Meet Our Partner Success Managers: Susan’s Blueprint for Culture Change at Scale
Quick Facts
- Years at SwipeSense: 4+ years (since 2022)
- Background: Banking and IT project coordination
- Notable Impact: 100% client retention since 2022, managing several large, multi-hospital health systems
Partner Success Managers (PSMs) are the SwipeSense team members who work alongside hospital partners long after go-live, turning data into action and daily habits that stick.
For Susan, a Senior Partner Success Manager who joined the company in 2022, that work spans some of SwipeSense’s largest hospital networks. Her path there started in banking, and what she brought with her was a knack for getting people talking to each other, a skill she has used every day since.
The Path to Partner Success
How did you find your way to the PSM role?
Susan’s route to SwipeSense started nowhere near a hospital. Before joining the company, she worked at a bank in Atlanta as a project and communication coordinator, where she helped a large IT department bridge the gap between technical specialists and the rest of the organization. It was there that she sharpened the skill that would define her next role: taking complex, technical work and making it clear and useful for the people who actually have to act on it.
Ready for something more purpose-driven, Susan found her way to Clean Hands Safe Hands (now part of SwipeSense). The opportunity resonated with her right away. “I’m just passionate about people and making life a little bit better,” she says. She joined in 2022 and has since been promoted to Senior Partner Success Manager, adding a Leapfrog Coach certification along the way.
Leading at Scale
What is it like managing some of SwipeSense’s largest hospital systems?
Today, Susan’s book of business skews large. She generally works with full health systems rather than single hospitals, some with as many as 30 facilities. What stands out to her most, though, is how differently these facilities can operate even under the same corporate umbrella. Hospitals within a single system often run independently of one another, with little communication about what is and isn’t working elsewhere in their own network.
Susan sees an opportunity in that gap. Because she works across every facility in a system, she’s often the one connecting the dots, carrying what one hospital’s team discovered over to another that’s wrestling with the same challenge.
For example, with her first multi-hospital client, the individual facilities belonged to the same system but had never really talked to each other, each one sitting on lessons the others could have used. As Susan puts it, “You have all this knowledge between you all, and nobody’s sharing it.”
As a result, she started bringing the group together on a regular basis. It took some time for the group to find its footing, but once they did, the hospitals started trading real lessons learned. “They’re just better for it,” she says. “There’s so much to be learned from each other.”
The Key to Lasting Change
What actually makes a hand hygiene program stick?
Ask Susan what separates a hospital system that improves quickly from one that stays in place, and she points to alignment. “If you don’t have a certain level of buy-in up and down the org chart, it sort of doesn’t matter what you do,” she explains. A program can have full C-suite support and still stall if it never reaches frontline staff, or it can have enthusiastic unit champions who lose momentum because leadership never backs them up. “It has to be like a perfect marriage,” she says.
In practice, that means starting with the person doing the work, not the workflow she wants them to adopt. Rather than mandating a new process, Susan’s approach is to sit down with staff, understand how they actually move through their day, and suggest improvements, even ones that have nothing to do with SwipeSense itself. It’s less about fitting people into a system and more about looking at the whole picture and figuring out where a small adjustment could make the biggest difference.
With one environmental services team, that meant asking how many times a day they actually walked into a given room, and whether restocking supplies twice a shift, instead of running back and forth, would make the job easier. “Tell me what you do right now, and let’s see if it makes sense,” she tells them. One EVS team told her a hand sanitizer dispenser was tucked behind a curtain and nearly impossible to find, a fix nobody had thought to ask about until she did. “I think it’s literally the only way to change a culture,” Susan says. “You have to answer why. Why is this important? Why should this matter to me?”
Success Stories
What moments make the job worth it?
Susan says her favorite moments come in pairs: the instant a C-suite leader realizes a compliance percentage is a tool and not the goal, and the instant a frontline clinician realizes their input actually changes something. Both, she says, trace back to the same lesson: the technology only works when the people using it feel heard.
One of her favorite examples came from a group of project leads in Pennsylvania who turned hand hygiene into something staff wanted to be part of. They ran a team competition with a prize of naming the sandwich of the week in the hospital cafeteria (the winning entry, courtesy of a group of good-humored physicians, was a turkey burger called the “septic shock”).
During March Madness, they let staff vote on a hand hygiene reminder word, and “bananas” won. Staff started dressing up in banana costumes, handing out banana trophies, and calling out “bananas” across the hallway whenever someone skipped a step. “It took some of the corporate, big-brother feeling out of hygiene monitoring,” Susan says, and compliance on that unit reflected it.
Her data has mattered well outside hand hygiene, too. When one hospital saw a room test positive for C. diff, then another the next day, then two more two days after that, Susan and the hospital partner used SwipeSense’s contact tracing feature to map how the cases connected. The pattern pointed to a gap in the unit’s workflow, giving the infection prevention team a clear, fast path to retrain and contain the spread before it went further.
Redefining Success
Why does Susan say “85 is the new 100”?
One of the biggest traps Susan sees hospitals fall into is treating hand hygiene compliance like a school report card, where anything less than 100 percent reads as failing. It’s an understandable instinct. “Everybody gets hung up on that perfectionist mindset, that grade in school,” says Susan. But a compliance score isn’t graded the same way a test is, and holding it to that standard sets staff up to feel like they’re falling short even when they’re doing well.
Part of the gap comes down to the nature of the work itself. On a single shift, a nurse might face dozens of hand hygiene opportunities in the middle of fast-moving, high-acuity situations, an emergency call, a patient in distress, hands already full with equipment. Expecting a flawless streak across every one of those moments, every shift, ignores the reality of frontline care. Chasing a literal 100 percent, then, isn’t really a measure of good behavior, it’s a measure of a standard no one could reasonably sustain.
More importantly, the payoff from hand hygiene improvement doesn’t wait for perfection. Moving a unit’s compliance from 40 percent to 70 or 80 percent can significantly cut infection rates long before anyone gets close to triple digits, and holding steady at a strong number matters more than chasing a flawless one.
Susan has watched the perfectionist mindset trip up strong performers herself: a nurse at 96 percent who felt like she was failing, and a physician who apologized for sitting at 84 percent, assuming it reflected poorly on him. Susan reframed both the same way, pointing out that hitting the 80s or 90s consistently puts someone at the top of what’s realistically achievable. “I said, a hand hygiene score of 84 percent is an A+, not a failure!” she recalls telling him. “He was like a whole different person after that.”
Future Vision
What is Susan excited about?
What excites Susan most is about where SwipeSense is headed: shifting from single tools to a connected platform built on one foundation that runs underneath everything a hospital does. Hand hygiene monitoring is just the starting point. Susan is increasingly focused on how modules like asset management, nursing insights, and contact tracing work off that same foundation instead of operating as separate, disconnected tools.
Ultimately, that foundation is what takes the cognitive load off frontline staff: from a charge nurse knowing a unit is fully stocked without a clipboard checklist, to a bedside nurse not having to hunt for the ultrasound machine. The overall result is a better experience for the people delivering care, a safer one for the patients receiving it, and a clearer picture for the leaders trying to manage it all; what Susan describes simply as “a holistic experience for hospital staff.”
That instinct, to look past the technology itself and focus on the person it’s meant to serve, is the same one that’s carried Susan from a bank in Atlanta to some of the largest hospital systems in the country. Whether she’s sitting with an EVS team to figure out where a dispenser should go, resetting a physician’s mindset about what a good score actually looks like, or picturing a future where the technology fades into the background entirely, her focus stays fixed on the same thing: the person on the other end of the data.