. We have expanded our classroom, lab, and office space by almost 40%, with a brand-new EP lab (Figure 1) and new mapping systems in place. We’re teaching not only cardiac rhythm management, but also EP, structural heart, interventional cardiology, and similar specialties. We have grown well beyond the pacemaker school model, preparing our students for exciting new roles in the cardiac space. Our current mission is to change lives and improve outcomes through customized high-quality training, staffing and remote monitoring solutions.
PrepMD Professionals has been connecting talented and trained individuals with the medical device community. How does the company achieve this?
PrepMD Professionals is a separate entity which provides recruiting and placement services through dedicated staff led by Matt Wilson, CCDS, as the director of that company, and Katie Reddy as the manager. PrepMD Professionals offers direct and contract staffing solutions (similar to a traveling nurse concept) to medical device and healthcare employers, and have contracted with major healthcare systems (Figure 2) in the Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West.
In the initial weeks of our core training program, the Professionals team works with our students to understand how they can best represent them for job opportunities, including resume development and interview preparation. Some students want to be in the cardiac rhythm management space, some want to work in a healthcare setting, and some are looking to be on the EP side. With over 24 years of combined experience in the cardiac medical device field, Matt and Katie have the expertise to support the diverse needs of the employers.
Why should device clinics or healthcare systems consider PrepMD RMS as a remote monitoring service provider? What are some common remote monitoring challenges PrepMD RMS helps address?
Back in 2015, we started a pilot and had a handful of clinics that were working with us to make sure that we understood the needs from both the client and patient perspectives. We used the 2015 Heart Rhythm Society Expert Consensus Statement on Remote Interrogation and Monitoring for Cardiovascular Electronic Implantable Devices as our standard of care. We created a software solution and a platform that services the device clinics by addressing common challenges faced by clinics, such as the ability to create an optimized workflow inside their institution.
Our customized solutions enable clinics to reach new heights of cardiac device remote care. One of our unique strengths at RMS is our full-time direct employees who are highly experienced and predominately IBHRE® certified; the team has on average over eight years of experience working in a device clinic or industry role. A key benefit our clients appreciate is the option to have our team work inside the clinic’s current system, keeping what is comfortable while optimizing their workflow. There are no upfront costs associated with our solution, and our clients often refer to our collaboration as an “insourcing” solution against an outsourcing model.
PrepMD RMS is currently monitoring in all four corners of the U.S. We have accounts ranging from as few as 20 patients to as many as 16,000 remotely monitored patients, each with unique challenges and needs. This applies to everything from managing alerts, optimizing the report writing, and improving patient care through consistent remote monitoring. Once PrepMD RMS creates for our clients a more efficient workflow, the clinic can add more patients to the system (Figure 3) without experiencing any additional burden.
Looks like you’re working toward addressing several challenges in the space. So what is next for PrepMD?
As this industry changes and grows, we will continue to look for how we can help identify problems and be part of the solution for individuals, companies, and healthcare providers in the medical device space. Our onsite training is state of the art, but not everyone can commit to a Boston-based program for 6 months. After initiating a pilot in the summer of 2020, we launched the PrepMD Passport Series, a self-paced and self-directed online learning resource. The Passport Series has successfully provided a much-needed global solution for individuals who work or study full-time, evidenced by our first international Passport Holder hailing from Italy! We are proud to be the first to market with such a robust learning resource for the global community.
PrepMD Passport Pro (Figure 4) is our new hybrid product designed for corporate and healthcare system training, and includes cardiac specialties such as interventional cardiology, cardiac rhythm management, EP, and structural heart. Over the past year, we have provided tailored onsite and online training for over 10 different corporate (Figure 5) partners. Providing the baseline foundational training has helped our corporate partners focus on what they do best, which is to train on their specific product attributes without having to stop and revisit basics. Corporations and healthcare systems come to us to customize a training solution or to augment their existing training to make their employees and new hires much more productive in a shorter amount of time.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I would like to thank the medical device and healthcare community for the trust they have placed in PrepMD, and I am proud of the PrepMD employees for their continued hard work and dedication! These talented individuals now work from over 20 different states, and each play a critical role in the PrepMD mission to change lives and improve outcomes. As we look forward, there will be new problems for us to solve, even beyond the cardiac space, into adjacent specialties such as neuro. We will continue to seek out new opportunities to provide innovative solutions to individuals, companies, and healthcare providers.
Current Issue
Stay in the know.
