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Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Sean Diwan on Smart Technology Investments, AI, and Leadership 6-17-26
00:16:35
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- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by the global CIO Global Chief Information Officer Sean Dewan. And Sean's been a global CIO of several different companies, a cto, a Chief Information Security Officer. He now serves as the CIO of Tomar Pharmaceuticals. An absolutely brilliant person. As a preface to this podcast with Sean Dwan, brilliant leader. Just a quick note. Well, Sean is the Chief Information Officer at Tomar Pharmaceuticals. Everybody should recognize that he will be speaking here in his personal capacity. The views that Sean shares are his own and don't necessarily reflect the view of Tomar Inc. Or its affiliates. I'll ask Sean to start with just taking a moment to introduce himself. Then we'll talk about how he thinks about allocating investments today, what's important, what's not, and a lot more issues in discussion, trends. Sean, can you take a moment and introduce yourself?
- [01:04]
B
Great. No, thank you Scott. Appreciate you having me here. Excited to be here. Longtime listener, first time caller. As you mentioned, I'm a CIO currently with Tolmar Pharmaceuticals. Have been in technology for 20 plus years overall and specifically in healthcare space which as you know, is, you know, so wide, vertically and horizontally. For about 15 years I've been at the helm as the head of technology and the cio, cto, ciso, CDO capacity, have seen it from every angle, from the payer side, the provider side, medical device industry, rev cycle, and now pharma. A little bit about myself. I usually tell people I didn't choose healthcare, healthcare chose me. So started my career building systems for a variety of industries where in several cases downtime was an inconvenience. Then I stepped into healthcare and realized how important downtime has a correlation to a life itself. So that kind of changes you. So I've worked across continents, cultures, different care models and at the end of the day, technology is the enabler, the human element really is the core. That's what keeps me in the space. And really I'm building trust, safety and hope at scale the way I see it. So that's kind of a little bit
- [02:34]
A
about myself and I love that. I'm asking two questions to start with. How do you think about prioritizing technology investments? Sort of, sort of what moves the needle and what, what might sound good but doesn't really move the needle. Then I'll also ask you about the balancing the need for innovation and technology, spend versus operational and regulatory headwinds and how do you manage those two. So first, how do you prioritize investments and think about that and what moves the needle. And then second, how do you balance innovation versus regulatory?
- [03:07]
B
Yeah, absolutely. No. Good question. So, as you know, in healthcare, much like a lot of other industries, there really is no shortage of shiny objects. There's so many of them out there, you get inundated with so many things. So to me, over the years, you know, it's kind of come down to having a simple filter. Number one, does it reduce friction for our users, clinicians, and ultimately the patient care we're providing? If not, it's probably a science project. Number two, does it improve data quality or eliminate a silo? Because if you can't trust the data, you won't be able to trust the decisions coming out of it. It's driven by data. Number three, does it automate something humans should never have been doing manually to begin with? So someone is still copying, pasting between systems or looking at nine different systems toggling between them to make a decision or get some insights, That's a cry for help. So if an initiative checks those boxes, it'll most likely move the needle. And if it unfortunately needs a 40 slide deck to explain the value, probably not.
- [04:20]
A
But I love that. Would you give me that summary again of how you look at it? Things that should have been automated to begin with, the human, should it be done? Give me those three or four things again, just for people taking notes. I love that, Sean.
- [04:31]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Number one, again, does it reduce friction for users, clinicians, and patient care, essentially? Number two, does it improve data quality or eliminate a silo that is really barrier to trusting the information that drives decisions? And number three, does it automate something humans should have never been doing manually to begin with?
- [04:55]
A
I love that. And talk for a moment about the most impactful ways that you've seen data and analytics used today. Where do you see actual ROI with data and analytics? What works, what doesn't?
- [05:08]
B
Yeah. So the areas that I've seen stand out are really around as far as an ROI is concerned, is really governing the data and harmonizing it. So because it provides clarity, and clarity beats chaos every time. So the second piece that I kind of have seen is, you know, does it, back to the point I was making earlier, does it break down data silos, which when data flows between systems seamlessly, insights follow, and if the information gets to the right person at the right time to enable those critical decisions. And then the other element that I've seen is this operational commercial analytics, which is really helping leaders make decisions based on Facts and truth, not sort of tradition or understanding points. So when I think about ROI as it relates to data and analytics, when your data really becomes a strategic asset, instead of sort of a digital attic where stuff is just sitting, ROI actually shows up fast and you don't even have to really work up multiple spreadsheets for your CFO to really make the case, it kind of comes through.
- [06:23]
A
Take a moment. If as we work through from data to artificial intelligence, AI is of course being discussed every place. It's more and more being a part of everything. Talk a bit about where is AI really useful versus overhyped and where are you most excited about it? Where do you see the most practical use cases?
- [06:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, AI, yes, the infamous two digit word that I hear everybody hears 90 billion times a day. So you know, as it relates to healthcare, where I've seen emerging things and practical things as well. And what we're also seeing in other industries worth investing today in the AI space is practical things such as document intelligence. So AI actually loves paperwork more than any human ever has. So just leveraging AI for really from a documentation intensive type work is worth investing and I'm seeing a lot of good returns in the industry and beyond about it. The second piece is spotting anomalies before they become issues. So kind of like an early warning system, parsing through and looking at reams and tons of data in different buckets to really being your sort of safety monitoring mechanism. Ordinarily it would take manual effort across multitude of silos, but AI has been able to traverse through that pretty quickly and spot those anomalies variations and bring those to service up front and essentially allow you to prevent things, which is huge. And back to the predictive maintenance piece about machines. You know, how do you monitor these machines? How do you really predict failure when it could happen? What's the likelihood of occurrence? So looking at all the machine generated information, leveraging AI to really parse through that and allowing preventive actions, I think those are some of the key things I've seen that are worth investing today. The overhyped piece as it relates to healthcare. I can tell you this notion of AI discovering drugs by itself. You know, today it's probably, you know, more people think of it as just out of reach or some people think, oh yeah, just put it in AI and it'll discover things for me. But it's really more like a smart intern who really needs supervision when you think about it. The other notion I've seen as far as hype overhyped is chatbots for everything. If it can pronounce as an example half of your drug names, it's probably not ready. So it's this notion of, hey, let's just deploy AI, put a chatbot in that people can talk to, it'll solve everything. That's kind of an overhype right now take a moment.
- [09:24]
A
In today's competitive world of top tech talent, what do you look at and sort of how do you retain and recruit great tech talent in a very competitive market against startups, VC funded things, everything else. Talk to us a little bit about that. Retaining and recruiting top tech talent.
- [09:44]
B
Absolutely, yeah. The people element, you know, cannot be understated. Right. Overall, I mean that, that is really the competitive differentiator. So the way I see it is that in health care I've taken the approach where I'm not really competing with big tech on perks. You hear about that a lot, that sometimes, you know, these perks are just outrageous. The exuberant what I compete on when I'm recruiting talent in the healthcare space is on purpose. You know, people really get engaged and stay when their work matters. You know, they're growing professionally and personally and career wise. They feel like they're being supported, they're given the level of autonomy and accountability that's needed. So lastly, the way I see is that healthcare really give technologists like myself something rare, the chance to really directly affect and improve lives. And to me that's been the differentiator conversation I've put on the table when I try to attract top talent, maybe from different industries that are super hot, hotter than healthcare.
- [10:52]
A
I love that. Sean, thank you for the thoughts on talent so important in today's world. And I love the fact of connecting talent to purpose and healthcare and sciences. Talk for a second about maybe one of the hardest leadership lessons you've learned over the last couple decades in information, in the CIO role, a CTO role, a global CIO role. What's some of the harder leadership lessons you've learned?
- [11:20]
B
Yeah, there's been several actually and, and one that kind of sticks out, which I'm sure your listeners probably deal with it very frequently than they even realize, is that, you know, most of the time silence is not agreement where you're pitching something and, and you're trying to persuade people or team or on certain things that how they need to be done. Silence sometimes can mean everything from well, I disagree but don't want to say it or I'm still processing or I just don't understand. So what I've Learned is you gotta pause and figure out ways to check for alignment early and often and never assume. Head nodding means yes. And I think I've seen scenarios where you kind of assume agreement, assume alignment and press fast forward only to kind of pause, pivot verse and waste time, money and energy and break trust, break relationships. So something that is important from a leadership standpoint that, you know, kind of make sure that you keep that perspective in mind. That's what I've learned.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah. No, I love that concept, particularly this. On silence, you're talking to somebody, they're not, they're not, they might not be, they might be conflict, diverse, they're not necessarily disagreeing with you, but they're also not waving their head and saying, yes, we agree, we agree. And sometimes that can be taken as we're on the same page and sometimes it's really just one person talking over the other and not being on the same page. So I, I absolutely love that, that leadership lesson on really making sure you're communicating and aligned. We always talk about, in terms of it's two way communication, not one way communication. I love that. Take a second on another question and this will go more to the healthcare IT world. If you could wave a wand and fix one thing in healthcare it, what might that be?
- [13:28]
B
Yeah, so yeah, healthcare IT as we kind of talked about earlier, I mean, healthcare is such a vast area with so many verticals and horizontals. And to me, you know, what emerges over and over again is this notion of, or lack thereof, of interoperability. If every system in this ecosystem could exchange data cleanly, securely getting that information to the provider or the caretaker or the scientist, overall patient care gets better, data silos finally crumble, decision making becomes smarter and faster, and people like me end up getting a good night's sleep. So personally, I've gone through things as well where I go and get some X ray done and my primary care doctor doesn't get it until X days later because of this system, can't talk to that provider and so on and so forth. So to me that's become a pretty important barrier, I believe. And if I could, if I could really wave that magic wand and fix that permanently and consistently across the various care continuums, that would be fantastic, Phenomenal.
- [14:45]
A
And I guess one more question, Sean, if you're up for it, and any advice you would give to emerging chief information officers, emerging leaders, and feel free to answer or not answer the question, but any advice that you think about when you're mentoring or giving advice to
- [15:01]
B
emerging CIOs yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, in our space, technology is complex and so are people. So I think about it where technology is the engine and people are the fuel. So never, never lose sight of that. And to me, and I think some of your listeners will agree with me, technology sometimes can be the easy part. People are the real architecture. You can again, buy the best platforms, the best tools, the best AI models. But if people don't use it, they don't understand it, they don't leverage it, they don't adopt it, they don't make it their own, you're really installing a very expensive kind of shelf decor and you don't want that. So you just kind of talking to people, understanding that angle is so critical because us analytical types also kind of get deep into the weeds sometimes and forget the bigger picture periodically. So that would be my advice,
- [16:05]
A
and I love that. Sean, I want to thank you for joining us again. As noted by Sean and by myself, these are the thoughts of Shaun Dewan. They're not necessarily the thoughts of Tolmar. They're intended to be more generally, Sean's thoughts on business, on leadership and serving as a cio. Just a remarkably brilliant guest. Thank you so much for joining us. Sean, what a pleasure to visit with you. Thank you very, very much.
- [16:31]
B
Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it.