Sickbay Sessions | Episode 4: Sickbay’s Innovation Engine: Built for Clinicians, Shaped by You
At Sickbay, our best product ideas don’t start in a lab — they come from the floor, the ICU, and conversations with the people delivering care.
In this session, EVP of Product Management Chris Schabowsky walks through how Sickbay takes clinician and executive feedback and transforms it into scalable, actionable innovation.
What You’ll Learn:
- How Sickbay translates bedside challenges into new features
- How Sickbay’s agile development approach supports scalable deployment across diverse health systems
- Why a vendor-neutral, clinician-centered platform drives better outcomes
Whether you’re leading clinical innovation or shaping your hospital’s digital transformation, this session is for you.
Podcast Transcription:
Jennifer: Thank you all for joining us today. I’m Jennifer Lazarus, the Director of Marketing for Medical Informatics Corp. We are thrilled to bring you the fourth episode of our Sickbay sessions in this series. We are exploring how cutting-edge technology is revolutionizing bedside and remote patient monitoring. We’re optimizing clinical workflows and closing the data gap in healthcare. Each session in this series features industry experts and innovators to discuss the latest industry advancements and solutions throughout today’s session, if you have any questions, please feel free to use the Q and A tool that you can find at the bottom of the screen, or you may also interact with us through the chat feature here at Medical Informatics Corp. Or as you’re going to hear me say in the future MIC, we are proud to deliver next generation technologies that unify patient monitoring workflows for healthcare systems. Our focus is on every patient everywhere, monitored by people who care and powered by actionable data. So today, I am joined by our Executive Vice President, Chris Schabowsky. He oversees our product team and department. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Chris: Great to be here.
Jennifer: Excellent. Would you mind taking a moment and introducing yourself to our attendees?
Chris: So, as you said, I am the head of product here at MIC, and I’ve been a part of the executive leadership team for the past few years now, and my core responsibility is optimizing our flagship product, Sickbay, and identifying major pain points related to patient data monitoring and building out solutions that address those pain points. And I have to say that, you know, my favorite part of being a part of MIC is working across all the departments and all the amazing staff and colleagues that we have here, as well as working with clients and thought leaders, it’s been an amazing experience working with providers, nurses, supervisors that have feedback for us, whether it be good or critical, because any feedback is good feedback.
Jennifer: You mentioned the collaborative spirit that you enjoy here at MIC. Would you talk about your previous roles in the history that has inspired the collaborative energy that you bring to the product department?
Chris: Absolutely, before I joined MIC, I was in healthcare consultant, and I helped healthcare organizations prop up some cutting-edge programs, including surgical robotics and remote patient monitoring. During that experience, I was able to work with the C-suite as well as all the way down to the front liners, including nurses and providers, and it really gave me an insider look at the challenges that our healthcare organizations are facing today, and I’ve been able to leverage that knowledge into improving and building on Sickbay.
Jennifer: So, you talked about leveraging that knowledge to improve Sickbay. I mean, really, what brought you to Medical Informatics Corp, given the diversity of your background?
Chris: Yeah, like I said, I’ve been in healthcare for a long time, and I decided at this point in my career that I really want to be a part of the future of healthcare and innovation. While I was consulting in hospitals, I also ran a team of experts that were brought in when a patient was injured or died, and we helped hospitals determine why it happened, and provided recommendations and how to avoid it again. So, I had a really personal experience watching what happens when healthcare providers don’t have the information that they need when they need it, and what that can lead to, so it can lead to compromised patient care. It can also lead to patient injury. It can lead to patient death. So, I was driven to get proactive about it. I was working on how to resolve those issues after they happen, and I saw that Sickbay really unlocked one of the core needs that physicians and caregivers had to take care of their patients, and that is taking all of the information from disparate devices that don’t talk with each other, and aggregating that and putting it into a single platform that can be accessed at any time, anywhere, and it really empowers clinical teams to make sure that their patients take care the best they can.
Jennifer: You mentioned Sickbay, for those who are either unfamiliar with our platform, or maybe you’re an existing user who could always learn a little bit more about what we do. Would you talk about what Sickbay is for everybody in attendance?
Chris: Yeah, so I mentioned a little bit that Sickbay is born out of the ultimate pain point of devices not talking with each other, having the challenge of taking all the data from those devices and trying to come together. With some comprehensive story about what’s going on with the patient now and previously, and the current state is collecting information, putting them into the EHR in pretty significant intervals of time. It could be anywhere from 15 minutes to four hours, and there are significant gaps and events, and data because of that. The Sickbay is a vendor-agnostic, web-based platform that receives, aggregates, stores and time, and synchronizes data across all integrated medical devices at the native resolution of the device. We can take up wave forms at samples up to milliseconds, and we can have a range from a second to a year, as long as the devices are integrated with Sickbay. So, what does that mean? You have access to the patient data anytime, anywhere. You can share it with your clinical team. You can consult with your colleagues to make sure that the patient is getting the care that they need right now. It enables a ton of workflows. You can do near real-time monitoring for one patient or multiple patients. You can support provider rounding, and you can have central monitoring rooms with standardized workflows regardless of the hardware devices that you are working with. You can also perform retrospective analysis on any patient who has been linked to Sickbay. What are the benefits? We’ve seen a reduction of the length of stay. We’ve seen an improvement in time to treatment. We’re able to address staff burden by providing them support through remote monitoring, as well as reducing administrative burdens. We can support billing and appeals with high-fidelity data showing exactly what has been going on and justifying medical necessity. We’ve also seen users lean in on Sickbay to deal with litigation. We’ve had clients actually take a look at this data, share it with the plaintiff, and say, Look, this is what happened. This is what we’ve done, and they’ve been able to avoid lawsuits because of it. We’re constantly seeing different use cases that our clients are coming up with, and it’s really exciting to see that.
Jennifer: With that, speaking of doing a lot with a little time, one of the things that you’re tasked with and responsible for the company is our product development roadmap, you know, where we’re going with our, you know, product management process. Would you mind briefly explaining what the product management process looks like that you’ve built for MIC?
Chris: Yeah. So, the first thing we ended up focusing on when I joined with the tech team and the product team was implementing an agile software development process. And the goal here is to be able to release features and enhancements quickly while validating their value, and we prioritize our platform improvements through impact and effort and high impact, low effort, we’re going to be rolling that out quickly, and if there’s high impact, high effort, we’re going to be more we’re going to be working on that for A little bit, long before we roll that out. During this iterative development process. They’re called sprints. We work on something for about a month. We do that a few times before we roll out a release. And each department is responsible for something. So, the product team builds out the requirements based on our data interactions and clients, market intelligence, and our technical team and our medical device integration teams. They work on developing that we review the progress, and then we really rinse and repeat until we’re happy with the features that we want to roll out for the next production.
Jennifer: The product team is working on building requirements. You’ve got your medical device team and your technical team that are looking at that development process and the timing. But to tie it back to you know, your inspiration for being in this role at the company is your experience as a consultant in your previous roles, the relationship with the hospital systems. Would you talk about how the process of product management impacts the client? What does this look like for them based on the work we’ve done?
Chris: I mean, I think it could be summarized fairly quickly. Because of this process, we are constantly releasing features that improve our product over time and periodically, so our clients don’t have to wait a year plus to see additional value being added to Sickbay and clients can take a look at the work that we’re putting together, the features enhancements that might be rolling out the version decide for themselves whether or not to deploy that. You can wait for a version. You can wait a couple of versions, based on your resourcing, as well as what is being implemented and what is going to be helpful for you and your teams.
Jennifer: Since you mentioned that the client really controls their deployment, one of the things I know that is a priority here at our company is the client feedback loop, and where that ends up going, whether it is the product development, whether it’s the experience. So training people who are using the product at the bedside, etc. How do you, within your department, involve client pain points when you’re prioritizing features and products?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that’s really the fun part of products, making sure that the effort that you put into the product is as high value as possible. And there are many ways of doing that. Our feature and prioritization process includes a number of what we call listening posts that can include direct client feedback, market analysis, competitive research, as well as leaning in on our subject matter experts. But one of the most important feedback that we get is directly from our clients. There are multiple ways for our clients to reach the product and provide their feedback and recommendations, and requests. They can create tickets. They can share this information with our frontline client-facing staff. We all often hold interviews and surveys as well. Once we decide to develop a feature, we directly engage our clients, even those who haven’t necessarily requested it, or share a pain point during the Agile development process, to make sure that we’re going down the right path. And this is called Sprint reviews. So, we’ll do some development work, and we’ll share with the client. We’ll ask, “Hey, is this what you’re looking for?” “Is this what’s helpful?” And if yes, then we continue on that path. If the answer is, it could be better, then we take that information back into the development loop and include that to make sure that the future is as best possible.
Jennifer: And given what you just said about taking in the client information, can you give us a few examples of features that have been rolled out or are in the process of being rolled out based on client feedback?
Chris: Yeah, for sure. So, three come to mind right now. The first is a data smoothing feature that we’re rolling out in patient checks, which is our retrospective data analysis app, dual wave form, and configuration of wave forms and numeric values in our multi-patient monitoring app, which is called multi-mod, and our effort to integrate with the EHRs and bed workflows within them. So, we’ll start with data smoothing. Briefly, Sickbay brings in that data from all the different devices, like we talked about, at a native resolution, and we don’t do any post-processing right now. So, what does that mean? That means that you know you’re going to get high fidelity data, and all of the data that’s great most of the time, other times it can be challenges, because device data can be noisy and there can be artifacts, and when that happens, that can make the signals being shown by patient injects really hard to understand because it’s less clinically actionable. So, we got that feedback, and we decided, let’s make a toggle switch, so now users can toggle between the raw data and smooth data to try and get rid of those artifacts and noise, so that the clinicians have the data that they need more easily for the dual waveform multi model. That was simply a lot of feedback we got was, hey, we need to listen. We need to look at two waveforms, which is great, and also, let’s make sure that the numeric values that we’re looking at while we’re monitoring patients can be configured however we want. And it sounds simple, but it actually opens up a ton of workflows, because now we have different users in different care areas. We have respiratory therapists who are interested in looking at ventilator wave forms and signals. We have tele techs that are interested in ECG and sometimes SPO, two critical care nurse providers can see the direction that we’re going. It really is a differentiator with Sickbay. There are not many companies out there that can show and unlock this type of data and allow people to look at what’s going on with their patients in near real time and look at the data that they need right now for EHR integration. You know, we understand that the EHR is becoming more and more important in healthcare, and that a lot of workflows and a lot of data are entering the EHR. So it’s important for Sickbay to kind of play in that space and augment what’s going on in the EHR. So there are a number of things that we’re doing to implement our platform into EHR and make sure we get pertinent data into the EHR. So, a few things we can talk about. The first is pushing device data from the device and Sickbay to the EHR flow sheet rows. So that’s what we consider legacy medical device integration. We’re also able to embed Sickbay into the EHR. We can digitally export ECG strips to the EHR. We can enable real-time wave. Form monitoring straight from the EHR, as well as high-fidelity retrospective data analysis. We’re also able to push out trend data, and the user can open that up, take a look at it, and then click on a link that brings you to Sickbay for a more detailed analysis of what’s going on with your patient.
Jennifer: Those are three really strong features, and I’m really proud we’ve brought to market, and I think it’s a lot to consider when we’re looking at the various pieces of client feedback. And clearly, there’s a lot of this process with sprints and stuff the clients are privy to. So what can a client expect in terms of a product release timeline for Sickbay? And then there are additional costs to the client, because we’re wrapping in so much of their feedback, and it’s driven with their perspective in mind.
Chris: Yeah, we had to give that a good deal of thought, and I think that we landed on a good balance between the Mi c team as well as resourcing on the client side, the is resourcing, which is always very tight and hard fought for we landed on three releases a year, and with the understanding that clients may not deploy a new version every time we release it. Now, that said, the good news is this is free, right? This is part of the subscription. So as we roll out new features, new capabilities, and when our client decides to deploy that in production, there’s no charge to that. One other thing to note is that we have unlimited users, so once Sickbay is deployed on a bed, anyone can tap into Sickbay, look at that information, which is really powerful, and I’d like to talk about that a little bit more later on.
Jennifer: You mentioned twice now when a client chooses to deploy because, again, we enable the client to make that choice based on what’s best for them in their system. But deploying into a client production environment can be challenging, whether it’s a few units or an enterprise worldwide. So, at a high level, can you explain how MIC is working with clients to deploy it?
Chris: Yeah, so our software development life cycle is built on a rigorous tool set that’s designed to enhance both the security and the scalability of Sickbay our approach enables our clients to perform user acceptance testing within their own dedicated test environments before they go to production and before we go to each release, we do engage our clients directly. We walk them through the features that we intend to include in the version. We make sure that they line up with their specific use cases. Their users are able to review it to determine if it’s going to optimize their own workflow and improve their usage of Sickbay. So, we really have this balance of when we are offering up versions, making sure our clients understand what’s going on with those versions, and deciding to deploy or not.
Jennifer: You mentioned how when you engage our clients with new releases, you used two words that I think were important, it was scalability and control. So can you talk about what that means in place for an effort like this?
Chris: Sure. So, Sickbay is designed with maximum scalability and resilience in mind, and we adapt to much wider client need, including high availability, disaster recovery and geographically distributed deployments. The platforms architecture supports seamless scaling. As healthcare organizations grow, evolve, mergers, acquisitions, you name it, Sickbay can handle it. Our deployment process is tailored to align with each client’s needs. That includes control processes aligning with internal schedules. We also provide comprehensive UAT scripts, detailed documentation and a structure rollout to ensure very smooth implementation.
Jennifer: Chris, I appreciate you taking the time with me today. You know, we’ve covered a lot in a little bit of time, but a couple highlights that I’m always inspired by are the reason people are here and why they want to be involved in innovation. And in our previous webinars, which I will throw in an advertisement. If you happen to miss our previous webinars, you can find them at sickbay.com and our resources page, but in those webinars, my colleagues and I have discussed how Sickbay unlocks device and patient data that can drive innovation, improve workflows and patient care. And what I want to know from you is, what do you think are the most important advantages of Sickbay, and what is your vision for the product?
Chris: So, the vision for the product always has to align with the company’s mission, which is delivering next-generation technologies that unify patient monitoring workflows, and as a head of product, you can never lose sight of that when it comes to the advantage of Sickbay. I think we got to land on the rich, high-fidelity data that is pulled in from all the devices as well the EHR and it’s unmatched. It empowers both clinical and non-clinical users to fulfill and optimize their own workflows. This can include nurses, providers, tele techs. We’ve also seen our clinical documentation integration teams and risk management use Bay. This is a modern infrastructure solution, and it sits between your bedside and your EHR. We’re consolidating and normalizing data through the devices at the native resolution, and we’re serving that up to support your clinical operational and financial workflows. So, when it comes to the division, the direction I think Sickbay is going, I can think of three things. The first is optimizing our platform for specific clinical use cases. A good example here. Two examples would be neurology and respiratory therapy for neurologists, one of the challenging aspects that we’re running into is too few neurologists across a wide, geographically distributed area and enable them to remotely monitor and review documentation of patients all over their health system. For respiratory therapists, it’s a little different, because they’re often running around different units and different floors to patients that are ventilated, and they’re responsible for all those patients. The problem is, when they leave the room, they’re blind to what’s going on with the patient and what’s going on with the ventilator. So we’re able to provide them with a view into all the patients that they’ve been assigned while they’re walking to another patient. Building this out and serving greater care areas is really the direction that Sickbay is going. We’re also supporting non-clinical workflows. And revenue cycle is something that we’re seeing an uptick on. Because Sickbay has such a rich data set that our CDI teams are not necessarily privy to. They’re able to use it to justify medical necessity, to have a much more robust appeals process, and to support peer-to-peer review of billing. And they’re able to capture more revenue because they have all of this data in their hands, and they can show it, they can work with it, make sure they’re optimizing billing, as well as fighting for reimbursement that they duly deserve. We’re also starting to get prepared for agentic AI. So everyone’s talking about AI agents, how they can be used, and we want to make sure that Sickbay’s ready for that. When you get sick, they’re future-proofing your own technology so that we are developing AI API’s, we’re developing MCP servers. We’re really getting ready for that agentic AI revolution that we think is imminent.
Jennifer: Well, as I mentioned, Chris, that was my last question for you. I do want to reflect back. You know, there’s been a lot of turmoil in our political environment when it comes to hospital funding and stuff. So, I think it’s exciting to look ahead at that roadmap. Like you mentioned, you know, those three big initiatives, I think, are going to offer a lot of opportunities for people to maximize what they can do. I hate the phrase because we use it so much these days, but to do more with less, I think there’s a lot of opportunity there, but it’s not sacrificing quality at any point in time. And I think that’s what’s exciting, too, about your process, with taking in that client feedback and constantly iterating on what Sickbay is doing and what’s possible. So I want to thank you for taking the time with me today. Everybody who’s joined us, if you’ve asked questions, hopefully we’ve gotten to the answers in our Q and A portion or in our chat portion. But if, for some reason, you think of something later, don’t hesitate to reach out to us through sickbay.com or our LinkedIn, and I look forward to seeing you guys in our next webinar. The announcement for that will come soon on our sickbay.com website. So, everybody, I hope you have a wonderful day, and thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.
