Piedmont Medical Inc. And the Revolution Bed

Byron Wurdeman founded Piedmont Medical Inc. (PMI) in 1992 in the spare bedroom of his house in N.C. When Medical Dealer last reported on the company in 2010, it had grown from a one-man show to a team of 30 and earned a name in the industry for delivering like-new reconditioned hospital beds with a warranty. (Once, a customer called complaining that they had received new beds from us instead of the reconditioned beds they had ordered. That’s impossible, Wurdeman said. At the time, the only beds PMI sold were reconditioned.) After two decades of tearing apart and rebuilding every major make and model, PMI’s technicians offer beds that have been mistaken for new, along with comprehensive customer support from a broad knowledge base.

Over time, the company added specialty beds, as well as new patient room furniture and guest seating. The company then began having bed parts, accessories and attachments manufactured for them and continued to build its team and its product availability with worldwide distribution channels. Today, Wurdeman’s onetime back-bedroom project is closer than ever to taking its greatest leap yet.

Ten years ago, I was doing installs myself and talking to the nurses, patients and biomeds, listening to what they did and didn’t like and what they wanted in a bed, Wurdeman explains. They’d always tell me what they’d like to have, and I’d just keep track, listening to people tell me about how their backs had gotten injured or how this or that component was hard to repair.

Then one day in 2002, his banker said he should design his own bed. Wurdeman realized that the depth of his multi-manufacturer knowledge, paired with his mental catalogue of nurse, patient and biomed complaints, could equal something greater than the sum of its parts. So the self-made entrepreneur set his sights on becoming a designer, so he could distill 10 years of troubleshooting and close observation into a single project – a hospital bed that would do it all. He hired someone to operate SolidWorks, the same 3D modeling software that was used to build the Rover that went to Mars, and got to work designing.

Today, his model is in the final stages before going for FDA approval and scheduled for launch in 2013 under the entity of Piedmont 361, LLC. An idea 10 years in the making, the Revolution Bed is just shy of becoming a tangible, marketable reality.

PMI will continue to recondition and sell a broad spectrum of hospital beds, stretchers, ICU and birthing beds and related products, but Wurdeman expects demand for the new bed to skyrocket. The aptly named Revolution Bed uses a similar zero gravity technology as the zero gravity chairs in a Brookstone. It rotates 90 degrees to the left or the right and converts into a chair on either side of the bed, making visits to patients more interactive, assisting the egress process and practically standing patients up on their feet. Its braking system locks all four casters, instead of just two. The core frame is expected to function in the ICU, med-surg, and with attachments OB-GYN departments, among others. Perhaps best of all, This thing turns on a dime, Wurdeman says. You can spin it around in the hallway and go the other direction. To achieve 360-degree mobility, Wurdeman uses directional casters under the bed and trailing caster on the 4 corners. All you have to do is turn, and it turns with you. When he and his team tested its mobility, it traveled nearly 66 feet forward in a straight line after a sturdy shove by itself.

The plan is to have the initial assembly of the Revolution Bed take place at a PMI’s existing facility. We just have to set up for it, Wurdeman says. The whole thing will be a natural progression, because right now that’s what our business is – teardown and reassembly.

But what will the market make of a reconditioned bed company dipping its toe into manufacturing? There’s a stigma, Wurdeman says, of, ‘You’re not a new bed company. You’re a reconditioned bed company.’ But to Wurdeman, it seemed like the right thing to do. We’ve lived around it, developed a concept around all the problems we’ve seen in the past from the other manufacturers and resolved the problems with our new concepts.

My guys can fix most anything, he explains. We have a comprehensive knowledge because we’re dissecting all different makes and models of beds. We get cross training because we tear them apart every day and see so many different issues. We’ll buy five hundred and fix five hundred and have hundreds of problems, so we’re going to find solutions for many more things than [a manufacturer] would normally see because there is not a direct connection between the designer/engineer and the problem, they only seem to hear about them from a third or fourth party.

It’s been a long 10 years, Wurdeman says. But I know that if I didn’t go through the trial and error process, I’d have done it in four years or less – and created a sub-par product.

Proper placement of the electrical unit came by trial and error, Wurdeman says. I knew from having to repair them that it needed to have easier access. We don’t want to get the patient out of bed to repair them so we placed the electrical unit in the software, try it out and see if it worked. If not, I’d move it three inches over and check it again. When it wasn’t working like it was supposed to, I’d go back to the drawing board. Wurdeman went through that process with every single component of the bed. So we have tried to make it easier on biomeds. We’re really trying hard to make sure we create the simplest format possible for everyone.

And that includes not only those on the front lines- patients, nurses and biomeds – but also risk management and the executive team who determines the equipment budget. If a nurse has a back injury, I believe, the average cost to the Hospital is calculated at between $70,000 and $80,000. What’s more, injuries or the potential for injuries often discourage nurses from staying in the profession. We’re trying to divert those kinds of risks.

But Wurdeman’s careful thought processes also included thoughtful consideration for the aftermarket equipment industry that has been his bread and butter for the last 20 years. Wurdeman has designed his bed in such a way that it’s made to be reconditioned. Wurdeman’s plan is that a single bed will serve as many facilities and patients as possible, according to their specific needs. The plan minimizes waste, maximizes returns on investments for his customers, and ensures that top-quality reconditioned beds will be available for a long time to come.

So how did he achieve all that? The core frame is expected to function in the ICU, med-surg, and with attachments OB-GYN departments, among others. The Revolution Bed is designed to be a four-generation bed instead of designed to fail. First, a hospital will lease or buy the bed. After five or seven years, they can turn the bed back in or trade it in and we will recondition it. I designed it so it comes back to us and is easier to recondition, because that’s our core business. And now we can send the beds back to the original user or sell them to smaller facilities that don’t have the budget to lease or buy the beds new. The smaller facilities can have the beds reconditioned or trade them in after many years and get value back. Then we can go through the same process with nursing homes. When the commercial markets finish with them, they trade the beds in. The final market is individuals at home. I’ve put a lot of thought into making it fit all the categories, Wurdeman says.

I have tried to consider every problem.

In the future, Wurdeman says, customers can expect Piedmont Medical to continue to set the standard for reconditioned beds, continue setting an example in the reconditioned medical equipment market, and continue to innovate the marketplace and the products within it. Look for the Revolution Bed’s debut in 2013.

For more information about Piedmont Medical, visit www.piedmontmedicalinc.com, or call (800) 433-3255. For more information about the Revolution Bed, visit www.therevolutionbed.com.