The Power to Found a Company to Solve a Problem
Cheryl Dalton-Norman, MBA, BSN, RN, is Founder and President, Conduit Health Partners.
By Cheryl Dalton-Norman
In the early days of COVID-19, patients were dying because it took hours, days or even weeks to transfer them to a facility that could provide a higher level of care.
It was a problem that existed before the pandemic--and one I worked to solve for Mercy Health, now part of Bon Secours Mercy Health, when I co-founded Conduit Health Partners, a nurse-first triage and transfer service, in 2017.
Yet nationally, it took a pandemic for people to realize the challenges hospitals face with patient transfer.
Six years ago, I wanted to make it easy to get the care people need. We built a transfer center where our nurses worked with physicians and other caregivers to find the right setting for care based on the patient's needs and bed/service availability.
I intended to solve the problem of patient transfer for Mercy Health. I used the data from patient transfers to help leaders understand where patients were coming from, what brought them to our system and why people were leaving for care elsewhere. Later, we added nurse-first triage to identify where and when patients needed to be seen or whether they could care for themselves at home. This drove down emergency department visits.
We quickly expanded Conduit’s services beyond Mercy Health--and we didn’t struggle to gain customers. When COVID-19 emerged, demand exploded. By 2022, we had grown from 10 nurses serving 22,000 patients to more than 240 nurses and support staff managing 9.8 million total calls.
The former COO of Bon Secours Mercy Health calls us “smokejumpers”: We go directly behind the line of fire. I like to think we flip problems on their head. There are plenty of people who will tell you the reasons you can’t do something. We focus on what we can do to help.
““There are plenty of people who will tell you the reasons you can’t do something. We focus on what we can do to help.”— Cheryl Dalton-Norman, MBA, BSN, RN, Founder and President, Conduit Health Partners #PowerToChangeStories”
Cheryl Dalton-Norman is the President and Co-founder of Conduit Health Partners, an outsource partner that offers customized health care solutions for health systems, health plans, employers and others to improve care and access for their patients and employees. Cheryl’s wide-ranging expertise was instrumental in the development of Conduit’s innovative solutions including Transfer Center, 24-7 Nurse Triage/Access, Virtual Care, Health Care Call Center Scheduling and Employer/HR services.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheryl-dalton-norman-52ba413b ; https://www.conduithp.com