DGTL Voices with Ed Marx

Edward Marx records this one on site at Dayton Children’s Hospital with three members of its IT leadership, all of whom served.

J.D. Whitlock is the CIO. He spent seven years as a Navy surface warfare officer, then thirteen in the Air Force Medical Service Corps. Nick Schopperth is the Chief Information Security Officer, with just shy of 23 years in the Air Force across systems administration and cyber warfare. Mark Manibusan directs half of the Epic teams and is still serving as a communications officer in the Army National Guard, 24 years in.

In this Veterans Day episode of DGTL Voices, they talk about what carried over. J.D. describes a deployment to Bagram where the hospital was half Air Force and half Army and everyone practiced well beyond the top of their license. Mark explains why basic training still gives him nightmares when his deployments don’t. Nick talks about the unsolicited advice slide he brings when he speaks on base. Plus why all three of them landed in nonprofit healthcare and not somewhere else, and the award Dayton Children’s won that no other health system in the country did.

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Kimberly Powell is vice president and general manager of healthcare at NVIDIA, where she has worked since 2008. She started her career as a hardware engineer at a small medical imaging company that was digitizing radiology, after a co-op program at Northeastern University put her there as a student.

She almost didn’t become an engineer at all. She once told her high school physics teacher that girls don’t do engineering, and started college as an international business major before switching.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Kimberly tells Ed Marx about the demo with Mass General radiologists that hooked her on healthcare. She explains why voice is becoming the way patients and clinicians interact with care, and why making care easier to reach will actually increase demand for it. She also has advice for leaders who give up on an AI tool because it isn’t perfect on day one.

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Isobel Handler is VP and head of advisory at Kontakt.io, where she leads a team of former health system operators and technical experts. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at UCHealth, starting in operations and growing into vice president of outcomes and operational intelligence.

She grew up in Pittsburgh in a family of clinicians, doing homework at the nurses’ station of whatever hospital her mom worked at. She never felt called to be clinical, but she never left healthcare either.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Isobel tells Ed Marx about the feedback that steered her out of operations and into analytics, why she made the jump from a health system to industry, and why she wants more people talking about the exam room of the future, not just the hospital room of the future. She also explains the thinking behind KIO Clinics, Kontakt.io’s new set of tools for ambulatory care.

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Matthew Le Merle is the managing partner and CEO of Fifth Era Partners, which has invested in more than 1,500 companies and projects, including more than 80 unicorns. Before investing full time, he spent years as a strategy consultant to some of the world’s largest banks, technology companies and healthcare organizations.

Fifth Era’s 13th biannual Unicorns report tracks more than 750 private companies valued at $1 billion or more that are building what Matthew calls the autonomous digital economy, where the internet, AI and blockchain converge.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Matthew tells Ed Marx why large established companies struggle to innovate, what a hospital leader should do when a disruptor shows up, why averages lie in healthcare, and why he thinks health systems are wrong to stop doctors from looking at what patients bring in from ChatGPT.

Download Fifth Era’s Unicorns report: https://www.fifthera.com/unicorns

Corporate Innovation in the Fifth Era, by Matthew Le Merle and Alison Davis: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072PTC756

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Umar Ansari leads clinical AI solutions globally for a major healthcare company, a role he pitched to leadership himself during COVID. He has worked in more than 60 countries and has lived in Dubai for 21 years, after moving there with Cerner for what was supposed to be two.

He almost became a doctor. His sister, a physician, told him that if even 1% of him doubted medical school, he shouldn’t go. He took the MCAT and got in anyway, then chose computer science instead.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Umar tells Edward Marx why he believes character outlasts achievement, why he stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room, why humans will never be fully out of the loop in clinical AI, and what his father taught him about leaving things better than you found them.

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Dr. Patrick McGill is the CEO of Community Health Network in Indianapolis, a $4 billion system with 17,000 employees and five hospitals. He is the fifth CEO in its 70-year history, and four months into the job when this was recorded. He still sees patients on Mondays.

His path there is unusual. Family medicine, then informatics after Epic went in, then transformation, then the corner office.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Patrick tells Edward Marx why he wants people to stop asking about AI strategy, what he asks them instead, and what he thinks everyone gets wrong when they chase patient experience scores. Plus: the practice he took over after its physician was killed in a plane crash, and what he tells emerging leaders about titles.

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Xinan Rahman founded a company that matches incoming payments against payer contracts, catching underpayments as they happen rather than months later.

His father named him with an X instead of the usual Z, because his kids were going to be different. He did the same with Xinan's sister.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Xinan tells Edward Marx about growing up in Bangladesh, why he studied computer science as a practical decision rather than a passion, and how reading his own hospital bill in college made him curious about what health systems actually get paid. He also explains why revenue cycle staff are not the problem and what he thinks comes after underpayments.

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A week in the hospital used to be standard after heart bypass surgery. Dr. Gianluca Torregrossa sends his patients home in a day or two, and they are back at work within a week. One of them played 36 holes of golf two weeks out and sent a photo.

He does the operation robotically, without cutting the chest open. Surgeons tried this in the early 2000s and abandoned it as too difficult and too expensive. He picked it up anyway and has now done more than 100, including the first ever performed on a pregnant patient.

Gianluca is Director of the Robotic Coronary Artery Surgery Program at Cleveland Clinic. Before that he trained in Italy and spent nine months in Sudan operating with the humanitarian organization EMERGENCY.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Edward Marx why he thinks technology's job is to simplify technique rather than replace the surgeon, what Sudan taught him that medical school could not, and why he believes healthcare is running out of time to fix its leadership problem.

Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/