Episode 78: Bringing Clarity, Control, and Confidence to Equipment Management with Bryan Johnson

Amanda Brummitt:  WeInfuse Podcast, Episode number 78. Welcome to the WeInfuse Podcast. My name is Amanda Brummitt. In every episode, we give you a seat at the table as we talk to infusion center owners, operators, and experts so you get the insight you need to run a thriving infusion practice. In today’s episode, we talk with our very own Bryan Johnson, CEO and Co-founder of WeInfuse, CEO of RxToolKit, and CEO of InfuseTrack. Bryan shares how their new software, InfuseTrack, brings clarity, control, and confidence to equipment management for infusion centers, specialty pharmacies, home infusion providers, and hospital outpatient departments.

Bryan, thank you so much for being here today. It is great to have you back on the show. It’s been a few years already.

 

Bryan Johnson: It’s been a long time since I was on a podcast.

 

Amanda Brummitt: I know many of our listeners probably already know you, but give us the elevator pitch on who Bryan Johnson is, how you got into healthcare, and, more specifically, infusion.

 

Bryan Johnson: Happy to. Yeah, it’s a long story. I haven’t done much else with my career. I was in college, and I had a business mentor that I was introduced to who was starting an infusion business, and I didn’t know what that was, but I went and met with him in his office. He was… This was back in 2002, 2001, when infusion was kind of not even a word, I don’t think yet. But people were starting these outpatient infusion centers in physician offices, and that just got me. So I, you know, I told him, “Hey, I really didn’t wanna be in healthcare. It wasn’t my thing, you know, but I like IT-” Yeah … “so I’m happy to… If you’ll share business with me and help me be involved, or let me be involved in your conversations and teach me, I’m happy to help out on the IT side, you know, websites, marketing, email, things like that.” So I did that for some years.

 

When I graduated, he invited me. He said, “Hey, why don’t you come work for us? We need someone in sales and marketing to help us with our systems. So I went to work, and the company was called Innovative Infusions. It was kind of infusion before it was cool. So I spent several years there helping to grow that business, then left and did more of a franchise-thing with that original company in Austin, Texas, and started what would become the Austin Infusion Centers, opened them, and ran them here in the Austin, Texas office.

 

Fast-forward a few years, and the company grew across the state of Texas, and we sort of…Reece–who is my now co-founder, if you guys know Reece Norris–was doing the corporate law thing, decided to, you know, “Hey, I don’t think I wanna keep doing this.” And I said, “Well, I need you to come over and help me ’cause I got this infusion thing and it’s getting really hairy.” And so he came in, and we kinda merged and rolled up all these franchises under that Innovative Infusions umbrella. We had infusion centers operating all over the state of Texas, some of the first standalone infusion centers in the country, a model that Reece kinda helped us put together, and under his leadership, we were able to grow the business. Around two thousand and, oof, I think it was ’12. Amanda, don’t quote me. It’s in the bio somewhere. We were approached and sold that company to Paragon Healthcare–what was Paragon Healthcare in Texas. So they didn’t have infusion centers, and Rick Allen had the foresight to see this was gonna be an important business, so he added it to their home infusion, hemophilia, kinda specialty pharmacy business they had going then.

 

So, back up a little bit: in 2010, Reece and I co-founded the National Infusion Center Association, which is NICA, if the audience needs to know.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Amazing.

 

Bryan Johnson: We didn’t know what that would become. We knew there was a need in the industry to kinda pull this new group of folks together, and later in the late 2020s, we founded the Infusion Access Foundation (IAF) off of that as well. So very involved. I spent four years at Paragon. Did great. We developed a proprietary system before we sold the company to Paragon called Dripsync. It was a software system we had created to run the business. And so looking back on that, we said, “Hey, what, what do we most enjoy or what do we think we can multiply our knowledge and scale that?” And we thought the software was probably the best way to do that versus opening up, you know, another 100 infusion centers, because that’s hard, and we weren’t ready to do that then. So, we founded WeInfuse and went live in our first office in 2016, I believe, up in the Dallas, Texas market. They’re still a client. And they’ve just been growing from there. Reece always said it was an overnight, 10-year instant success.

 

Amanda Brummitt: An overnight, 10-year instant success is incredible. And then how about the RxToolKit piece?

 

Bryan Johnson: Along the way, we met Chuck and his team on the RxToolKit side and just loved what they were doing. We were super excited to partner with them, and then had a conversation with Chuck, and we made an acquisition of RxToolKit a couple of years back. Added that to our company and our team. It’s just been a great acquisition, and now we’re on to InfuseTrack. So just onward and upward, let’s say.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like solving infusion pain points is almost a superpower for you and Reece-with WeInfuse and RxToolKit.

 

So what was it when you were out and about in all your clients’ infusion centers, what did you see that made you say, “We’ve gotta do it again. We have to go create a product to fix this”?

 

Bryan Johnson: Well, we had our own infusion center still at Paragon, and just watching… Again, there was software in place. It had gotten pretty long in the tooth. We decided, or at least the company decided, not to retail that software out as a solution for other folks. So it really became kind of a proprietary in-house solution. We just, through NICA and through everything else we had going on, we just saw that this was really a problem industry-wide, and we saw tailwinds coming in terms of more and more biologic drugs coming through the FDA that were infused only, that were gonna be provider office drugs, and the site of care optimization swings that were pushing patients out of the hospital.

 

We said, “Man, this is really gonna be a thing where there’s gonna be this massive industry, and there’s really nothing to help- Yeah … pull it together.” Everybody was still struggling with systems, and that was really what got us excited: hey, we could… Now that we’ve built one solution before, you kinda know, we always say it’s like if you ever build a home and you live in it for a while, you know, you love the home, it’s great, but if you ever built a second home, you know, this time you do it, you’re gonna be a little smarter. Like, hey, that laundry room needs to be a little bit bigger. I need one more half bath. You know, you learn a lot from that first experience, and we had learned quite a bit from our first software and said, “Man, we could do it again, but so much better.” And there was more technology. There’d been a lot of advances in SaaS software cloud, and whatnot, and we were just really excited, like, “Hey, let’s give this a go.” So like all entrepreneurs, it’s a little… You don’t really understand how hard it’s going to be, and you say, “How hard can it be?”, which is a funny quote that Reece and I always say to each other. And then what we thought would take a year took two, probably two to five years, actually. And, with most of the things we do, that’s how it works. But you just delude yourself into thinking, how hard could it be, and you just do it anyway. So that’s the WeInfuse origin story, at least on that side.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Okay. And then when it comes to InfuseTrack, what were you seeing in the market that told you, okay- We’ve gotta do it again. We’ve gotta create a solution for this.

 

Bryan Johnson: Yeah, InfuseTrack was an accident. With WeInfuse, we added claims RCM software about 4 or 5 years ago and have been developing it since. We added a pharmacy system for both home infusion and specialty pharmacy, as well as for infusion centers with their own pharmacies. So we were in the midst of that, and one of the things that kept coming up was tracking infusion pumps, mainly the portable kind that go to a patient’s home for home infusion, things with inotropes and TPN, parental nutrition kind of buckets, antibiotics, and so on. And so on the side, I started just kind of vibe-coding it up on the product side to help our pharmacy team. Said, “Hey, I’m going to just kinda get this going and figure out the workflows so when it comes time to build this in the pharmacy app, we have something to run off of.” And as I started showing that to clients, current clients, and prospects, we kept getting feedback like, “Hey, this is great, but, hey, can you also track my infusion center pumps that are on the wall? Can you track my equipment, my IV poles, my chairs, my vein finders, my blood pressure cuffs? Can you help me with inspections, monitoring, certifications, licensing, and tracking?” And so as I started stacking more of this in there as kind of an idea pile, it– we looked up, and it was a whole navigation bar in this vibe app. It was like, “This is a whole app.” And then I had– That, that was one of my roles at Paragon when they– in the acquisition, I was in charge of a lot of the facility, especially provisioning of facility equipment and things like that–pumps across the company, supplies, certifications, contracts. And so it suddenly flashed back to me all the things I used to keep in a spreadsheet back in my Paragon days. And that’s really where it came from.

As we talked to clients, we were prospecting for this idea: “Hey, what else are you tracking that’s not already in WeInfuse or RxToolKit?” You know, WeInfuse has a full system of records, lots and lots of capability. RxToolKit is a clinical education and policy resource that includes many good clinical decision-making tools. But, but where– You know, what about everything else? And so everything else kinda fell into these buckets. A lot of asset tracking, compliance, and these are sort of the unsung heroes in this company that do it, and it all flows to accounting. So we just started backing that in, and at some point, we were like, “Hey, let’s…” I hid it from everyone in the business for about six months and wasn’t sure it was worth our time. And then, I brought it to Reece and the team and said, “Hey, I think I have something here that might be similar to RxToolKit, a standalone logo, a service that will both integrate with our current software solutions, or it could be a standalone product.” And we got a trade show booth at NHIA. We demoed it, got an outstanding response, and said, “Okay, we’re onto something here.”

 

And so now we have a dedicated dev team and a dedicated, you know, marketing and sales team around this. It’s exciting. Apparently, it is needed, so we’ll see on the podcast next year how we did, Amanda, but I think it’s gonna work.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah. One year from now, we’re gonna check in on that. So from an efficiency perspective, no-brainer, right? We all need to have a good inventory of our equipment. But can you give me some examples, like the potential risks of not knowing where your stuff is, not having things available, or unnecessary costs?

 

Bryan Johnson: Like, what’s the business case?

 

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah.

 

Bryan Johnson: I need to start collecting some of these pain points as we talk to folks, you know, current clients and prospects, ’cause they’re giving me lots of good stories. I… You know, pumps, in just starting with infusion pumps, they’re very expensive. I mean, these are all hundreds to thousands of dollars of devices. They’re heavily regulated, with an annual requirement that they be biomed-certified to work properly. There are all kinds of maintenance and leasing, and just a lot of complexity around pumps. And so losing track of them, of course, is a big deal. And so we– I was just actually at a client’s office, we were visiting, doing an onsite, and going to a couple of their different infusion centers, and I walked in with one of the facility supply chain guys, and while we were in the back room of this infusion suite, there were two IV pumps just lying on the floor wrapped in plastic. And, you know, it was– I walked to watch and like, “Hey, what are these doing here?” You know, I was asking the nurse or the center director, and she said, “I don’t know. Those– Some guy dropped those off at the front door, like a month ago, and I just set them back here on the floor.”

 

So what happened was those pumps were sent to the biomed vendor, who was certifying them and doing their annual maintenance, and they were supposed to go back to either headquarters or another infusion center. I don’t know what, but they… the address got mixed up. They FedExed them to the wrong facility. Well, the nurse just got them and set them on the floor. Nobody had any idea where these pumps were, and this was about three or $4,000 worth of equipment just sitting on the floor. And again, I’m with the guy who’s supposed to be tracking this stuff. It’s on a spreadsheet somewhere, but he didn’t even realize they had been sent back.

 

And so this kind of thing, you know, I recalled a lot of memories for myself and my own challenges of getting pumps back from patients, uh, pumps that are lost in shipping, pumps that are on the wall at the infusion center or on a pole, but they’re, they’re due for maintenance and, you know, we’re, finding out that the sticker’s not on there and, you know, the state board shows up or the pharmacy inspector shows up and finds you have a pump out of certification, that’s a big deal. So anytime you’re tracking a lot of things with a lot of values on them, it’s just doing it on a spreadsheet, usually having only one person in the company who owns that, is just very risky. So we really wanted to put something together that was technologically advanced, that had kind of the “Hey, stupid” function, kind of the–we always say the red, yellow, green, and also something that was organizationally visible. So if your supply chain person doesn’t show up to work tomorrow or takes another job, you know, someone can step right in instead of it being something on their desktop or in SharePoint somewhere. And all the clients we talk to, this, this kind of thing is typically just spreadsheet tracked.

 

Amanda Brummitt: So you’re taking it from being dependent on a person to having an actual process. Always an improvement. Also, tell me how it works. Do you pop an AirTag on it? Is it automagical?

 

Bryan Johnson: We are working on some of that. Really, so high-level it’s —tracking, you know, a lot of physical assets and tracking things on those assets, like their certifications, their —If you do asset tags, we can incorporate those. A lot of this equipment already has serial numbers, so they have XOM, and that integrates with our Zebra barcode scanning —2D, 3D, 1D, whatever it is—we do that in our app already. And so we’re, we’re integrating with that process just to make it easy on the user with existing systems. We are working with companies that do physical asset tracking to incorporate that.  One of the things we do — every one of our clients, whether they’re a pharmacy, a physician’s office, or an infusion center, has refrigerators. Some of them have freezers. A lot of them have ambient cabinets and things like that—clean rooms, ambient rooms. And so it’s critical they track temperatures in those and temperature ranges. So traditionally, that’s, you know, kind of a kitchen-style temperature sensor or whatever thrown on the shelf, and there’s a clipboard, a magnetic clipboard on the front of the fridge with a log, and someone writes down every day, you know, the temperature in the fridge is 39 degrees. And then that is scanned in somewhere, or it’s kept on a spreadsheet, as I said.

 

So there are several companies we’re working with. I won’t name them here on this podcast, but they know who they are. They haven’t signed our deal yet, so please do that soon. We are looking to incorporate their digital devices, cellular devices, and network devices, and those will also be tracked directly in InfuseTrack. So anywhere we can incorporate third-party technology for asset tracking, environmental monitoring, and that includes temperature, humidity, pressure, you know, we’re bringing all those in. So the big thing is we’re getting it all into one place. You know, a lot of people think about refrigerator temperature monitoring, pump tracking, a DEA license, and a nursing license as part of the same concept, but these are generally in a couple of folders in the compliance bucket, somewhere on company share drives. We just wanna bring them all to one place where that visibility is there for everyone. And you log on, and if it’s red, deal with it. If it’s yellow, it means you gotta deal with it soon. If it’s green, you’re in good shape. So the inspector shows up, you can click a button, you can see everything’s inserted, you can see the monitoring, everything’s in compliance, and everyone kinda knows where everything is.

 

Amanda Brummitt: So, Wow, Bryan, that sounds like an incredible improvement for most infusion centers. Where do you typically see the biggest ROI for a software like this?

 

Bryan Johnson: Yeah, I think, I mean, if you’re a one-location infusion center, infusion suite, you probably are doing a pretty good job of keeping up with things, and you can walk over in the space, look at it, and keep track, put it on a spreadsheet. I think as our clients or, you know, prospect is scaling up, when you’re getting to two, three, four locations, especially when you’re getting locations that are sort of disjointed, so they’re not geographically together, where it’s harder to go put eyes on things, I think that’s where the biggest ROI and value comes because instead of having multiple folks tracking things, having to call your infusion suite, and say, “Hey, have you looked at this lately? Have you seen it? Can you go take a picture of it?” You’re now involving the staff in the process, and that’s something that the software is designed to do: keep that situational awareness. So the staff at the local facility is encouraged, and we make it very, very easy for them to manage their compliance. Again, log in to the dashboard. If something’s red, address it. If something’s, uh, green, you’re good. If something’s yellow, you’ve got, you know, an inspection coming up soon or a pump due for its annual PM. But just keeping everybody on the same page so the corporate office staff, again, if that’s one person or ten, is not saddled with all that work, and you’re having to get on planes and cars and drive and check on all these things.

 

One of the stories I always tell is that whenever I physically visited one of our infusion centers when we owned and operated, I would find compliance issues. The pads weren’t in the AD box. The AD battery had expired. The oxygen tank was empty. The Ambu bag on the oxygen tank had expired, and it wasn’t connected. So I really try to design the app around, hey, this is your facility. Your facility needs to be green every day. And if you’re green, everybody’s happy. And that’s how we push the kind of behavior management in the app to keep everybody on the same page. But again, the greatest ROI is the consistency and scalability of a compliance asset-tracking software that can be managed by a single person. And so when you get ten, fifteen, twenty, a hundred facilities, uh, you’re still able to see everything, make decisions. All this reporting drops back into our analytics suite, which our current clients are very familiar with. And so, just having all that in one place is a huge advantage over lost spreadsheets. And not to hate on spreadsheets, but it’s not something that scales well when an organization grows. What does onboarding look like? How do you get all those expiration dates in? How do you get all those barcodes in? We have learned our lesson with WeInfuse, and so we have clients with thousands of pumps. We have clients with 55 pumps. So, depending on your size, we do have an import process. Good news about the spreadsheets is that if they’re accurate, we can import them all. So we’ll be– We have a- If they’re accurate … we do have an import function that’s already baked out, and that will allow if you’ve got, you know, a thousand pumps on a sheet with serial numbers, model numbers, you know, your lease agreements, whatever, we, we can bulk pull that in. We can pull in your pump certification images and whatnot. Again, we’ve kind of learned how to do that with WeInfuse when we go live with clients who are on other solutions. Our team is ready and willing to do that so we can hit the ground running. Training it —this is definitely a what-you-see-is-what-you-get software. So there’s the pump. It’s either, again, red or green, right? It’s insert, it’s not insert. It’s your responsibility to get it back on the patient. You haven’t seen it. There are gonna be several integrations around shipping and last-mile logistics. So if you have couriers moving these around, all of that will be integrated with our partners, like VirtueScript and others on our Partners page.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah, shout out to VirtueScript. Thank you for the plug there, Bryan. If you guys are not familiar with VirtueScript, go check out Episode 75 of the WeInfuse Podcast.

 

Bryan Johnson: Oh, there you go.

 

Amanda Brummitt: So Bryan, if people are pumped and wanna be some of the first to get a sneak peek of InfuseTrack, how can they set up a demo with you guys? It’s great.

 

Bryan Johnson: They can reach out at sales@infusetrack.com. You can also reach out to sales or support at weinfuse.com or email me directly. Anyone on our team is gonna funnel you to our team, so we can set that demo up. It’s about an 8- to 15-minute demo, and we can do it virtually. Or if you are going to the National Infusion Center Association trade show coming up in July, we will be there. So come and see us. We’re there.

 

Amanda Brummitt: And do people need to be a WeInfuse client to use InfuseTrack, or can they use it as a standalone product?

 

Bryan Johnson: The answer is yes, very similar to RxToolKit. You do not have to be a WeInfuse client today to purchase and use InfuseTrack or RxToolKit. You can use it as a standalone product. We are looking at other integrations with other applications for this, but it works out of the box for all these things. However, if you are a WeInfuse customer or a client of ours, we do have a pretty tight integration. That’s where you’re really gonna get the most value, because you’re gonna be able to use the same user login for WeInfuse that works for RxToolKit, our WeInfuse U platform, and all of our applications. You can use that across your whole organization, SSO for the technically folks on the call. And you, you’re gonna have direct access when you assign a pump to a patient inside of WeInfuse, you immediately then will be able to see that outcome in InfuseTrack and vice versa. So really giving you that, that kinda whole company view of things. That sounds really seamless. Very exciting.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Hey, speaking of exciting, Bryan, what are you most excited about in the industry right now?

 

Bryan Johnson: Things I’m most excited about. I say this all the time, at least for myself personally and my team, I know we are– we always say we’re never gonna run out of interesting problems to solve. The industry is changing, so whatever we’ve solved today, tomorrow, uh, insurance companies or again, pump technology, or just technology in general is gonna throw us a curveball. In this space, there’s just always a new challenge, and so the new… That’s fun for us. We enjoy those challenges. We wish we could say yes to every feature request of every client, but, you know, it just doesn’t work that way. But I’m just most excited about how we’re able to integrate some of this new technology into healthcare. Healthcare’s notoriously behind, and we’re chasing it as much as we can. But we’ve got some really fun and interesting things for WeInfuse, RxToolKit, and InfuseTrack that we’re gonna be incorporating here. So 2026 is gonna be a lot of fun, so stay tuned to the WeInfuse Podcast and for updates.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Yeah. Well, and big thanks to you and Reece for being those humans in the room that see a problem, and instead of just complaining about it, you say, we could fix this.”

 

Bryan Johnson: Well, we can try to fix it, Amanda. That’s what we’re doing.

 

Amanda Brummitt: Well, as usual, great information from Bryan Johnson about InfuseTrack, the new software from WeInfuse that brings clarity and control to equipment management for infusion centers, specialty pharmacies, home infusion, and hospital outpatient departments. With InfuseTrack, you can track your pumps, chairs, IV poles, vein finders, temperatures, certifications, licenses, and inspections all in one place. Its dashboard tells your team exactly what needs attention today, what’s coming up, and what’s good to go, so a lost pump or expired certification doesn’t catch you by surprise, especially as you scale to multiple locations.

 

Schedule a test drive by emailing sales@infusetrack.com. And while you’re at it, check out WeInfuse and RxToolKit. These tools save time and money while making infusions safer for patients and caregivers. My name is Amanda Brummitt. I’ll catch you in the next episode.