The Sim Cafe~ Interview with Jerrod Jeffries

Beaker Health was founded by Jerrod Jeffries, a former product manager of Laerdal Medical and the healthcare curriculum provider, Wolters Kluwer. 

During his decade at Laerdal Medical, Mr. Jeffries was product manager of Laerdal's SimMan 3G, LLEAP, and vSim and technical product manager of RQI. 

While helping lead nursing partnerships at Wolters Kluwer he gained understanding of the complication’s healthcare organizations had with storing and disseminating their knowledge. Beaker Health is committed to allowing organizations of all sizes leverage internal expertise to create additional revenue, visibility, and raise the nursing education benchmark.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerrodjeffries/
Beaker health: https://beakerhealth.com/about
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jejeffries?lang=en
 

Innovative SimSolutions.
Your turnkey solution provider for medical simulation programs, sim centers & faculty design.

Transcript

Disclaimer: 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative SimSolutions or our sponsors. This podcast is being sponsored by Echo Healthcare.

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Intro: 1:00

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber as she sits down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So, so pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in, and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb: 1:33

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Today we are truly blessed to have Jerrod Jeffries. Jared is the founder and CEO, a Beaker Health. Formally he was the product manager at Laurdol Medical and worked at Walters Clovers. Jared, why don't you go ahead and tell our guests a little bit more about yourself.

Jerrod: 1:56

Yeah, thanks Deb, and thanks for having me. So I got into simulation pretty early where my mother was doing a lot of things within the space and one of the pioneers within it and became pretty interested when my father was in the aviation industry and saw this as a merge between the two. And I was being brought along at many different symposiums, conferences, all sorts of things, and asking a lot of questions as most kids do. And then I was able to move over to Norway and worked for Lead Medical for a summer during an internship where I kind of really got my feet wet and became fully immersed. And then once I finished up my education in the United States, I then went back over there and had three years as a product manager within s Stavanger Norway. Then I moved into that being the product manager, one of the product managers of leap, which is the operating system that powers all high fidelity simulators for Laurdol based simulators. And then from there I moved over to the software arm in Copenhagen, where I originally started being technical product manager for the resuscitation side, but quickly missed the simulation side and went over and did vSim. And from there I went over to Walter kclu eventually where I ended up becoming product manager and leading some nursing partnerships and found some issues that surrounding private libraries for healthcare content as well as dissemination and tracking the metrics and allowing not only presenters, but organizations to have more knowledge in being able to see the true impact that their content internally was having. But at the same time, what they could be doing, where they be focusing more on.

Deb: 3:37

Thank you. Thank you. And Jerrod and I met rather serendipitously, uh, we met a LinkedIn little chat, uh, I think we might have some things in common. Would you like to talk? So we set up a, a call a couple weeks ago and by the end of the week I was sharing my content with him, at which point I actually said, How do I know you're not gonna hijack my stuff? To which she replied, You don't<laugh>. Later on in the week, I discovered after doing a little research that there was a possibility that Jared was related to the Dr. Pam Jeffries. And I texted him

Jerrod: 4:19

Exactly. We were on a bit of a text train then, and I was like, Oh, should I have disclosed that? Cause I, I don't usually, cause it's usually I just wanna do well by the industry and, and nurses have a near and dear place to me. And so I think there was a long time where you didn't text back Deb, and I was even a little worried of, Oh, should I disclose that? Like I, I don't usually don't disclose that my parents aren't anybody. So

Deb: 4:39

Yeah, no, I was, I was very excited. And you know, it's, it's wonderful that you're walking alongside with her with some of the great things that you are doing and are going to do that little entrepreneurial spirit.

Jerrod: 4:53

Well, thank you.

Deb: 4:54

So why don't you share your journey into simulation and how you got to where you are now out?

Jerrod: 5:02

Yeah, so it all did kind of spur with my parents' industries. And then I felt like because nursing was such, um, an area right for disruption, that I was able to then start saying, Okay, do I wanna actually pursue most of my life within simulation? Because healthcare was always near and dear to me. And so when you're thinking of that, right, when you're not even on your death bed, but when you're ill, you kind of just only want to get better. And then of course the most important thing when you're a kid growing up is that of education. So these two fields are extremely important to me. And then having this technology element with simulation, moving at a pretty rapid pace and really being challenged of how you can be overcome challenges and, you know, almost like puzzles of how you can solve people's issues was something that was really exciting. Then I went overseas for, and that's where I also was able to meet Chris, who is a product manager for Leap at the same time as me. And he was teaching me kind of firsthand, also, let's get you in all these simulations where I did a resuscitation one for cpr, and a few weeks later he took me down to Belgium, where he was from. And we went out on a couple ambulance rides where I actually end up tight quarters. Um, the man was in panic, the, the, his wife had collapsed from a heart attack and first responder was getting tired. So he pulled me in and I was giving, giving CPR pretty quickly. And as most nurses and healthcare providers have, have pushed on broken bones and ribs within the chest, it's, it's pretty impactful from a simulation to a real world aspect. And then also saving or giving an extra week to someone's life in order to, for them to give closure to their, their loved ones, to give closure to that person is pretty impactful. So you kind of see that you're making a difference and there's, there's actually purpose within this industry and what you're doing,

Deb: 6:55

Right? It does feel very strange the first time that you do CPR on an actual person and you, you feel their ribs, like you said, cracking and you mm-hmm<affirmative>, you see the things that occur during a resuscitation.

Jerrod: 7:12

Yeah. And, and I mean, you even think about other people you went to school with your friends and family and you know, their accountants are finance such, which all makes, everything makes the world go round. But, you know, I don't think most people get the ability to have that, that impact on others besides teachers who are, you know, helping shape and mold a, a young individual. And in healthcare, which are giving extra, you know, maybe seconds, maybe years, maybe decades to someone else's life.

Deb: 7:37

Right. Now, what happened with you during Covid? What was the experience of Covid?

Jerrod: 7:44

Yeah, so when Covid happened, it got me thinking a lot of different things. One was, that's where I saw 80 ish of the best, you know, high profile healthcare educators within nursing all come together. And everybody was lining up after the presentation was created or presented, asking questions, saying, Hey, can I have this model? Can I have this picture? Or what was quickly realized was, there's no feedback loop. In addition, these, these presenters don't have really a way to disseminate that on their own without a large industry partner, uh, kind of bringing them together. And so that got me digging down a little more of the rabbit hole, looking at other industries and then also trying to understand that of the education industry. And most people have probably heard of Coursera, a great company, which 4,600 courses. They're just under 4,000 schools, just under a hundred million users. I mean, just doing incredible things. But healthcare industry is a little bit different because our, our content needs to be a little more specialized and maybe not. So everything's with a blank slate. So that's where we thought, okay, can I really understand or try to understand this education market better? And then when I started going down, you have the United States, which is by far the best at weapons software. And then of course education. As most people think about branding, you have, oh, Apple is gonna be the number one brand. Everybody knows Apple. But the thing is, is the best brand that we have is our education systems. You have people that are dying to get into Harvard or Yale where you can't really even comprehend the amount of value that brand goes into this education institution. So no matter what, you have now traditional academic institutions that are having donors or individuals trying to put 50 million on this side of their building for the like, or you have Colorado State University, that 37.7 million to name the rights of the stadium. And this is sports with, you know, even crypto.com doing something with the LA stadium. And so you have numbers and parallels which are not even really knowledgeable or understood within other industries that we don't really have yet in the healthcare industry, but we have something with education that is just unparalleled. And then you have the, the rest of the world where everybody wants to be educated at a US academic institution. And so learning all this then gave me the, between seeing what was at this conference and then understanding the education industry more on a whole led us to down this path of, okay, how can we actually help nurse healthcare professionals, more specifically nurse educators and then as we're seeing here more specifically even does within the simulation industry. And so what we pushed for was, was that of opportunity of trying to find those remarkable educators and then to remove the barriers for that is how do we make it clean and simple to allow those to actually upload their content, get paid for their content if someone's consuming them, or have their organization actually be able to say, Hey, now we have an additional value that we're given to our members. We have a better way to build a community. We have another way for retention. We're actually giving purpose to our members. And not just holding this inside, but actually leveraging what we have during a pandemic was, was a huge learning opportunity for me. And it just came with all these different variables from external providers, from internal growth, from reading about all these different areas of benchmarks and industries where I think we could be pulling from, uh, within the healthcare education field a lot more than what we have been previously.

Deb: 11:45

Thank you. Now, where do you see the future of healthcare going? Where do you, what do you envision happening as far as simulation and, you know,

Jerrod: 11:55

Yeah, good question. If I could wave a magic wand, a lot of things would be a letter. We can look at other industries and pick up best practices and try to understand where we can really borrow those types of skill sets into one healthcare education. But even more so simulation to your question. And so when we look at how much money is going being poured into different industries or that of education where the profit margins are better than any other industry in the world, you're seeing that there's a lot more potential to tap into that we're not doing. So for example, for an undergraduate, this is for United States, for any of the international listeners, but the cost to go to school in the United States is, you know, of course scholarships and, and financial aid aside can be from, from 20,000 all the way up to 80,000 a year. And of course is approximate rates based off discipline state in state, outta state, et cetera. And see if someone's paying, we'll just even call it a hundred thousand dollars for a four year degree, then they graduate. You don't have the ability to even tap into that field of expertise, faculty, other really gifted alumni that even have the ability to say, Hey, now I'm doing this thing 20 years down the road, but oh, I'm not tied to my academic institution. I went to Indiana Ann University and there's so much knowledge, you know, we have a lot of famous graduates, Mark Cuban being one and he's owner of Dallas Mazare, but now he's doing a lot of stuff with the prescription meds. Try to love the cost and to have the ability to glean his insight of saying, this is what I do for businesses, this is how I'm trying to tackle an industry because we are alumni from the same academic institution. I would love to be able to learn from that. I would even pay to learn from that. So ideally you would have something where organizations would say, Hey, here's all the content that we've already created. We have ladol mannequins and simulators, we have cia, we have gamar, whatever it is. And then you can be able to filter based off all the content that, and training that they're already giving. So then these heavily resourced cities and countries could then share all this knowledge through not only education, but trial and error and things that you need, low cost, uh, ways, moulage, whatever it could be to say, Hey, this is how you're actually going from zero to seven in a matter of days instead of a matter of years because we've already done that trial error. You have to pay us to understand and to, to look at this and see the content in the library we have, but we've already done all this. And then you can have annual subscription. So even going back to the, to the alumni piece was you're now, instead of just paying a hundred thousand dollars for the year, I would, I guess me personally would pay a couple thousand dollars to say I want to tap into the education from other alumni, from academic institutions or corporations and be able to connect with them to understand what the, what trials and tribulations that went through as well as have a tighter connection for that community.

Deb: 15:00

Right? I think that the pandemic provided a opportunity and opportunity for people to think a little bit and not just go, go, go. It created a natural disruption, certainly. And and to your point, like someone like myself who's been on, I've had an amazing journey. You started out in the intensive care unit, went into emergency medicine, worked in a nursing home, um, is director of nursing, then I got into academia and then, you know, to open a company but to use little bits and pieces and to all the amazing people that have showed me the ropes, I'm so thankful to have learned from

Jerrod: 15:41

Certainly and right, that's one, it's cuz you're an incredible person, but, but two, it's how many people don't have that opportunity? How many people aren't that extrovert? How many people aren't able to go to all these different cities or, you know, have a network or connection like that? And if we really want nursing shortage education, raise the benchmark with the nurses, we need to have a database or an area where other like-minded educators can say, Hey, I want to go learn this. It could be just some time learning. It could be that they're getting a accreditation program. It could be so many different options. And because you create what you want and you look at the maturity through SSH, which has done incredible things throughout the, you know, their time. But the growth is so, uh, I don't wanna say slow, but there's only so many people I can get in a time because I even remember when I was over in Copenhagen and I wanted to go to this, you know, premier conference, imsh every year. I couldn't afford it, the company didn't wanna send me. Or is, you know, there's all these different variables that you're like, I wanna still get that content from ims h I would pay for that content from IMS H but I can't receive it. And what the pandemic has done so quickly for education is that they have put in an enormous amount, you know, a decade or two of, of change and growth in a matter of months. And I believe most every academic institution can see that. And now healthcare organizations or professional organizations should be adapting some of these same practices but perhaps haven't had the same opportunities within the technological products or platforms that have been developed solely for academic institutions.

Deb: 17:20

Agree. Where do you feel simulation is on Roger's, uh, adopter category?

Jerrod: 17:27

That's a great question. I'll use an example of anybody who's been to Imsh in the past decade has seen a radical transformation of people pe by people. I mean industry partners that have been there, you know, from from 2011 all the way up till or 2022 and the difference between what it was a decade ago. And now you have, I mean, millions and millions of dollars being poured into all these technological advancements of what's our bet on ar, what's our bet on vr? What about mixed reality? And you do have these big software players with Microsoft Meta slash Facebook and whatever else, you're still on their platforms. You have abide by their rules, but of course they want healthcare partners to be, to be picking this up. And you even have partnerships such as Facebook and Microsoft, you know, getting together in order to make this more accessible. And where I see the adoption for simulation is I see the, the adoption changing because when people are gonna be finally able to afford a very expensive high fidelity simulator or you know, have the services package where they don't know if people can track impact of how much usage or uptime there is correctly, cuz you can have something switched on, but it's not being used. I think that within simulation, there'll be a period where you're doing a lot of things that is able to merge the two worlds of kind of this metaverse or technology-wise into that of something hardware. But right. Simulation has been going on for, for centuries. It's just how we keep coining and, and and ding the language between everything and we're finally coming together for our uniform terminology. So I think we're past the early adopters cause I think there's been a lot of funding for that. And I think that we're hitting the later stage. And of course large industry hardware partners could test to this, but I think now a lot of it's gonna be about services for their hardware pieces. It's gonna be about services, it's gonna be about content. And I think where there's a large portion that's missing is that of how to use the content, how to use a simulator, and then how to actually, and some, some of your other podcast guests have been done an incredible job with this. And so it's how do you actually create impact and make a difference within your community because you have these simulators,

Deb: 19:55

Right? So you're saying we're still in early adopter phase?

Jerrod: 20:00

Well, because I think that the bar's gonna be moving based off what people's definition of it is. And so someone's gonna say, Oh, you don't do simulation because you don't have a, a headset strapped to your face. And someone who's just graduating school or for the younger generation, they're gonna say, Oh, simulations with those really big and heavy dolls. That's so silly. Why would we do that? And you know that, that to them is gonna be simulation. But in the nineties and early two thousands, simulation included high fidelity simulation with a framework and all these other parallels where I think that definition kind of keeps shifting. So I think for some degrees right, we're in a later stage. In others we are early.

Deb: 20:44

Right. That's a good answer. What would you like to share with our listeners as something that you learned and it was kind of an aha moment for you? A personal aha moment.

Jerrod: 20:57

You know, when you really dig into an industry and you're seeing these crossroads across different ones of, of healthcare in one and then education being the other. And again, this is a personal bias. Two of the most important industries I think exist. There's so much opportunity that we have because of, and this goes back to the research I did on the education industry with the profit margins being so large with an education and due to this adjusted rate for inflation, you have such a massive opportunity cost. And due to this, there's so much room for improvement within that of not only the educator to have this part of the pie, but in addition that of the organization to tap into this what I've coined dust content with collecting dust on servers to actually have a library that allows'em to, to create an additional revenue stream for the very least more visibility and kind of could will with their community. But that moment all came from talking to users of, of different nursing directors, presidents of nursing associations, a professional organizations, uh, deans and you know, other people of high prominence within academic institutions is that the education industry is still so stuck in the way that it used to be. And I think that it's on the cusp of saying, okay, we need to be pushing forward. How do we increase our bottom line as an academic institution, professional organization, whatever it is, without increasing tuition or membership rates. And the answer is really sitting there in front of'em as we have all these incredibly talented and attractive, you know, articulate, engaging, knowledgeable, one of the best whis in their entire field. So they're literally, they're giving their life or their, their, all their time is going towards this profession or this segment of education. How do we then take that and promote that externally for revenue and visibility? And so the ha moment was exactly that of trying to understand the difference of, of how you can actually take those two pieces and put'em together.

Deb: 23:15

And I think one of my favorite things about working with you, Jared, is when I'm working with you, Bruce, my daughter Chris mm-hmm.<affirmative>, Shelly, just sparks are flying think there's thinking that you could actually, almost like the light's going on in simulation when you could see something mm-hmm.<affirmative>, but we can actually have like learning happening right. Among us that no one's afraid to say what they're thinking because it's just gonna build a another better idea.

Jerrod: 23:43

Yeah. And it, it certainly, certainly Deb and, and it's such complimentary skill sets where we have different backgrounds and, and we all have massive amounts of mutual respect for one another. And we're challenging by putting on a different lens and saying, I love that idea. Let's look at these three options with it. And, and then going back to the exact idea that we already had. And I, it's, it's a safe space and it's, and it's a very building space where I think this all has to do with partnerships. And if people leverage partnerships in the right way, they're always able to accomplish more than what they're able to do, you know, individually.

Deb: 24:17

Right. The collaborative nature of things. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And one of my favorite sayings is when everyone thinks alike, no one thinks a lot.

Jerrod: 24:27

Hmm. I haven't heard that, but I like that

Deb: 24:29

<laugh>. Well it's true. If you have a group full of whatever nurses, they're all gonna think like nurses. But then if you get somebody in there that's from it or a teacher, they're gonna be able to add. And I think that diversified approach to healthcare, to education, to all different industries is what can make us stronger and better.

Jerrod: 24:51

A hundred percent agree. And I think it's funny that sometimes, and I'm not pointing fingers, just sometimes we don't borrow best practices or we want to create, reinvent the wheel where we don't need to. No, no industry does that. And we can jump by leaps and bounds if we're able to recognize the support and how we want to actually raise the benchmark within this field altogether. It can be done.

Deb: 25:13

Yeah. Is there anything that you wanna ask me?

Jerrod: 25:16

Yeah, I do have one question. So I've talked a lot with a lot of different people within the space and of course there's the buzzword, or at least it was, uh, past couple years is innovation. So my question to you is that of why do you believe that more innovation needs to happen within healthcare or more specifically in nursing education?

Deb: 25:36

I believe that innovation needs to happen in nursing education because if we continue to do things the same way that we have been doing them, we are going to continue to get the same thing that we have.

Jerrod: 25:50

Mm-hmm.

Deb: 25:51

<affirmative>, we need nursing instructors, we need higher level people who can influence the industry and help them understand what simulation is. Simulation is innovative, but it's not mm-hmm.<affirmative> just a technique. It's almost like a vehicle for learning. And when you can flip the whole script on that and look at it as how can you learn to do things and learn from them and share those with each other and create a culture of lifelong learners that you're gonna see more innovation, you're gonna feel more free to ask questions, to challenge the status quo. To rethink right from Adam Grant's book, Think again that some of these things that we have just perpetuated as realities are, are just simply not true. So we need to go ahead and think about rethink everything, rethink many things, and, and do it in a collaborative and safe fashion and not have political companies thinking that their solution is the right solution.

Jerrod: 27:04

Right. Yeah. And to your Adam Grant quote, I also thought of a do Carnegie one where knowledge isn't power until it's applied. And so Right. You can create the best type of content or education in the world, but if it's not being used or if it's not being consumed or tracked, then you're gonna be in a bit of a bit of a pickle. Yep.

Deb: 27:21

Yep. I used to use that one when I would teach nursing students. I would say knowledge is power, but it's only power if you give it away. Cause if you just, you know, store it, Yeah. Then it's not gonna go anywhere and it's just gonna, I don't know. Well, this has been a wonderful interview. Is there anything else you wanna share with our listeners?

Jerrod: 27:40

No, I, I do appreciate the time for the listeners. Of course, you can catch me through most social media channels as, as any majority of people have these days. If anybody is interested in pushing out their content or, or building a library for additional revenue or visibility us over at Beaker Health, we're extremely happy to get that up and running for you. Yeah, we've had some great, great reviews and, and a lot of people love using us. So we're, um, just looking to help the industry and, and the overall space, you know, push forward and help raise the benchmark overall.

Deb: 28:12

Right. I think that having here the opportunity to work with your platform, it is if, if an old grandma can do it,<laugh>

Jerrod: 28:20

That was our North star was simplicity and cleanliness.

Deb: 28:24

Yeah. All right. Thank you very much and happy simulating

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Outro: 28:46

Thanks for joining us here at The Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed, connect with us at www.innovativesimsolutions.com and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode of The Sim Cafe.