These words, by Steven Magee, a world leading expert on radiation and human health, resonate powerfully with the healthcare industry today. Hospitals are increasingly ramping up their sanitization efforts and isolation measures to curb the spread of COVID. The situation demands an effective containment solution that is durable, reconfigurable, and easy to use in sensitive environments. Enter STARC Systems.

While working on occupied renovation projects in hospitals, Timothy Hebert, the founder of STARC Systems, realized that temporary drywall barriers might contain dust and debris to protect patient-occupied areas from pathogens, but they cause significant disruption to employees and patients. This led him to deliberate on the idea of creating a more unconventional and creative alternative that wouldn’t disrupt the workflow in hospitals. To bring his idea to life,Hebert established STARC Systems to empower healthcare contractors and facilities with reusable,easy to install temporary containment for occupied renovations. With the recent coronavirus pandemic, healthcare facilities have recognized immediately that STARC panels can also provide the ability to increase their negative air isolation capacity preventing the virus from spreading to staff and other patients.

In a conversation with the editorial team at MD Tech Review, Chris Vickers, the President and CEO of STARC Systems, discusses at length how his company's innovative offerings can help avert the disruption caused by occupied renovation and create instantisolation.

What are the pain points faced by your clients, and how do you solve them with your solutions?

In occupied renovations, significant time is spent putting up temporary containment barriers to contain the ongoing renovation. The installation is time consuming and expensive and creates dust, debris and noise. And once renovation is completed in that space, the wall must be torn down and discarded on the way to building the next temporary wall. With the pandemic surge, hospitals have not had sufficient isolationcapacity forcing them to co-locate patients or create less than ideal stop gaps.

To eliminate these pain points, we offer two premier temporary containment solutions—RealWall and LiteBarrier. RealWall, the initial solution,provides the appearance and stability of a real wall built with a rugged three-layered system with a galvanized steel back, foam corecenter reducing the renovation noise, and a white-painted aluminum front. LiteBarrier is a lighterweight solution, an exceptionally durable temporary barrier solution supporting frequent reconfigurations.

To keep the dirt and harmful particles from the renovation area away from the rest of the healthcare facility, we ensure that negative air pressure can be created behind the wall panel system exceeding the ICRA Class IV standards. When the door is opened, no particles can get out into the public space.

With the outbreak of COVID, we were immediately inundated with requests for our solutions to create instant negative air isolation spaces for potential or positiveCOVIDpatients. The idea is the same as installing the solution in a renovation space,to stop particles (or viruses) from escaping the space. For healthcare environments, users can create anterooms to instantly convert a standard patient room into an isolation space. In open areas, STARC solutions can allow creation of a stand-alone isolation room with a ceiling and four walls. Many facilities also use our panels to seal off a hallway creating negative isolation space on one side of the wing.

Could you explain your product customization in detail?

RealWall and LiteBarrier come with telescoping modular panels extending from 6' 10” to 10' 3” in height with a range of widths from 12” to 48”, which easily connect. The flexible corners allow the user to install the panels at different angles,not just 90 degrees. The tool-less connection between panels creates an airtight seal in addition to gaskets at the top and the bottom of the panel. Our extremely rugged doors support a wide variety of designs, including glass inserts and sliding doors that allows for better egress.
Users can configure the solution quickly and efficiently and reconfigure as many times as they need. It is the durability, ease of use and flexibility of our solutions that equip us with a competitive edge—our clients reuse our products, over and over again, saving time and money while meeting their critical needs.

Could you recall a case wherein you helped your client solve practical challenges?

One of our clients, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, a part of the State University of New York system, was struggling to cope with the huge influx of patients due to the pandemic. They also recognized that additional risks were being created within their emergency room with typicalemergency room patients. Like other hospitals, the exambeds were separated by curtains. When patients, coming in with a broken leg or a cut,enter a common emergency room, they may immediately pose a risk of spreading, or contracting, a virus because of that open environment. SUNY Downstate was looking for a solution that would not only work during the pandemic,go up quickly to solve their immediate need, but even later, to cater to the emergency room requirements. This is where our temporary containment offerings made a difference. They created fully sealed isolation environment with temporary walls between each of the beds. And in the front, they installed a wall of glass with a sliding glass door. While avoiding the disruption of construction, they now have the ability to reconfigure the STARC walls as needs change or leave them up forever.

How do you envision the future of your company?

Our business is witnessing sharp growth and with the pandemic, we see both isolation and renovation being important to our future. Hospitals may look to renovate to attain greater isolation capacity but will still need instant reconfigurable isolation solutions for surges for years to come. And because of the constant renovations within hospitals, renovation will continue to be a strong market.

As we expand our customer base, we are seeing our products also being used extensively outside of healthcare. STARC product is perfect for these situations, allowing contractors to utilize products in healthcare on one project, and then again,with in other occupied renovations such as commercial, education, airport and clean room facilities.