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- [00:02]
A
Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now your host, Ed Marx.
- [00:17]
B
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I am with the CEO of Merge, Stephanie Trunzo. Stephanie, welcome to Digital Voices.
- [00:27]
A
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
- [00:29]
B
Yeah, I am as well. I love what Merge does. We're going to unpack that a little bit. But I also love who you are as a leader and all the research that I've done about you. So I'm really excited about this conversation. I think it's going to help a lot of people. But the most important question we have today is what songs are on your playlist?
- [00:48]
A
Oh, gosh. And of course, start with the hardest question. My playlists are so eclectic and they defy genre. So if you ask my husband, he will tell you my playlists sound like my teenage daughter's music. If you ask her, she'll tell you they sound like old songs she doesn't know anything about. So I've got a mix of musicals, pop, country, pretty much everything you can think of. What I was just listening to before we. We hopped on here together was meditation music.
- [01:17]
B
That's right. Because you do yoga as well.
- [01:20]
A
I do, I do. I'm a huge advocate of a yoga practice for sure. It's. It's a great way to still the mind and carry that practice right off the mat with you.
- [01:29]
B
Yeah, no, that's awesome. We'll have to add. We do have a playlist on Spotify for Digital Voices. We'll have to add something yoga ish that you might in a yoga studio. What about life message and mantra? Are there words that you live by that sort of guide you?
- [01:44]
A
There's a poem called the Desiderata. I had it on my walls in high school, on a poster. And there's a line in it, whether or not it is clear to you the universe is unfolding as it should. And I have always found that particular sentence, the whole poem's beautiful, but that sentence to be just such a great encapsulation that there is always more we don't know. And whether you want to take that sentence spiritually or intellectually, there are things that are happening and moving us in ways that we can't understand. And there's. There's a lot of peace to be found in knowing things are going to happen and you may not have control over all of them. So just finding that peace. Yeah.
- [02:25]
B
Yeah, I like that a lot. That's really good. Stephanie, let's Talk a little bit about who you are. We're going to jump into all of your amazing background and leadership and things like that. But it's always great to know the foundation. So, like, where were you born? Just start from the beginning.
- [02:38]
A
Yeah. So I grew up in rural Pennsylvania about 45 minutes an hour outside of Pittsburgh. I am 100% Italian. So Italian immigrant culture. Growing up, everybody asks if I can speak Italian and the answer is food words and curse words only. That's what my family spoke. And I grew up in a family of educators and entrepreneurs. So my dad was a high school English teacher, mine actually, which was a partly fun, partly painful experience. Both my sides of my family were educators, high school mostly, but also entrepreneurs. So my great grandpa who came from Italy was a blacksmith. And what could he do with that skill in the United States after he came to America, started working on auto body stuff. So he got a patent for trash compacting metals as an immigrant to this country. So always had entrepreneurs in my family. My dad started a personal computer store in the mall way before anyone was buying computers. So just a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial, educational spirit.
- [03:45]
B
Yeah, that's awesome. And I presume you've been back to your country of origin. And if someone's listening, like, I'd love to go to Italy. What's your favorite city?
- [03:54]
A
Oh, yes, absolutely. Been back to Italy. I love Italy. I really like the area outside of Milan. I'm a big fan of the smaller villages as well. So Orvieto is beautiful.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So I really like getting into the culture and, you know, kind of being part of what I feel like is familiar from growing up.
- [04:15]
B
Yeah, no, that's awesome. I love Italy as well. So I was asking a selfish question there. So.
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A
Yeah, yeah, I'll give you hot tips anytime.
- [04:22]
B
Absolutely. Awesome. So you have this brilliant tech career. What was the primary catalyst that got you into tech and that unfolded into what it is today?
- [04:34]
A
I say this pretty often, but I really do think that, you know, we can't always make sense of things going forward, but looking backwards, you can find some themes. And I think some of those themes kind of led to where I am today. So I, as I said, I grew up in a rural area. I went to an all women's undergrad. I went to Carnegie Mellon for grad. Those experiences started to teach me that the world is a lot bigger than Leechburg, Pennsylvania. But there were a couple things that, that were always consistent for me. I always was deeply interested in the way that our mind works. You Know, how do humans think? What motivates them? Them? You know, you asked what it was like growing up. I was doing very bizarre things like finding ads in the back of magazines to send away from Mensa tests, or ordering full sets of religious texts so that I could learn about world religions, not just the religions that I was taught about. And that kind of curiosity, I think, and then beginning to see and really see for myself that boom of, of, you know, teaching myself HTML, because I saw a world that could happen on the Internet, you know, digitally, outside of just what I had physical exposure to. So through my, I think my interest in how people think, what motivates humans, that led me to get a psychology degree. But then learning while this explosion of technology happened at the same time that I was growing up gave me a real appreciation for how do we kind of achieve what I would see as innovation in the future. And I just became really impatient for it. Right. Like once I could imagine it, I wanted it to be here. So those couple of threads coming together around tech and health, that's cool.
- [06:21]
B
Yeah. And then eventually you become the gm. Oracle Health. Was there another catalyst that happened that sort of got you into the healthcare track?
- [06:31]
A
Yeah. So it was the pandemic, I think, like a lot of people. Right. So, you know, we mentioned a couple of those things I would say are part of the green threads, like my deep interest in psychology. In 2020, I got my YTT, my yoga teacher training, interest in, you know, mind body connection. And I was running at the time for Oracle all of the large scale cloud transformation. So I had built a program around taking large enterprises to the cloud. And, and during the pandemic, Oracle, like many tech companies, were doing a lot of things for greater good. So donation for vaccine management and immunization management programs and, you know, understanding data so that we could help CDC make decisions. And we were doing that globally for governments, even outside of the United States. And you know, we had this moment at Oracle that was like, we really should take all of this amazing learning from the pandemic. We were doing things so quickly in a way that we were sort of proving to ourselves at Oracle that, yeah, the technology can help us make progress faster in this health landscape. And so we decided to launch Oracle Health as a whole business. So that was really the catalyst. It was taking the understanding of what does it mean to change giant enterprises to something that is much more modern, combined with the urgency and explosion of learning around the pandemic that resulted in Oracle's decision to really invest in health and healthcare landscape.
- [08:05]
B
Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah. With a merger of great tech and great healthcare and great leadership can really do a lot with transformation now. You're an inspirational person to many people just from a leadership perspective and how you sort of integrate all aspects of your life. But you do also speak heavily on women's equality. Did you encounter inequity as your career progressed?
- [08:32]
A
Yeah, I think, like, yes, of course. I think there is no way for that answer to be no. I just was having a conversation to make a really quick example. I was, took. Took my daughter to college last weekend. So she just moved into Elon University. And I was chatting with some other parents and folks that I knew and they were talking about how often they have run into somebody that they went to college with at a professional event or how cool it is to come across someone who had been a colleague early in their career, later in their career. And as they were telling these stories, I was thinking, I almost never have these situations. And why is it? Well, why is. It is simply just the ratio of humans. It's just math. Like there are not enough of my colleagues or my peers with for me to run into. So, you know, when we talk about these moments, those are the kinds of ways that it shows up in these very invisible ways, but they impact your lived experience. Right. So it's. It's not often that I'm going to walk into a corporate box at a stadium and run into a bunch of women that I went to college with. Like, that just probably isn't going to happen. And so, you know, to some degree it's. It's just those, those kind of daily life occurrences that, that you witness and you reflect on and you. That over decades there is quite an accumulation of those small moments that turn into something substantial and meaningful.
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B
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I want to go down this road a little bit further just because you're so passionate on it. And I think a lot of people listening, both men and women, but I suspect a lot of women, you know, more specifically that are like, I want to be like Stephanie. I want to follow her and learn from her.
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A
So.
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B
So a couple things, you know, that you advocate for is not a seat at the table, but set the table. I love that. Can you, can you expand on that a little bit more?
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A
Yeah. So, you know, what I see happen a lot of times is this confusion that offering a seat at the table to a woman also includes doing all of the work to make sure that there is that seat available and What I'm sort of encouraging is, you know, a seat at the table means that a lot of the labor has already been done to make space for all of the voices to contribute equally. Not saying, well, the woman is also expected to be the one to develop the agenda, make sure the catering is there, ensure that the room setup is right. Like, are we sharing on screen who is running the slides? Like, there's a lot of labor that goes into any kind of event. And typically that work ends up being emotional labor or expected labor for the woman that's in the group. And you know, just like whether you're having a brunch at your house or a meeting in the office, it should not fall to the woman simply because she is the woman to set the table in order to take the seat herself. And so that's, that's kind of the confusion that I'm encouraging people to really unpack that a seat at the table means that I have the right to sit down and my coffee should be there already just the same as everybody else has a seat at that table. So, you know, thinking a little bit more about, about some of, again, the invisible labor.
- [11:55]
B
Yeah, you know, I, I said women in particular would be interested, but by, by real, just, you know, pulling back the curtain a little bit. This is really for the men, you know, that will emphasize some of these insights. Super important. The other thing you have said is stop talking about women in leadership and start hiring.
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A
Yes.
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B
Can you expand a little bit on that?
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A
Yes. Yes. Again, you know, everything starts somewhere. So by no means do I want to invalidate any work that anyone is doing. These topics need discussion. But at the same time, a lot of the corporate conversations that I've been part of, you know, across my career for decades, there's a lot of discussion around building initiatives that feel like checking a box when the problem is really the problem. Like, ultimately, if you have women in leadership roles, these conversations don't exist anymore. Instead of just like any other topic in the workplace, you can spend a lot of time admiring the problem, you can spend a lot of time in meetings talking about it, or you can take an action that solves it and then step stop talking about it. So I think that, that we have a lot of challenges still where we're looking at, you know, our, our diversity statistics in a way that make the story the story we want to tell instead of really making sure we just have people that are representative in roles taking up those spaces where, where they can drive change.
- [13:21]
B
Yeah, no, I love it. Super action oriented. Not so much theory.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So, Stephanie, for, let's just take someone mid career and again, I hate to bifurcate now between men and women, but I think that there's going to be some women in mid career that are going to be thinking and men as well. But I know we're sort of focused right now on, on making sure we have equity with women in leadership. And they're like, oh my gosh, I want to be like her. I want to be a CEO of a company doing good things in the world. What are one or two things that you might give them in terms of advice to best position themselves? Understanding that, okay, they've, they've got the skills required in terms of the technical expertise, but what else should they be thinking about?
- [14:07]
A
Yeah, and I think, Ed, you just said one of them, you know, because I, I deeply respect what you said and I, I always feel a little, you know, unsure how to address some of these topics too, because we're talking about humans and humans not being marginalized, being inclusive, that, that all voices have a place. And so, yeah, it is not a binary, this is a non binary human conversation. Right. I think that first piece of advice, which is what you just alluded to, which is recognize that all humans have value. Right. We all inherently have value. And I, I often think about it this way because again, it comes down to math. We would never say a really well trained AI model takes all of its information from a single data source. Right. We want diversity of data that' makes good technology. There is absolutely nothing different about human voices. We want diversity of inputs, backgrounds, experiences in these discussions. And so my first piece of advice would be to say, just really think about the fact that, that every human that you're interacting with has an equal right to be in the conversation. And you think a little bit more that way, even yourself, even as a woman, how are you making sure that everyone has some representation, that there's space for their voices and their thoughts? And I think the second one is be impatient. You know, there is absolutely no reason for us to have a tolerant approach, frankly. Right. Like I would say, if you see it, name it. If you're feeling uncomfortable, talk about it like there is no room anymore for us to be silent, for us to be quiet. I think be impatient. And one of the things that I feel most optimistic about is that isn't a conversation that I have to even have anymore with the youngest folks in our workforce. It is just absolutely taken for granted that I should be able to show up in my workplace with the same rights and conversation and voice as anybody else around the table. So, yeah, I think that we are all headed in the right direction, but that's kind of where I would advise people to lean in.
- [16:20]
B
Yeah, I love that. And hopefully we'll have a little bit more time at the close, catch up a little bit on one or two things, more on leadership. But let's talk Merge. So tell us about its mission and vision and why did you take this role?
- [16:34]
A
Yeah, so Merge is I think, one of the coolest places in the world to work. I'll say kind of in answer to both questions. Why is it so amazing and what is the reason that I took this role? The people are fantastic. And when I say fantastic, I mean they're the kind of people that you want to pick up the phone and call whether you had a bad day and just want to vent and you want somebody to validate you and have a good conversation or you had a brilliant idea and you'd love somebody to help you take it to the next level. These are good people, kind people who are really, you know, genuinely doing what I think all of us are trying to do, which is enjoy our work and have real impact along the way. So it's just a fantastic company of people. What we're doing is also what made me very interested. You know, I was spending, as I just said, a lot of time in the healthcare industry thinking about the underlying technology, the systems of record, the things that we know have been architected over time and not with intention for decades. But at the same time there's this whole experience layer going on, right? Our focus on wellness, our, our desire to change the orientation from transactional systems to human oriented systems. And you know, a company like Oracle or somebody with massive resources are the only kinds of companies that can't, can truly change system of record. But there's no reason to serialize this experience experience layer. And so Emerge has this beautiful blend of background in driving consumer born industries like retail or food and beverage or hospitality, where it's baked into the DNA of the organization to know I need to identify audiences, I need to deliver messages, I need to, you know, convert them and I need to retain them to experience in industries like health or life sciences or financial services that are highly regulated. But we still need that same kind of human focus. And so Merge had the experience on both sides of that story and I saw the need every single day when I was talking with what were Oracle Health clients about those challenges that they were not built to be able to think in that way, they were built to be a transaction model. So, you know, that opportunity to make progress really quickly at the experience layer was very exciting to me.
- [19:05]
B
Yeah, that's super cool. Almost a year in, was there any surprises? You know how sometimes you have sort of like this.
- [19:11]
A
Oh, for sure, yeah, absolutely. Surprises. I think, you know what I'm surprised about are maybe two things. One, that the agency model, so I didn't grow up in an agency model. I grew up in a tech world. And tech world, you iterate, right. You're very used to things being very rapid and agile and never done. You're always improving, you're always creating new. And the agency model, I think there's a lot of outdated concepts that we're still hanging on to that are ripe for transformation. So that's one of my surprises is hanging on to some of the agency model that I would say is like advertising days of old. Why are we still pitching? Pitching puts you on opposite sides of the table. Don't we want to be on the same side of the table? Why are we we almost exclusively looking at RFPs which propose an answer instead of letting you reframe what is the problem in the first place together? So a lot of the ways that I, I think are not quite reflected in that model. So changing up the model. The second surprise I'd have is that 15 years ago we were talking about creating integrated holistic views from marketing through technology. And you know, some of these conversations, there's been the promise of them and yet not a ton of progress against that promise. So I think that's my other surprise is how many topics that I was talking about 15 years ago are still unfortunately relevant today. And I think now we have significant headwinds to help us solve with the advances in technology today.
- [21:00]
B
Stephanie, you seem just kind of like a hip person in general, but you also have teenagers.
- [21:05]
A
Yeah.
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B
What are some shifts that you're seeing in healthcare space and like social media specifically? I always super curious about this. You know, are the next generation, are they looking to AI TikTok, whatever for?
- [21:16]
A
Yeah, well, you know, I think we tie a couple of threads here together. So background in education, my family were educators. I think that there are some really outdated marketing contexts that we need to overcome. Like that marketing, especially in healthcare wellness space is, you know, there's, there's sort of a dark cloud over it that we think that people are manipulating us or they're using our data in the wrong way or something like that. Right. And I think reframing that and to answer your question, it is about education, enablement and empowerment. It's about identifying how do you deliver the right kind of content with the right kind of accuracy to the human that needs it so that they can make their own empowered decisions. And I think that, you know, looking at generationally, we, we land in different channels, we operate different ways, right. And so kids, you know, and my daughter, she is a new college student and for sure they're getting their information off of the channels that they live in. Right? As do we all. And so how do we make sure that those channels are ones that are serving value at a educational way? And how do we teach people to credentialize what it is that they're looking at? Because in the end, some of that burden does sit with the viewer, the consumer of the content. So, yeah, TikTok, whether it's, you know, ChatGPT, like all of the channels that people are going to, it's, I think, as much about learning to use the tools correctly as it is about what is the content that's coming through them.
- [22:52]
B
Yeah, that's super insightful. Can you give us one example how you're helping clients, you know, navigate all these changes in healthcare?
- [23:01]
A
Yeah, I think that, you know, the impacts on budgets is something that's really interesting. Right. I've seen this swing in the pendulum throughout my career where especially, let's just take the marketing lens where we say, okay, AI is, is going to make everything so efficient and we're going to be able to generate all of this content with AI, so let's reduce budgets and look for efficiencies next year. And then what happens is that some of that tech comes through on the promise, some is not quite ready, and then you wish you hadn't given away your budget because you need to reinvest it in innovation or in some different way of thinking. So one of the ways that we're really trying to help our clients through this is to think differently about what you're measuring. What are your success criteria? Are you caring about what you measure instead of measuring what you care about? Are those impacts on budgets truly sustainable? How do we help you develop a plan that shows you efficiency, but shows you efficiency in ways that could actually help operational challenges, as one example. So for our health system, rather than just measuring old outdated metrics like views or clicks or eyeballs, can we actually measure we improving your operational challenges by managing traffic flow? You know, people are not coming to set up an appointment. They're coming because their knee hurts and they want to Figure out why their knee hurts. So can we route them to the right education before they have to book an appointment? Can we change the traffic flow where you know that you're often overbooked in this clinic, but you typically have free appointments over here? Those are all things that if you think a little differently about the problem and pull the starting point up to top of funnel, we can actually use that budget to help impact operational challenges and measures, not just the things you would maybe typically measure for Martech, which is hard to attribute. I think that there's, there's a reality that just like in healthcare, we want to get to a single view of patient. I think in marketing we want to get to a single view of human right. So whether you're a teenager who is looking for health information or you're just scrolling because you need a dopamine hit of, you know, puppy video or whatever, we need to understand who you are in a 360 view. So even throwing away some of our segmentation mentality, because with the tech now we can get to a point of understanding kind of infinite personalization. And we have just completed a Data study over 2,000 people aged 26 to 75. And regardless of the age, the biggest takeaway is that how humans feel about their financial future correlates exactly to how invested they are in their health and wellness journey. And so there's a really interesting takeaway there. You know, regardless of age, whatever channel people are getting their information from, that how they feel about their financial future is deeply connected to their health and wellness. So thinking about that, to me just really underscores why it is so important that we approach this through the lens of education and enablement. How are we teaching people to make better choices?
- [26:21]
B
Stephanie, it's been super fascinating talking about leadership, your career and merge, you know, you're a CEO and busy family, all the different things that go on in life. What are some things that you do to recharge and remain fresh?
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A
Well, obviously yoga. So I've got to definitely give another plug for something that moves your body, right? I think that that is definitely one way and it quiets my brain. And I would say the hardest part of yoga is not the physical part, it is the mental part. Can you be still? And I think for those of us that are fast moving people, that is the biggest challenge. And I would also say, you know, whatever makes you curious. That's what I follow, my curiosity and that's what refuels me a lot of times. It is reading some good books. Robert Sapolsky is somebody that I've been reading a lot lately. He, he has two really great books, Determined and Behave. And they are about, again, sort of about the psychology of how we think and what motivates us and the connection into neuroscience and can we prove whether or not we have free will, which is a big topic. But those kinds of things, you know, they all are related back to the work that we do every day. So those are my two answers. You know, jump into something that moves your body and gives you some stillness in your mind, and then what are the things that makes your mind busy too? Makes you excited and curious.
- [27:47]
B
Yeah, that's really good advice. So I want to ask one more advice question that I know our listeners probably have given your leadership and your experience. So you mentioned your daughter. You just dropped her off at college. Let's say four years from now, they invite you back to give the commencement address. What. What is again, one, one thing that you might share.
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A
You.
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B
You've already given us several golden nuggets of wisdom, as I call it, in terms of leadership. And now this is really early career, right? This is, you know, what they might want to embrace as they move forward into their careers. Like what, what one or two words of advice?
- [28:28]
A
I would say you are perfect because I don't mean that there isn't work to do. There is always work for us to do. But the deep belief that you are valid, that your ideas and your curiosity are things that the world needs, you are perfect. Like whatever your imperfect things are, those are just right, too. So, you know, bringing your whole self into this next stage of life and doing it with the confidence that you deserve to be here and you will find, find that just that attitude by itself, I believe it will lead you down a great path. You know, you know, if you're always curious, you'll always be doing something that energizes you.
- [29:10]
B
I love that. That's a great way to end our time together. On Digital Voices, we covered everything from your background and the influence of your parents and just the whole entrepreneurship that was inherited from this sort of immigrant story. If you will learn about your career from a tech point of view, but also into healthcare, but it's really about people. It's clear that you're a super people person and just your advocacy for women in leadership is tremendous. And we shared a lot about what men can do to help and also what women can do for themselves in terms of getting to become a CEO like yourself. Talk quite a bit about Merge, promoting health, wellness and happiness. I love that last part on happiness. And then we talked a little bit about how you get your energy and take advantage of your downtime. And finally, as you already mentioned, you are perfect, as is all of our listeners. What did we miss? Or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.
- [30:07]
A
Just that I'm so excited about what this moment in time can do for us. There is a lot of virtuous stuff that we can accelerate. How we think about access to healthcare, how we think about wellness, how we help people learn more about their bodies and minds. You know, this equipment that we're carrying around with us every day. So I'm really excited about what we're doing with. With our clients and for the world. And, you know, in addition to we're all perfect, I would say we're all finite. So it's not just about refilling your energy. It's spending it in the right way. So, you know, enjoying this time together in this conversation, for me, great way to spend energy. I'm really hopeful that. That others think that as they listen to this conversation, but I'm just very optimistic about what we're going to be able to accomplish in the coming years.
- [31:00]
B
Stephanie, you're a great leader and more importantly, a great person. Thank you for being on Digital Voices.
- [31:05]
A
Thank you, Ed. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.