DGTL Voices with Ed Marx

Episode: Three Things You Can Do This Year to Take your Tech Next Level

Release Date: January 22, 2025
Host: Ed Marx

Episode Overview

In this solo episode, Ed Marx kicks off 2025 with practical, experience-backed strategies to elevate technology and partnerships within healthcare organizations. Drawing from over 20 years leading IT in major health systems, Ed shares three powerful “hacks”—or, as he prefers, “accelerators”—that foster closer executive collaboration, deeper vendor relationships, and transformative insights by intentionally getting out of the office and engaging face-to-face with strategic partners and admired organizations. The advice is actionable, scalable, and designed to fit almost any budget.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Segmenting and Deepening Vendor Relationships

[00:17–04:09]

• Ed describes a structured approach to categorizing vendors into four groups:
  • Strategic (4–5 key partners with the highest influence and spend)
  • Tactical (10–15 important but not critical vendors)
  • Vendor (the bulk: ~90%)
  • Emerging (3–5 startups or potentially strategic newcomers)
• Assign relationship management responsibility based on category: CIO leads with strategic vendors, direct reports handle tactical/emerging, others manage the rest.
• Hold routine, scorecard-driven meetings with strategic vendors. Both parties rate each other to improve collaboration.
• Annual Strategic Summit: Invite strategic vendors and C-suite for a full-day, in-person session: share strategies, discuss headwinds/tailwinds, solicit real recommendations, and tackle core challenges together in mixed vendor-executive teams.
  • Quote:
    "It was great to have four or five of your strategic vendors all working together to come up with a solution... They would just cross pollinate because they would hear things, then they would present back and it was just fascinating and the great ideas we had."
    — Ed Marx [03:48]

2. Executive Field Trips to Vendor Sites

[04:10–07:35]

• Once a year, Ed and select C-suite peers embark on multi-day, multi-site road trips to meet strategic vendors on their home turf.
• Structure: Dinner with executives, half-day immersive sessions, travel to the next partner.
• Benefits include:
  • Unique exposure to vendor culture, prototypes, and the "unfiltered" environment.
  • Direct access to senior counterparts and CEOs—often from Fortune 100 companies.
  • Deepens relationships, mutual understanding, and reveals collaborative opportunities.
  • Encourages executive-level buy-in for technology initiatives.
  • Cost = travel only, but ROI is "game changing."
  • Quote:
    "There's nothing like being in their environment... You would also have access to their CEOs... It was pretty amazing experience to do that."
    — Ed Marx [05:42]
  • These trips are also strategic from a scheduling standpoint: grouping several visits into a dedicated block minimizes disruption and maximizes impact.

3. Visiting Admired Non-Healthcare and Healthcare Organizations

[07:36–09:46]

• Pick a top-performing company admired for a particular trait (e.g., mobile experience, customer service), ideally outside healthcare.
• Initiate contact through vendors or LinkedIn, request a day-long, mutual strategy-sharing and learning session.
  • Both teams present strategies, question rigorously, identify common deep-dive topics ("whiteboard" or "parking lot" issues).
  • Foster reciprocal insights and lasting ties (e.g., CISO-to-CISO connections).
• Similarly, do the same with peer healthcare organizations—learning best practices face-to-face is far superior to conferences, blogs, or podcasts.
  • Quote:
    "We would learn so much... way more than you could, you know, reading a blog or listening to a podcast like this or, you know, different ways that you might normally..."
    — Ed Marx [09:22]
• Geographic proximity helps but is not essential.

4. The Side Benefit: Deep Executive Team Bonding

[09:47–11:54]

• These trips offer precious downtime and camaraderie between executives (shared travel, meals, airport moments)—difficult to achieve in routine meetings.
• Shared exposure to strategic partners leads to:
  • Unified understanding and excitement for initiatives (no more failed “conference excitement transfers”).
  • Accelerated decision-making and cross-team alignment.
  • Quote:
    "It's irreplaceable because you just don't get that kind of downtime with your peer group. So these really are beneficial."
    — Ed Marx [10:44]

5. How to Get Started: Low-Risk, Scalable Steps

[11:55–15:52]

• Start small: Visit a peer healthcare organization in your region; choose a nearby admired company for a first joint session.
• These don’t need to be with mega-corporations—what matters is learning and building relationships.
• Combine multiple vendor visits in a single trip to minimize time away from the office and gain diverse perspectives in a compressed window.
• When inviting your own C-suite, emphasize the executive-to-executive interactions and direct access to senior vendor leaders—it’s almost always compelling.
• Quote:
  "Go visit a vendor. Maybe it's just you and your team the first time... Then go for the bold one and just pick your three or four partners, whatever the magic number is..."
  — Ed Marx [14:57]
• These shared experiences often translate into increased support during internal discussions, such as budgeting:
  • Executives who are present at these visits actively advocate for IT investments, having seen the value firsthand.
  • Quote:
    "It was just amazing. And obviously it's like I got two votes now. I just don't have one vote. I've got, I've doubled my votes in some case with triple or quadruple."
    — Ed Marx [16:32]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the goal:
  "If you want to develop a world class tech to match the rest of the clinical quality of your organization, you gotta make these sort of moves." [16:19]
• On the impact:
  "Oftentimes we're like always looking for like what are the one or two things we can do that'll really move the needle for us. I'm telling you, these are the type of things that move the needle." [17:23]
• A CEO's reaction:
  "My CEO had never, ever, ever called me on my cell phone previous to this moment... He was like, just like a kid and so excited about the digital transformation that was going to take place with this partnership." [15:45]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:17 – Ed introduces the theme: actionable hacks to deepen vendor and executive partnerships in healthcare IT.
• 01:35 – Framework for segmenting vendors and managing relationships.
• 03:10 – Annual strategic vendor meetings with C-suite inclusion and collaborative problem-solving.
• 04:57 – “Field trip” methodology: immersive, multi-site vendor tours.
• 07:36 – Visiting admired non-healthcare companies for mutual learning and cross-industry perspective.
• 09:22 – Similar visits with peer healthcare organizations for benchmarking and camaraderie.
• 10:44 – The value of off-site time with the executive team.
• 13:05 – Step-by-step advice for starting small and scaling up these strategies.
• 15:45 – Memorable story of executive enthusiasm and investment support following such visits.
• 17:23 – Ed’s final encouragement and summary of key actions for 2025.

Conclusion

Ed Marx leaves listeners with a clear challenge: step out from behind the screen, invest a small amount of time and travel, and reap outsized rewards for your technology organization. By proactively building face-to-face relationships—with vendors, admired companies, and peer organizations—you gain strategic insights, secure stronger executive backing for IT, and lay the foundation for breakthrough digital transformation in healthcare.

"You just gotta go out and make it happen." – Ed Marx [17:28]