The Center For Health Design; Taggart ”Tagg” Neal, EDAC, Founder and CEO TAGCarts® – Member Spotlight

The Center For Health Design’s® Lynn Kinney, EDAC, SASHE recently interviewed TAGCarts® Founder and CEO Taggart Neal, EDAC for the Affiliate Connection’s “News and Highlights” 30k+ readers.

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…This month, we had the pleasure of interviewing Taggart “Tagg” Neal, EDAC, of TAGCarts®. Tagg is literally thinking outside the box with his innovative and time-saving solutions for caregivers.

Briefly describe your current role. 

As founder and CEO of TAGCarts®, I oversee strategy, operations, culture, execution, finance, investor relations, sales and business development. Everything I do falls within the discipline of building a brand of products with nurses and hospitals. Our brand reflects their values, culture, and goals for better community health.

How long have you been affiliated with The Center?

5 years.

What led you to become a member?

The Center’s member community represents other like-minded teams embracing evidence-based design (EBD) in the healthcare industry. As a startup, I wanted our membership and contributions to the greater collective to be a cornerstone of our company culture. The team at The Center supported my vision for a cart company beyond expectations and hasn’t stopped since.

How did you get started in the industry?

In 2003, I was fortunate to be offered a position with a medical cart company as a territory manager for Northern California and Nevada. I fell in love with the role of serving nurses by providing medical cart solutions to enhance their ability to work smarter, safer, and provide better care for patients.

How have you utilized EBD and your EDAC credential to build a better cart and how has that impacted outcomes?

The evidence-based design process provided the framework for designing our supply cart for nurses – known as the TAGCart®. It validates our design as going way beyond. We sought challenges and feedback from users to improve and inform design. My evidence-based design credential (EDAC) gave me the knowledge to apply the EBD process to our medical cart design. Including stakeholders requires input from more than just end-users. One outcome of that was the evidence we found where hospitals and healthcare systems are trending toward the integration of their sustainability goals into their supply chain. This validated our desire to build a sustainable cart for healthcare and was thus included. Had we only asked end user nurses about sustainability, we would not have known hospitals were looking for capital equipment to evolve beyond being competitive to becoming beacons of sustainability.

What have you liked most about being part of The Center for Health Design community?

Collaborating with other design-minded professionals. It’s comforting and validating to know others view objects, products, or environments of care beyond the “surface” of what they actually are. It’s design-mind thinking and there are no right answers, only models for processing. Eliminating binary outcomes encourages my ability to explore, suppose, imagine, and on occasion innovate.

What is your “go-to” resource from The Center?

The Knowledge Repository. It’s a dynamic treasure trove of case studies, white papers, and overall evidence-based design work for healthcare.

What is one of your greatest professional accomplishments?

Easy, last month I walked into a hospital department in Silicon Valley to find a nurse delightfully charting on a TAGCart®. It was a surreal moment and interaction I’ll never forget.

What changes do you anticipate in the “new normal”?

Due to hyper advancements in technology innovation, I anticipate society placing greater value on cognitive energy displacement, mental health, and self-care as it relates to overall health and immunity. We are evolving past last century’s isolated metrics of money and time, into a new equation with primary variables of energy and health. I contend the current and visible paradigm shift toward home health and aging in place are outcomes of this new equation, in the “new normal.”

Tell us something that others may not know about you.

For about ten years of my early professional career and prior to corrective surgery, I was clinically deaf in both ears.

Tagg, thank you for your contributions to our industry and for you perseverance in creating evidence-based solutions for clinicians.

About TAGCarts®, Inc.

TAGCarts® is a Veteran Owned, California Founder Institute company bringing the medical cart industry into the 21st century with conscientious design and material manufacturing for nurses in healthcare. Based in Sacramento, TAGCarts® mission driven values’ of social responsibility and sustainability in healthcare was honored as Comstock’s Magazine’s “Startup of the Month” and founded by CEO Taggart F. Neal.

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September 17, 2021 – Sacramento, CA USA

TAGCarts, Inc. salutes and congratulates the 1st US Carbon Neutral Health System!(1.) It is increasingly clear healthcare has embraced corporate sustainability. With goals dating back five to ten years, we now find ourselves on the eve of twenty twenty-two, and in the initial manifestation of their economical, social, and environmental goal achievements. As a whole, these healthcare system values’ are now driving corporate decision making, supply chain partners, and spend commitments.

Consumerism in Healthcare

As a share of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, health spending accounted for 17.7 percent (2.). As the nation’s largest employer(3.), healthcare employs one in eight of us accounting for 12.5% (4.), and is expected to grow an additional 14% by 2028 due to the aging population (5.). This means healthcare isn’t an industry island of isolation, but rather consumers are healthcare and healthcare systems are consumers. This readily explains the rapid insurgence of consumerism into all facets of healthcare. Trends in consumer market = trends in healthcare. Accordingly a large percentage of those of us who work in healthcare, are the same consumers of healthcare. Today’s informed consumer is today’s informed patient as well as today’s healthcare worker. This is the driving force of compounding sustainability in healthcare and consumers will patronize healthcare systems who operate with forward thinking values that reflect their own.

Sustainability Phased Integration

With healthcare systems sustainability priority goals targeting greatest impact within their control, operational efficiencies, design, the built environment, and green energy consumption represent their first and second stage adoption of sustainable healthcare. These phases required dedicating their own resources toward new and innovative systems of operation and use; through their own capital and with applied grants and government / organizational rebates. The secondary and tertiary phases of adoption to sustainability, will actually cost healthcare far less capital and resources as they place the burden of “Shift” on their supply chain partners.

Product Differentiation

In the scope of hospital capital equipment, “Hospital Grade”, use to represent proven efficacy, durability, and ever lasting utility. Today, in light of current and past global pandemics (COVID-19, Ebola, etc.), informed patients (consumers) understand more than ever the link between their health and the health of their community and planet.

Has the casual “Consumer Grade” standard evolved beyond “Hospital Grade” for capital medical equipment? Perhaps when it comes to to the sustainability component of the products, yes…temporarily. However the evolved procurement processes and policies enable healthcare’s supply chain to slingshot past the consumer market where “Hospital Grade” represents sustainable production, manufacturing, and supply chain for approved vendors and diversified suppliers.

Vendor Differentiation

For the last few decades, being a diversified supplier to healthcare was enough to shine and win committed spend; Veteran-Owned, Woman-Owned, Minority-Owned, Small Business, and more. In the last ten years we have seen that grow into the suppliers who have policies of “Corporate Good” and policies of giving back. Examples are performing charity on weekends, highway clean-ups, adopting a less fortunate hospital across the globe, and more. The real evolution is taking place now. Environmental Preferred Purchasing and Sustainable Procurement policies are the new normal…

• What are your products made of?
• Where are they made?
• Who makes them?
• Is there a carbon footprint score or certification available?
• How is your company promoting wellness and good outside of your primary revenue core competencies?

Consumers – nurses, procurement, administration, staff, c-suite, management – are smart and informed. They peel back the layers of the marketing with a click on their phones or mouse – to fact check if the spirit of the marketing and positioning message are consistent with their products and actions.

Wherever healthcare supplier / vendor companies lie on the sustainability spectrum, being true and authentic to your commitments, goals and impact will deliver the highest rewards.

For Your Medical Cart Solutions,

Tagg

TAGCarts – Powered by Design, Designed for Care.

To see TAGCarts features and benefits for nurses and healthcare professionals please click here and review our “Suitable Medical Cart Applications.” To learn more about TAGCarts’ core sustainability commitments please click here. For questions about this article, share your next project, schedule a demo or contact us please click here.

Site References:

1. https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/community-health/news/first-carbon-neutral-health-system-in-us

2. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

3. https://www.exploremedicalcareers.com/1-in-8-americans-employed-by-u-s-healthcare-industry/

4. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/10/health-care-still-largest-united-states-employer.html

5. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/home.htm

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