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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Leading Innovation and Technology at Penn Medicine with John P. Donohue
00:15:57
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- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare podcast. Thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader from the Penn Medicine system. We're joined today by John Donahue and John serves as Vice President Information Services at Penn. Brilliant career. John, can you take a moment and tell us about yourself and about Penn Medicine?
- [00:22]
B
Absolutely. Thank you, Scott, and I appreciate the kind introduction. So, as I said, my name is John Donahue. I work for Penn Medicine. We're a Philadelphia based academic health system. We've been around for almost 275 years at this time and we both have in the nation's first hospital and the nation's first school of medicine. I've been with Penn now for about 22 years. I've worn a number of hats here, built our first cybersecurity pill program. I've led their infrastructure program for many, many years. And now I'm responsible for a group called Entity Services where our team really focuses on delivering field based technology services and maintaining executive customer relationships at our enterprise level with an eye towards business value alignment.
- [01:09]
A
Take a second. You've been now with Penn Medicine for more than 20 years. Penn, of course, is one of the great academic medical centers in the country. A magnificent institution, great leadership. Talk a little bit about how it's evolved over those 20 years, then I'll talk to you more about information technology in your world. But, but you bridge of course, all these worlds, but tell us a little bit about how Penn has evolved over the last 20 years or so.
- [01:34]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. It's evolved significantly. So I think when I first joined the System, we had one or two hospitals. We probably were a three or four billion dollars a year organization, maybe had 20,000 employees. Now we're close to 13 billion in revenues, 52,000 employees, seven hospitals. So, you know, I've seen a significant amount of growth at Penn Medicine in an environment, a community that's very competitive from a healthcare perspective. So I watched our leadership navigate us through Covid and we came out of COVID stronger than ever before and had a bigger delta, in my opinion, between ourselves and some of the other healthcare providers in the city. So the complexity of healthcare has changed dramatically. You know, technology's changed dramatically. I think pretty much every aspect of what we do has changed from a complexity perspective. And then when you marry complexity with scale, it's just a fascinating place to be. It's a fascinating place to work. I'm so proud of the people that we work with. We've got world class providers and it's an honor to Work for Penn Medicine?
- [02:38]
A
No, in your point on the competitive nature of the market, you've got the Jefferson system, you've got the New Jersey systems. You also have UPMC a little bit to the west of you. I mean, an incredibly competitive market and Penn has really thrived on over a long period of time. It's been a real testament to leadership and what you've done. And it's a combination. You talk about the combination of scale and complexity, but it's also the combination of the highest level academic medicine and research to go with complexity and taking care of the communities. It's really a multi level balance that you folks work through. Take a second, John, on sort of the big trends you're watching in the information tech world and in what you do.
- [03:21]
B
Sure, absolutely. There's a couple trends that I'm focused on personally as a leader here at Penn Medicine and the first one I'd call out is AI and specifically agentic AI. I think as a healthcare leader, as a technology leader, if you're not focused on AI and watching what's going on there, you're missing the boat a little bit. As you know, every third party application, every person that knocks on your door says we're AI based and we've got value there. What I've found is as you peel back the covers a little bit, there's not as much there there as they like to say there is. So really it's around trying to figure out how to apply some of these solutions and get the success that you're looking for. We've had some success, yet we still watch very closely what vendors are doing on this front. But some of our pure healthcare organizations are doing on this front. But there's a ton of potential on this side of things for us going into the future. So I try to keep an eye on that. The second thing for me, and some of this is just what I've done in the past is cybersecurity. So as we digitalize more and more of our patient records, I think we become a bigger target for cyber criminals. And anyone who's looking at the headline sees that there's more activity on the healthcare front than there ever has been before. So I really find it important to keep track of trends in the cybersecurity side of things. What are other organizations doing? How do you invest properly with not only a strategy that's effective, but deployment of technologies and staff to, you know, keep up or surpass what the bad guys are doing on that front? So the pace of change makes that particularly challenging to me. And then the last trend I would call out that I kind of keep an eye on myself is around extended reality space. The things that we're able to start to do now on that front, mostly on the educational side of things, although starting to bleed a little bit more onto the clinical side of things with you know, know virtual reality, with augmented reality. Significant promise in healthcare on this front. And I think it's really focused on making sure that you make the right tool set available. You've got some standards, you've got some governance in place that so people who are looking to be pilots and maybe champions, slash leaders on this side of the technology have a place to go. And then the last thing tied to that piece for me would be, you know, obviously there's a significant amount of cost, so you've got to place your bets pretty carefully. And then there's also some security risks associated with those type of extended reality tools. So those are three that I personally sort of keep an eye on. On top of doing the demands of the day to day job.
- [05:53]
A
No, thank you. Between sort of the AI, the agentic AI, the security, the extended reality and using different things to teach and educate in the sort of augmented reality extended reality world. Fascinating talk about in sort of the AI world, the agentic AI world. And you mentioned this at the, at the last moment on actually having to be careful on how you place your bets and where you spend money, where you don't spend money and so forth. Of course, talk for a second about intentionality in new technologies and adapting and bringing new technologies versus opportunistically keeping an eye on what vendors are doing and once in a while saying, hey, that looks really interesting, we really should explore that. Even though it wasn't on our immediate to do list. How do you sort of balance that intentionality versus opportunistic or seeing things thinking, hey, we ought to think about that.
- [06:43]
B
Yeah, that's a terrific question, Scott. So as you can imagine with an organization as big as ours, we've got a lot of brilliant people and these brilliant people have a lot of really good ideas and most of them are, you know, patient impacting in a good sense. So you know, you've got this huge demand for implementing, you know, forward thinking technologies like this and then you've got, as you said, you know, hey, we're seeing something out there, we're liking that, you know, it wasn't necessarily on our radar or wasn't necessarily on our strategic plan or our roadmap and we want to make some investments there. So we have found that governance is really critical and having some champions in those spaces that are willing to harness and say, all right, we've got five things that we're looking at that have potential, but we've got the bandwidth capacity, appetite to do three of them. Which three are we going to do? And then really holding folks accountable to saying, if we're going to invest in these technologies, both from, you know, a dollar standpoint and from a resource perspective, we're going to want to see some results or potentially fail fast. Right. And say, all right, you know, there wasn't as much here as we thought. We're not going to spend years and a lot of money. We're going to move on pretty quickly by failing fast and then, you know, going to the next one. So there, there is some intentionality. Very little happens here that doesn't get scrutiny and doesn't really require somebody to stand up and say, you know, I'm going to stand behind this. And these are the, this is the roi. These are the tangible benefits we're going to expect to see out of this. And, you know, I'll put my reputation on the line to make sure that those happen.
- [08:09]
A
Thank you. As we head John into 2026, what are you most focused and excited about? What are you, where are you most focused?
- [08:18]
B
Yeah, so for myself personally, I'm really focused on what I would call technology of the future. You know, I had an opportunity to work on at the opening of a pavilion that we built. It was an eight year project, $1.6 billion. It was significant. And one of my roles was leading the IT team to make sure that the inpatient space was state of the art in terms of how it was future proof or maybe future ready from a technology perspective. It was a fascinating project for me to work on that on the inpatient side. And our team did some incredibly innovative and move the needle kind of technologies from an inpatient perspective. So my shift now has been more towards the outpatient side of things. So ambulatory settings, ambulatory surgical centers, hospital at home. So a lot of my focus recently has been how do you open up these buildings where we have greenfield opportunities. And again, it's a little bit about placing the right bets on technologies. You've got to make sure the technologies you pick are working day one, but are agile enough to shift as new technologies become available. You're not locked in concrete. And how do you put an architecture in place that not only meets day one, where at some point before opening you have to freeze your technology, but again, be agile enough to say a year later something's available. And we're able to, through pre planning, implement that technology pretty easily without invasiveness to the business operations or the clinical operations. So I really focus on now trying to make sure that the investments we're making and the projects we're working on are what I call future ready. So it's got that agility.
- [09:54]
A
I just think that's an incredible perspective. And so many people made big bets and then they're really stuck with those bets because they don't have that agility or that ability to pivot. I just love that perspective. John, take a moment. You're probably a little bit younger than I am, but you're a committed person to lifelong learning. Talk about that in leadership. I know you've gone back to do a master's degree. You know, if you've been at Penn for 20 plus years, you're not 25. And so talk to us for a second about that commitment to lifelong learning and how important that is for leaders to stay curious and stay agile and stay at it.
- [10:32]
B
Yeah. I would tell you our CEO uses the term intellectual curiosity. And that has always resonated with me and I've tried to stay intellectually curious. I can remember as a young person in the business field and even as a young manager, I couldn't read enough Peter Drucker books, which probably ages me and folks that were, I'm of the.
- [10:54]
A
Same age, so it's okay, I hear you, I appreciate that.
- [11:00]
B
So I couldn't consume enough of that kind of material and just learn from others and see, you know, folks, Jack Welch and how he led and things that he did that were effective. So I really started with just having a voracious appetite for reading and learning what others had done and what they were doing. As I've matured a little bit, I think it's more around surrounding yourself with people that are mentors and sort of in role models, maybe a better word for in the way that they lead. And I look at that from two angles. It's sometimes what they do and sometimes it's from what they don't do. And I think if you can sort of keep an eye on picking the best of the best and leaving some of the worst from a trait perspective out, you can really develop your own sort of personal leadership style. So I still read a fair bit, but I also tend to surround myself with people that are much smarter and are much more experienced in leadership and try to hope some of that rubs off. And then the third thing I would say is I'm a huge proponent of mentoring. And so at any given time, I tend to mentor between eight and 10 leaders here at Penn Medicine. And I have found, Scott, that I learn as much from mentoring people as hopefully they're learning from me in terms of the curiosity they have, the questions that they have, and really making me be introspective about why I've done certain things. Some of the things I've done that were good, some of the things that I wish I had a second chance at doing. So I really enjoy leadership. I think it's one of those lifelong pursuits where you, you never quite, you know, become an expert at it. It's a evolving skill set. It's an evolving, you know, style that you have to be comfortable with yourself. So I'm not sure that answers the question, but that's.
- [12:35]
A
No, I, I think it's. I, I think it's really great. I think it's great. And I think the last point that you make is that when you are mentoring or you are teaching, you often learn as much or more than the person you're mentoring, because as you're doing it, you are sort of your own leadership thoughts and constantly getting better. And it's this great mix. You hit it really well, John. It's really impressive, this mix of leading. And again, we come from the generation of Drucker, Collins, Jack Welch and so forth, and then meeting with people and visiting with people and sort of combining that learning and learning by experience and doing and talking to people. And I just love the perspective on it. So thank you very, very much.
- [13:19]
B
No, thank you.
- [13:20]
A
I'm going to ask you another question because now you've piqued my curiosity. Of course, besides Peter Drucker or Jack Welch, and I already mentioned Jim Collins, but you can mention that, too. Any other business authors or business books, anything or speakers that have particularly sort of not so much that you learn so much from it, but that have inspired you as well. You already mentioned Kevin Mahoney, which I think this idea of constant curiosity, and I phrasing it wrong, is just so right. On any other business speakers or leaders that you've particularly sort of like, think, yeah, that's been inspiring to me, or helpful.
- [14:01]
B
You know, it's funny, as I sort of evolved and maybe matured a bit, it's less about focusing on one or two. It's more variety and really getting to see different styles and different leadership perspectives. So I would say there's not a single that I would call out. You know, I tend to really try to get a broader variety these days. There's a book that sits on my desk because it's really important to me. It's called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. And it's the idea of servant leadership, which I think is really important, particularly in this type of an industry, to really, you know, make sure that you continue to realize that you're here for the others and not them there for you. So I've tried to be broader. You know, I also tend to read a lot of David McCullough and some of the stuff that he's written about maybe the founding fathers and some of the tough decisions that they were faced with and some of the adversity that they faced and how they made decisions and how they recovered from bad decisions. So I try to take a broader path or swath these days through the available material out there. And the other thing I would say lastly is maybe, you know, back in the day, there weren't a ton of people writing books about leadership, and now, you know, the bookstore is full of them. You know, you can. You can pick out 10 or 12 and, you know, go to town on them 100%.
- [15:18]
A
But I. But I love the perspective, and I think it meshes with my experience at one point as like a younger professional, younger leader. They're probably two or three books that really stood out to me and still kind of do. But then it's this whole mix of different places you get inspiration and ideas from that's so helpful. I love it. John, what a great pleasure visiting with you. A great leadership career, 20 plus years at Penn Medicine. Amazing to see it go from 3 billion or so in revenues, that's just a proxy for size, to 13 or 14 billion in revenues. Amazing what you all have accomplished. Thank you for joining us today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. What a pleasure. Thank you, Scott.
- [15:53]
B
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you today.