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Supply Chain Now
How Data Readiness Drives Better Patient Outcomes
01:03:15
In this episode of Supply Chain Now, Scott W. Luton and Scott DeGroot are joined by Mark Holmes of InterSystems and Michael LaRocca of Ready Computing to discuss the shift from legacy networks to proactive, AI-driven decision intelligence.
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A
I liked how you introduced it. It's like, you know, just from a contextual is that look, healthcare, especially in hospital providers. And again, you know, what we'll be talking about here today is, you know, like if you can't, you can't find the right product at Target or Walmart, okay, it's not so bad. But look, if you can't have a procedure and you've been expecting a procedure because of a health issue and you can't have the procedure and so a lot different, it's impacting, like you said, life or death situation.
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Welcome to Supply Chain now, the number one voice of Supply Chain. Join us as we share critical news, key insights and real supply chain leadership
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from across the globe.
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One conversation at a time.
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C
Hey, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you may be. Scott Luton and Scott the Groot, AKA the Professor with you here on Supply Chain Now. Welcome to today's show.
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A
Thank you.
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C
Hey, Scott, how you doing today?
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D
I am outstanding. Thank you very much. My friend. Weekend is coming up and exciting summertime plans are on the horizon.
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C
Man, you must have a lot up your sleeve. Well, hey, exciting is the theme for today. We've had a lot of hits lately on some conversations you and I have been a part of. This is going to continue in that vein. Today we're going to be talking about the healthcare industry, folks. In particular, we're going to be talking with a few industry leaders on a really a variety of topics, including a few of the chronic challenges that plague healthcare organizations just about everywhere, especially in inventory visibility, data fragmentation and a whole bunch more. But the good news is we're going to be talking about innovation in a space that not only will be solving these problems and many others, but will be driving optimized patient outcomes and organizational success on all sorts of levels. So stay tuned for a fascinating discussion. Now, Scott, given all of your years, and we're not going to break the 20 year rule, right, but longer than 20 years of proven supply chain leadership experience for a major player in the Fortune 500 space. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on what we hear today. You ready to go?
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D
I'm ready to go, my friend. Yes.
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C
Well, folks, stick around for a great conversation that's going to offer up tons of actionable insights by the truckload. So with that in mind, I want to welcome in our wonderful guest joining us today. First, backed by popular demand, we have Mark Holmes, head of global supply chain market strategy at Intersystems. And he's joined by Mike LaRocca, founder and CEO at Ready Computing. Let's welcome in Mike and Mark. Hey, Mark Holmes. Great to have you back. How you been?
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A
Great, Scott. Thank you very much. It's great to be back.
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C
Well, I'll tell you what. I know you've been traveling the world as you help all sorts of organizations. I'm envious of your travel schedule, but we'll dive into some of the cool stuff you're doing here today and. Hey, Mike, how you doing?
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E
Good, Scott.
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D
How are you?
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C
It is wonderful to meet you. I've been doing our homework, my homework on you. And I understand you're 11 foot 2 inches tall, bulletproof, and you wear a cape, is that right, Mike?
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E
Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much.
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A
Okay. Okay.
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C
Well, me and, me and Scott the Groot have been looking forward to this conversation and let's dive in with a fun warm up question first. So, Mike, I understand as we were doing our homework that you are a car guy and you have lots of passion around automobiles. Much more than, than myself, who I'm the proud owner, I think, of five Honda Accords in my lifetime. Tell us about this passion, yours.
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E
Well, you know, Honda Accords, at least, you know, you could put a million miles on them and they keep going. So it's not a terrible choice. But yeah, I don't know, you might think it's a midlife crisis. For me, it's probably a lifelong crisis. I have loved cars really as long as I could remember. I mean, everything about them just has fascinated me. I kind of think that they're the perfect balance between form and function, you know, which is true in a lot of parts of our life. But I feel like it's very obvious in the car market. You know, you, you, you pick a car because you like the way it looks. You know, it's sporty or whatever it is that might catch your eye, but it has to do what it's meant to do. You know, if it's a sports car where you want to go fast, you want to break right. You know, if it's a race car, even more so. Or maybe it's a family car, you know, that you need a certain function because you have children.
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A
Right.
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E
I just think this form versus function thing is really, really fun to see in the car now. I feel like it's a good time to like cars too. I think all the manufacturers are on their A game. You know, I mostly consider myself a Corvette guy. I've always loved Corvettes. I think they're great, great cars, you know, built right in America. But, you know, some of the things that I. That I think is exciting, even relevant to the conversation today is, you know, when you think about what it takes to produce a car and even race car editions of those cars. Right. You really touch so many areas of supply chain, and it's amazing how many things you can learn just from watching what it takes to just get to the point where you're actually producing and assembling the car. I've always thought, too, that it's exciting to see how teams work together, whether they're building a car or supporting a race team. Optimizing the people around the production, around the use of the car is something I've always found really fascinating. So. So yeah, I could probably talk your whole podcast about that, but I shouldn't do that today.
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C
No. Oh, you could tell. You see, he might just lit up when we broached the subject of automobiles.
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A
And.
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And Scott DeGroote, I think we've just launched an automotive podcast series.
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D
Yeah, I love it. I love it. We have a whole different distribution channel.
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E
You just tell me.
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D
Love it.
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C
We're gonna make it happen. All right, so, Mark Holmes. Mark, now, I understand that you have had some exciting scuba diving moments with the family. Tell us more.
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A
Yeah, so my daughter and I, we've been. It's kind of our thing when we go on vacation. So my son and I, we golf, and when it comes to my daughter, we end up. We scuba dive. So we scuba dive for probably a good 15 years now. And we've, like you said, we've seen a lot. We singing about tortoises to unique fish to. One time there was a Navy SEAL, literally, we're 65ft down, runs out of oxygen. And of course, we all have separate regulators. We get him up and running. And then one particular. More of a recent dive. Daughter and I were diving in the Caribbean, and we knew that there was a fairly strong current. So we knew once we went down again, around 60, 70ft, the boat would pick us up about five miles down. And so we come up, as we get close to the surface, you know, she takes off her mask, she says, dad, there's a. There's like. This is only like five yards away. You know, there's a kilo of. We'll call it contraband, that perfect sealed square. And they. The boat comes over quickly, brings it on board. And. And so what came to mind to me was two things. Number one, how did she know what this contraband was?
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Number one.
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And then number two was, I have my supply chain hat on. And they said, look, there's, there's someone disappointed here on time in full obviously did not happen. Yes.
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All right, Mark. So Scott, I gotta come to you first. That is the one of the most unique fun warmup question responses I think we've had in supply chain history. Your reaction, Scott?
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D
I love it. You know, I have I going to the beach in a few weeks and I don't know that I'll have that exciting of a story. But good, good on you, mate, for getting it out of the supply chain. Whatever the capture band was, I'm glad
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it didn't get where it was supposed to go.
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That is right.
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Exactly.
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All right, so Scott, with an opening like that, it's going to be a great show. We got a lot more good stuff to get to here today. So I want to start with level setting on the current rules. We've got a ton and tons of expertise here today. Mike, let's start with you, if you would, since this is your first appearance on Supply chain. Now tell us briefly about what Ready Computing does and your role there. CEO.
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E
Well, Ready Computing has been in operation for a little over 15 years and we're headquartered in New York. We also have an office in the UK and we've got some dreams of growing in the eu, so we've got some initiatives happening there. We're a little over 170 people. We've always, since our inception, built connected systems of one form or another. We've generally focused on health and social care. That is our primary focus. And there's a lot to do there, both on the clinical side and the supply chain side of the health systems and the social systems. But we've also worked in other industries like financial services and food and beverage insurance, other things. So we're a very engineering focused group. Most of us, a lot of us come from software development backgrounds. I actually used to work at InterSystem, so this is a great experience in my life. And somewhere around 2011 I decided to branch out and start Ready Computing. But my role as CEO has changed over the years. So as you can imagine, in the early days, in its infancy, I kind of had to wear 100 hats and then do everything right. But the company's a lot more mature now. I get to sort of take a different position at the company where I focus on vision and strategy, I focus on partner relationships, I focus on our key customer relationships, building a culture that's great for the company, great for the staff, and ultimately always looking to find ways to grow the company, whether that means growing in geography or finding new sectors we could work in. But that's really my focus now. I have a great, great team of people that support me and support the business and our customers and I'm really grateful to them.
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C
Outstanding. And that terrific team is powering some innovation which we'll touch on here in just a second. Mark, if you would. We've enjoyed your past appearances here. We've created lots of great conversations over the years. Intersystems continues to be on a roll. Tell us for our new, especially for our new audience members, a little bit about what the organization does and of course your role with inner systems.
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A
Sure, that'd be great. Scott. So look, we're a global data technology leader. We solve complex data challenges with mission critical solutions. We do that for, been doing it for 48 years, a little over 48 years. Across 80 countries and nearly every vertical. We're privately held to 1.3 billion in revenue. We have zero private equity investment in the company. And the reason why I like to point that out is because it allows us to really focus on what the customer wants. Also just like what Mike was saying, you know, we healthcare, cpg, manufacturing, retail are large verticals for us along with the public sector. My role, as you were saying, I head up the global supply chain market strategy for the company. So it's finding the right fit by market, by region where we can take our supply chain products and it allows me to really deal around the world with a lot of really good people, good organizations and like Mike and what we're going to be talking about today.
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Outstanding. All right, Scott, the Groot. Yeah, I think we can just about solve all the world's ills between what Mike and Mark do. What do you, what do you think?
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I was just thinking, you know, these are two very, very active world active circles that are coming together. Health care and the need for health care and aging population, coming together with technology and supply chain. I mean this is at the heart of so many different conversations. I'm very excited to learn more over the next few minutes.
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C
You and me both. So as Scott mentioned and as we've mentioned a couple times, healthcare is going to be the main theme here today and for good reason because as what Scott just mentioned, if we think there's tons of demand right now on our healthcare system, just wait, give it a month, give it a year, give it a decade. It's going to be remarkable. So when people think about supply chain disruption, some folks may think of retail shelves or manufacturing delays, but in healthcare the stakes are much different. It's life and death. So I want to set the stage around our conversation a bit first. And Mark, I want to come back to you first because I want you to tell us if you would, what are a few of the common supply chain challenges in healthcare?
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A
Yeah, thank you, Scott. You know, like you said, and I liked how you introduced it, it's like, you know, just from a contextually is that look healthcare, especially in hospital providers. And again, you know, what we'll be talking about here today is, you know, like if you can't, you can't find the right product at Target or Walmart, okay, it's not so bad. But look, if you can't have a procedure and you've been expecting a procedure because of health issue and you can't have the procedure, it's a lot different. It's impacting, like you said, life or death situation. So challenges that we see, interesting enough when you look across verticals when I was talking about the company, is that they're common from the standpoint, we see significant disparate data, lack of visibility throughout the supply chain, not being able to bring that visibility of what's in inventory together. So that whole requirement for the unification of disparate data throughout the hospital network is an issue. And it's an issue that if we can't bring that together, then there's many things that we can't do. Like inventory obsolescence becomes a big issue. Of course we talk so much about that now outside of healthcare, cpg, manufacturing, inventory obsolescence is a big deal. But at the same time, on time in full, when we were talking about that earlier on time in full, not having the right product at the right time for the right procedure is a
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big, big issue, Mark, that you've already filled the plate. But folks, there's more facing our healthcare organizations. Mike, what else would you add to Mark's already full plate?
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Boy.
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Well, I thought Mark did an outstanding job response that I agree with everything he said. I and you know, seeing, you know, all of the preparation that goes in to making a health encounter, success for successful for patient is often something that we don't even think about as patients. You know, you show up for your procedure, you don't necessarily know everything that went into ensuring that the procedure is successful. And Mark touched on that. You know, just making sure you've got the right supplies at the right time and the right room and all of those things takes quite a lot of logistics management. And you know, it's one of the things that is a Real challenge for hospitals and health systems. But, you know, technology is there to. To help help with those processes.
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C
That's right. All right. So, Scott, two things before I get your thoughts, what we heard there from Mark and Mike. Number one, some of the words that Mark was using earlier, mission critical systems, high complexity. I mean, you find that by the truckload in healthcare. Earlier in my career, I spent some time working with hospitals, rural hospitals in South Georgia, and even for someone that's been in industry for quite some time, seeing some pretty big challenges, very unique in health care. But Scott, what did you hear there from Mark and Mike?
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D
Yeah, what I'm hearing and thinking about, Scott, is this idea that, number one, the demand for health care, as we said, is growing and the capability outside of metropolitan areas is probably getting stressed. And I also think about the fact that in every supply chain, especially the health care supply chain, you know, the difficulty from going from 80% service to 90% service, it's x 90, 95, it's x times 2, 95 to 97, x times 100. To get to the levels that we're talking about to hear today require outstanding operational excellence. And it requires tightly connected systems. And that's why I'm so excited to understand how Mark and Mike are. Are making a real difference, because I know it's got to be extremely difficult and probably pretty expensive.
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C
I'm with you. I am with you. So that begs all of this, begs the question a bit, Mark, because I think this next question I want to pose to you and Mike kind of brings it home, right? Because we're all. It's like we're all consumers in supply chain. We're all patients in the health care world. So, Mark, how often are hospitals still dealing with delayed or canceled procedures because supplies simply, they're not where they need to be? Mark?
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A
Yeah, I think it's good around the world, if you look at it, some countries are a little bit more than other countries, but we're looking on average probably about a 10% cancellation rate, which is quite high, and in other countries, even higher, if not much higher. And really the impact that it has, and it goes back to what we were talking about before, about managing inventory and disruptions and be able to bring decision intelligence into that. But just think about, just say we have one canceled orthopedic surgery. The revenue impact to the hospital can be anywhere from 75,000 to 250,000 just for one procedure, one procedure. Think about if you have hundreds of procedures that are being canceled or delayed dependent upon the type of procedure can be quite an impact for the organization. And that doesn't even consider the, the impact that it has to the patients. You know, the patient, the dissatisfaction, the, the health. And I had one quote, I won't mention the hospital, but children dying because they anticipated the procedure done, they couldn't have the procedure done.
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C
Hmm. That, that gets, should get everybody's attention, right? Because the. Again, life and death, Mike, speak to that. Gosh, 10% on average, these procedures getting canceled. When you look at healthcare globally, what else would you add, Mike, the impact here?
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E
Well, you know, I would start by, by saying that the role of technology is becoming increasingly more important to support these things, right. I mean, all the sort of the business cases that Mark just brought up, you know, what if we could do something at a technical level to help, right? What if we could reduce or hopefully eliminate that number of postponed or canceled procedures? That's really. I sort of view the world through the eyes of a technologist. I feel like it's my job or company's job to try to figure out how to apply the right technology to deal with those things. And it's forever challenging because at the end of the day, everything starts with having good data, having well integrated data. Hospitals in particular could be very challenging for a lot of reasons. We're dealing things with such as mergers and acquisitions. You know, what happens when a health system takes on a new hospital. You know, think of the load that that puts on the IT team and the technology stack, you know, you're going to inherit now all this technology, you have to decide, do we figure out a way to integrate with it? Do we replace it? Do we migrate, you know, from one cloud to another. There's all of these technology decisions that need to happen and to actually be able to implement, you know, whatever's decided, you know, and even in a. And I'd say a technical ecosystem that's fairly well healed, there's always challenges. You know, one at the EMR will get upgraded or the lab system, the inventory system will go through upgrades. So things that used to work may not work as they, as they once did. You have to look at your interfaces, right? You have to look at your things like your data transformations, making sure that all the data is flowing as intended to support things. So when you really look at it and you start at, with this sort of technology viewpoint, you could start to understand that the importance of a sound technology platform to make sure that we don't are missing 10% of our procedures. You can start to connect those dots
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C
all right, so Scott, I'm gonna drive a little bit further with Mike and Mark and I'll welcome your comments here because I want to get to one thing that's already come up several times. And just to start this conversation between Mark and Mike and what you shared, Scott, hospitals prevalent, they're operating with disconnected systems and fragmented data. Is that right, Mike?
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E
Yeah, it sure is. There's been many initiatives, you know, sponsored by our own government at the federal, state level to, to try to address those things and. But there's a lot of work in the industry that I think, you know, deserves a call out the way, you know, technology, at least the interfaces that piece systems together so that they could talk to one another, all their standards for interoperability that are developed. Right. And supported, things like in the healthcare world, things like HL7 like DICOM, you know, CDA, FHIR, you name it. Then add to that all the supply chain standards like GS1 and EdiFact and other things. The industry as a whole, I would say is doing a lot of things to try to help. And it's up to us is that technology implementers, right, to figure out and ensure that we're using those standards so that we could communicate with other systems in an efficient and accurate way.
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C
My love. And empower our healthcare professionals that look, we're not throwing stones at all. These folks want to serve, they want to take care of the patients. A lot of the workarounds, at least from what I've seen in my career, are because they're trying to help people.
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Right.
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And so what Mike just finished and Mark, I'll get your comments here, is we can create a better system leveraging modern day technology and empower our healthcare professionals to serve more while enabling the organization to be more successful so they can serve more people. Mark, what would you. We're talking about disconnected systems and fragmented data that's real prevalent across healthcare. Your thoughts?
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A
Yeah, so exactly what Mike was saying and what you were just alluding to what we would call data readiness. So data readiness, meaning having trusted, unified data that can lead to decision intelligence. And the key of being able to make that happen as we've been talking about, is you have clinical data and you have supply chain data. And one of the biggest issues that we're seeing in the market today is not being able to bring those two sets of data together. And that's not easy to do, but we have to do that. We have to make sure clinical data and supply chain data are coming together so that that data is Ready to then be able to optimize within the environment that we want to optimize with.
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C
All right, Scott, we've covered a lot of ground. We heard a lot of. A lot, at least to my ears. Adds to the why we've got to do better. What did you hear there, Scott, between what Mike and Mark shared, I heard
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D
that, you know what, the situation that we're in is getting better and that we are making strides to get better. But there's a lot more work for us to do. And the gap between the multiple interface, the multiple protocols, and the urgency of bringing clinical data, patient data together with do I have enough of the things that I need? These things are vitally important and makes me anxious, Scott, to learn some more about how is technology bridging those gaps? Because I can think about 100 questions I would ask about how can we go faster to close those gaps? And I'm sure that's where we're going to go next.
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C
It is, except I want to, I want to dive in a little bit deeper into the problem. A couple problems we've identified here because you can say that this is all what we're talking about in terms of fragmented data and siloed data sources. Anything but integration is a symptom of a bigger problem. So, Mike, there's a couple, there's a two part question I want to pose to you.
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A
Okay.
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C
And as Scott said, we might have a thousand questions for y', all, but Mike, what are some of the inefficiencies that place burdens on hospital staff? 1. And then as an example of that, you know, it sounds like from what you and Mark are sharing, a lot of labor is still consumed by people, man. You know, doing things like manually reconciling spreadsheets or perhaps spending time updating multiple systems. And then of course, we've seen it time and time again, folks chasing down missing items. Mike, speak to that, if you would.
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E
Everything you just said is very much true. You know, I think it starts with the fact that there are still too many manual processes. You know, I think as an industry, you know, striking this right balance between automation and manual processing is something that we're always, you know, trying to get better at. But boy, those manual processes, a. There's just human error, right? If you're doing things manually, you have to worry about those sorts of things. But the efficiency is also a real problem. You know, there's only so quickly a person is able to do things if all the processes are manual. I mean, if you're working with spreadsheets and sticky notes to sort of get through your day and to figure out, have I done all the tasks I need to do? Well, you're going to have a lot of challenges. I think technology offers a chance to bring some automation to the processes, also to standardize the processes, give people a sort of a guide or a protocol, if you will, for resolving things that might come up or making sure tasks are brought to completion, et cetera. But to me, manual processes is the very first issue. Right. I think another issue that we sometimes talk about, we call it the swivel chair effect. So imagine a person who doesn't is working in an environment where the systems aren't integrated and you have to do manual data entry. Maybe you have to enter something into the base emr and then you also have to enter duplicate information perhaps into the ordering system. And those sorts of things always are recipes for trouble because you're entering things twice. There's that human error element that might come up, there's the lack of efficiency, et cetera. So that's another thing, I think with technology and highly integrated systems that we could really resolve. And you know, another thing that comes to mind is this idea of staff sometimes hoarding supplies. Like, if you think about this, like just from a supply chain and a supply availability issue, you know, sometimes the staff doesn't always trust that they're going to have what they need at the right time. Right. Mark talked a little bit about that before. Making sure you have the right materials at the right place at the right time. Sometimes what could happen is this, if the staff doesn't have full confidence that they've got what they need when they need it, they'll over order. Right. They'll order in excess, which if, if the product has a long shelf life, maybe the problem doesn't immediately present itself. But some products do have a shelf life. Some things, you know, will only last so long. Some things need to be refrigerated. Right. There's a lot of complexity to these things that are ordered and having excess ordering really leads to just massive inefficiency and really high cost and a risk that things are going to get thrown out. So these, in my opinion, are just some of the sort of the key inefficiencies that staff go through. And I think technology could help with fascinating stuff.
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C
And Scott, a couple points here. First off, you can't you tell Mike's been in a hospital or a thousand. Clearly he's been in healthcare for quite some time. And then secondly, you know, healthcare as we've established is a unique industry.
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D
Right.
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C
There's plenty of, and there's plenty of things I think frankly other sectors, other industries could learn from healthcare. However, when we talk about those, those common challenges, spreadsheets, manual updates and systems, lots of systems that swivel, that swivel chair effective. I got that right. The good news is healthcare can also learn from global supply chain because those are issues that we've been solving for quite some time, have made some big gains in and of course drawing from marks and inner systems, years of work in this space. We are going to talk about how it's all coming together. But Scott, big opportunities but healthcare can learn from supply chain, huh?
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D
Well, I absolutely think that that's right and probably because the fact that the outcomes are so urgent in the healthcare industry and you know, quite honestly in as a society we're all struggling with the cost of health care and the speed of outcomes, you know, and these kind of things. Nobody wants to pay more for healthcare, but they sure want the right kind of outcome. So if we have people typing in the wrong things or hoarding supplies, you know, which is a normal, maybe human behavior, I don't have enough, I'm going to order extra. The bullwhip effect that causes costs to go up and inventory to go up and it's in the wrong place. So absolutely these are supply chain principles that absolutely need to be applied in the most excellent way possible.
- [29:57]
C
And you know, the thing is, and, and we're going to move into the an some exciting technologically driven innovation here in a second. But you know, technology is not optional. It's gonna be the only way we, we fix these challenges and more. We've got to lean in to modern day cutting edge technology and that's where we're going next. So Mike and Mark and Scott, the good news, and there's always good news, you go looking for it, we can counter all these challenges and a lot more. And one of the things, one of the recent developments, Mike, comes from you and the Ready Computing team because y' all have built this intriguing solution that's, that's brand new. However, it taps into something that's not brand new and is proven and that's the inner system supply chain orchestrator. So let's do this. Let's kind of break this up a piece and make a bit and make sure all our audience is with us. So Mark, let's assume the audience has not seen any of your previous conversations here about intersystem supply chain Orchestrator, but let's start there because that's a critical part of this, this healthcare innovation we're gonna be talking about. Tell us about how that works at a high level.
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A
Thank you, Scott. Yes. So think of Supply Chain Orchestrator as a decision intelligence data platform with four key embedded technologies that creates a single advanced data orchestration layer. So there's four key technologies. So the first one is that we want to create harmonized and normalized unified data so we can bring all the disparate data sources together. That is the first technology that we use from any source, inside or outside the network, the organization. The second technology is where we harmonize that data on demand by the special processes of how we do that, bringing processing to the actual data so that we know that when we want to run the analytics, it's real time and accurate. So once you have the harmonized normalized data, you have the ability to then analyze in real time data that is accurate. Then we apply our third technology, which is AI enabled intelligent business process integration. We've been talking so much about integration, but the product itself helps you integrate and bring the business processes together through our AI technology that is either application or enterprise, within the organization or outside the organization. And then lastly, and the fourth technology that comes together is our own advanced ML AI, agentic AI that ultimately helps you lead to prescriptive insights. So all four of those technologies are coming together as one product. And as you stated, we're just, we're really excited about how this technology that we've been talking about with you, Scott, over the last couple years is now indebted with ready computing.
- [32:53]
C
So we're going to pick back up with Mike and what they're doing with the channels360 application, in particular the supply chain edition of that. But really quick, Scott. Mark just listed four compelling aspects of the Supply Chain Orchestrator by our friends at Intersystems. And I'm not going to capture all of that because he's a lot smarter than me, but real time analytics, it helps with integration and we get away from these silos of intelligence and data. Of course, the data is cleaned and harmonized and normalized and on top of it all, or powering it all, perhaps machine learning and artificial intelligence. That is quite a recipe, Scott, huh?
- [33:34]
D
Yeah, it is. And I think that the methodology is right on. Mark is obviously onto a good thing here in terms of we have to describe what is happening, we have to have insights on what should be happening, and then we need to make proactive recommendations about how to fix something that should not be happening this idea of moving to prescriptive intelligence where we're solving problems before they cause bad outcomes. I think that's really intriguing. And not only do I say kudos to Mark, but I'm also interested in, you know, in an application in the real world. So I'm sure we'll get into that.
- [34:11]
C
Well, you're reading my mind, Mike. Well, let's talk about how all of that is combined with your team's innovation and especially a powerful why because we've established really all the challenges that a lot of the challenges at least impact the healthcare industry. Tell us about how all of that is powering the Channels360 application. Again, you've got a couple additions, but we're going to talk about really focusing on the supply chain edition. Tell us more, Mike.
- [34:39]
E
Right, well, yeah, as Mark said, we embed the inner systems technology and if you think of the application, our channels 360 as a multi layered technology stack, at the lowest level of the stack we have our data platform. That's where inner system serves a just absolutely critical role for us. I mean at the lowest level it does everything from persisting data, all your database crud operations I'll call them, it does all of those things for us, but it's also what allows us to integrate with other systems. Nobody in today's age is going to build an application that's siloed and only supports one department in the hospital. Everything you build needs to be a connected application of one form or another. And we use the inner systems technology to make those connections and deal with all the standards like I spoke about earlier and transformations and all of those things. But now add on top of that Supply Chain Orchestrator, right. It's doing quite a few things for us, right? It a, it gives us a framework. So there's this smart data fabric, you know, within Supply Chain Orchestrator that gives us a way to, a standard way to do certain things. It's sort of like integrate one system to another, perform structural and semantic transformation of the data. You just imagine there's this sort of concept of a data pipeline and as the data is moving from one system to another, there's a handful of things that have to happen. And so at its most basic level we're getting this framework that we could operate within. But now you're also getting a support to these or supply chains standards, things like GS1 and EdiFact and other things that we do. We've got the AI capabilities that Mark mentioned. We can do this for all kinds or Use it for a lot of things like automatically ordering into stock to make inventory to certain par level if it looks like we don't have enough supply on hand to deal with all the procedures that are coming up, all these uses for AI that we could use. So we use inner systems for that. And also Supply Chain Orchestrator gives us what I'll call an API first architecture. So as a you're building a technology, you want to find a way to sort of encapsulate all the key behavior of the application in services that could be reused in different contexts. Whether it's our own front end application calling into an API or it's a partner's application calling into an API. This API first architecture of Supply Chain Orchestrator gives us a lot of capabilities that we can use and even offer to our partners that we're integrating with. So we use it quite a bit. And maybe if I could just take a step back because I feel like I was a bit in a low level there for a while. Channels360 at its core is a case management tool, right? At its core it's applied, as you mentioned earlier, Scott, to different sort of scenarios through different additions. Right? So you have kind of different flavors of it. But ultimately what we're doing is registering new cases and coordinating people and systems around that particular case. So some of the tasks that might be performed within that case are done by people, right? Some of them are automated, but it's all sort of managed within a common workflow. And this really brings quite a lot of consistency to sort of how we approach a particular implementation. And I think one of the unique things about channels and the name by the way, comes from this idea of channels of communication. So, but the idea of this is we're integrating people and systems together, right? And, and the system starts to almost learn from itself over time. In the beginning, maybe you have, and I'm just throwing numbers out, maybe a health system has 80% of its processes are manual and 20% are automated. But the system gets smarter, we start to find ways, well, maybe we could automate that, maybe we could automate this. And little by little we start to automate more and more of those workflows, which has quite a few advantages. But within Supply Chain Channels serves this role of being able to make sure that orders from the time they're placed to the time they're fulfilled and everything in between can be sort of managed through a consistent workflow and get end to end visibility of everything that happens along the way. So somebody who's Using channels at any moment can see what's the status of an order, what's the status of the shipment? You know, could I possibly have gotten a cheaper product through another supplier? Maybe the discount levels were better. There's all kinds of intelligence that you could get within this from the end to end operation.
- [39:29]
C
So, Mike, you almost get as excited about talking about channels360 as you do Corvettes. So I'm looking forward. We'll have to have you back in a year and we'll talk about all kinds of outcomes and applications. But let me stick with you for
- [39:41]
E
a second Corvette edition of channels360.
- [39:44]
C
It's coming, it's coming.
- [39:47]
A
All right.
- [39:47]
C
So really I want to stick with you for a minute because I want to ask, in practical terms, you and Mark both have mentioned ML and AI a couple times. How is AI leveraged in practical terms as it relates to the supply chain edition of channels360?
- [40:04]
E
Well, I would say at a 50,000 foot view, we support rag oriented AI, I'll say, and agentic AI, right. And they each have a role and they kind of work together. I'll give you a couple of examples. When it comes to rag, we're basically generating content, right? What we're examples of that might be generating documentation for a patient, right? Maybe given a certain context, a certain condition, whatever the situation might be, we could generate a care plan, we could generate educational materials, we could generate all those things. We could also do things like generate a list of supplies that are needed to satisfy upcoming procedures, right? So that's one way that we use AI quite a bit to do these sorts of things. Now the agentic side of things is another step. It's even a little more powerful. It's meaning that we're actually not just generating content, but we're taking action on that content, right? We're finding ways to use AI to automate those things. So that could be things like automating an order of supplies because the PAR level was low in inventory, right? Or maybe ordering a renewal of a prescription, even for a patient, because the renewal period came up, right? There's all of these things that we can do to even at agentic AI, to use that. I feel like one of the things I know all of us in the industry, and I know myself and everyday computing, we put a lot of thought into ethical use of AI. There's a lot of things that we do as a company not to just say, okay, we're going to use AI everywhere. We're very specialized in where we use it or don't use it. Everything is done with purpose and with ethics in mind and to just make sure that we're using the technology in a very trustworthy way because it is powerful. You could almost do anything you want with it. And it's up to us to decide exactly where we plug and play those AI capabilities.
- [42:06]
C
That's right. Governance. Governance. Governance. Okay, so, Mark, before I get Scott to comment, I know he's chomping at a bit, but Mark, tell us more when we talk about AI and, and practical usage. Your thoughts, Mark?
- [42:19]
A
Yeah, I just obviously Mike did a great job on, on using the different types of AI. I wanted to focus just a little bit on the prescriptive insights. We brought it up a couple times and the reason why it's so important just, you know, obviously, you know, beyond health care, but sticking to what we're dealing with now is that you're dealing with and when a decision has to be made to, let's say, optimize a procedure, but, you know, beyond, you know, patient level, just optimizing could be working capital, operation costs, transportation costs, all of that. There's thousands of different touch points and data points inside and outside the organization. AI helps you do that real time very quickly in an optimized way to be able to come up with that outcome that affects the patient in the most optimal way for everybody.
- [43:15]
C
All right, so that goes back, Scott, what you're talking about, the visibility is not good enough. We need to take action. A lot of it can be automated. Mike and Mark both were talking about that, and the example Mike used was, you know, automating orders of supplies. So hopefully, rather than, you know, tracking down seven manual spreadsheets, oh, we do need some xyz. It's. It's autonomous. And so the supplies are there, which limits all those procedure cancellations. And that's just one small little example. Scott, weigh in. We've covered a lot of ground since I came back to you. Weigh in. What you heard there from Mike and Mark.
- [43:53]
D
Well, I put my mind. I was thinking a lot during the conversation about what it's like to be in the hospital procedure room or in the office when something is happening. And if I'm in that spot, if you're a user, a consumer of that, you want everything to go perfectly. You don't want someone to go searching for some more items that are needed or updating the spreadsheet, or you never want to hear someone typing go, oops. You know, you don't want to hear that. So, you know, Just like on the shop floor in a factory or distribution center. I mean, even more so in these cases. We really need to have the mindset that whatever makes that job easier and better and more efficient is what we have to do and not concern ourselves with, you know, oh, so much is this coming from AI if that makes the job easier and better, we should be all for it. And I, I love the idea of prescribing insights and orchestrating better outcomes before the oops, you know, happens. And so I think we're really onto
- [44:58]
C
something here and we have massive opportunities to act more proactively. Right. And again, lessen all the decisions that healthcare professionals have to make each and every day. One more element and Mike, I want to circle back to you here in a second, but one element that I don't think we touched on that I think speaks to the demand of why we got to do more of what Mike and Mark and their respective teams are doing is beyond the, the sheer demand that's coming onto our healthcare systems everywhere. Not just here in the states, but in the States. We're seeing tons and tons of MA M&A activity across the healthcare industry. And when you think about, you know, one company acquiring 10 different systems and those systems themselves are going to have the, you know, the gaps in the data and the systems and all that stuff, well then all that's compounded. I'm not sure the math behind it. Scott, you were sharing Math, you know, earlier, 100x,000x, who knows? But the problem gets bigger. The problem gets bigger. So this is a very timely discussion we're having. And Mike, I'm, I'm thrilled for the channels360 that you and the team at Ready Computing are launching. And I think it's just now hitting the market. Mike, but what do you expect? Look deep into your crystal ball. What do you expect some of the most powerful outcomes are going to be? Mike?
- [46:22]
E
Well, the most important outcome is patient care, right? That's number one. It's paramount. So I think one of the outcomes from here is going to be a better patient experience, a better experience for the staff, but ultimately better clinical outcomes for the patient.
- [46:41]
D
Right.
- [46:41]
E
So everything we're doing sort of serves that greater goal, I think at a supply chain level. At a lower level, I think one of the major outcomes is resiliency. I mean, you think of how many stakeholders there are in a supply chain and all of the points where something could go wrong. You know, imagine being able to make that whole end to end process as resilient as Possible. So anywhere there's a failure, the system could predict the failure, work around the failure. Right. Or things like that, or alert the right people. But anything we can do to build a resilient supply chain is, is critical. I think another outcome, of course, you know, every hospital is a business. They, the costs need to be right. Right. The time to a solution needs to be right. So I think all the technology, one of the big outcomes in here is, you know, making sure that the hospital runs effectively as a business, you know, making sure that all of their processes are running as efficiently and as accurately as possible.
- [47:44]
D
Yep.
- [47:45]
C
You know, because you're right. At the end of the day, hospitals, so many of them, so many healthcare systems are for profit businesses. A lot of them are nonprofit as well. But the better they can be run, Mike, I would argue, the more facilities and infrastructure they can build out to serve more folks, especially in all parts, and leave no one behind. All parts of the world, whether it's populated or less than or not very populated. All right, so Mike, sticking with you for a minute, once hospitals and their staffs, their managers, their leaders or professionals gained true real time visibility on the integrated basis, what, what do you find that they're often surprised to discover?
- [48:27]
E
Oh, boy, they discover a lot, that's for sure. I would say they're gonna discover. Well, something we spoke about earlier was wasteful ordering.
- [48:36]
A
Right, Right.
- [48:38]
C
I thought you're gonna say contraband, not contraband.
- [48:40]
D
Right.
- [48:42]
E
Presumably this, this question will go to Mark after me. Maybe I'll let him answer that one.
- [48:47]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [48:48]
E
Well, I think wasteful ordering, I, I, I, I believe health systems might not even be be aware of just how much waste there is, or at least it's hard to quantify. So imagine like this technology suddenly is going to give them all of this insight into how their ordering systems are, what their inventory systems are, right. In real time. And to be able to show that in a, in some kind of control tower or a dashboard, you know, I think that's going to reveal quite a lot. I think the hospitals are also going to really realize just how much of their labor expenses are spent spinning to get supplies right. To call the supplier because something went off the rails. I mean, imagine you have your clinical staff, your nursing staff dealing with these sorts of issues instead of patient care. I have a feeling health systems will discover some of, I'll call them distractions from patient care because they have to deal with all these sort of infrastructure and supply chain issues. I think that's going to be a big discovery. I think they're going to discover where bottlenecks are. I think there are generally are certain patterns to these bottlenecks that hospitals will be able to see. It might be a certain supplier has a history of always being a little late, right. Or a certain shipping company, a logistics company that maybe is adding delay or maybe for cold shipments, you know, they had something break down and product was delivered that couldn't be used. I think they're going to gain all kinds of insights there. You know, ultimately at the end of the day, once they have their systems connected and as Mark mentioned earlier, it's sort of like making sure the clinical side and the supply chain side are talking to one another once those systems become integrated. And now you can show this true end to end visibility of everything that's happening. Oh boy, they're going to learn a lot.
- [50:41]
C
Mike, I'm with you.
- [50:42]
D
And that.
- [50:43]
C
And it's like the Corvette going from 6 from 0 to 60, right? Scott, really quick. Mark might have a comment too, but really quick. Scott, in your career, you haven't been in healthcare as a practitioner, but you, I'm sure can relate to a lot of the innovation and a lot of the unlock that's going to take place in healthcare that Mike's talking to. What do you think healthcare professionals and managers and leaders are going to be discovering in the eureka moments that are going to be going off. What do you think?
- [51:11]
A
Scott?
- [51:11]
D
Yeah, I think that, you know, what Mike said is really right and that most like senior executives, they get some new technology like oh my gosh, look at how bad we were.
- [51:23]
A
Right?
- [51:23]
D
You know, and that's always that kind of, kind of moment where you kind of swallow hard and say, well, we have to do something about getting better. And this idea that we're over ordering, we have delayed shipments, we have staff spending hours, minutes every day, times hundreds of staff, times thousands of minutes, you know, millions of dollars of waste that is not being pointed toward patient care. I think that we're going to find that we have a lot of improvement. As good as our system is, we still have a lot of improvement yet to go. And that's why it's exciting. What Mike is doing and what Mark is enabling here is exciting. You know, people have rightly so want to complain about healthcare costs and service times. These are some of the steps we take, the solutions. It makes me very happy actually.
- [52:09]
C
Scott, I'm with you. And thinking about it, you mentioned kind of some factory crossover analogies. These things I think are going to greatly increase the capacity and the throughput of hospitals and healthcare organizations out there. And we need it. We need it. We needed it yesterday, we needed it last year. So this is very exciting and practical. Mark, anything you want to. I mean we're, I think we're, I think you can tell we're pretty excited about the rollout of channels 360 and yes. And the partnership here because again we're all, we're all health, we're all patients, we're all consumers of healthcare. Anything you want to add, Mark, before I circle back to Mike and, and check out the health of his crystal ball real quick?
- [52:54]
A
Yes, just really two comments. One, when you were just talking about everybody sort of into obsolescence and I tell you it was just recently in Japan and there was a particular medical distributor, it's not that many really that come together as a consortium really providing medical supplies. And I was in one particular one and they said look, I want to take you to the section of this warehouse that is just for them obsolescence of medical supplies that are about to. Because of the. Either close to their aging or passed. And it was as far as the eye could see. And you think about that. It's what a terrible, terrible situation to be in for so many reasons that we've been talking about. So that was a really live experience that was eye opening to me that we can address with what we're talking about today beyond. And obviously there's an indirect impact on the patient or direct impact on the patient. Patient. So that was number one and I think number two, I just didn't want to lose sight either too. And we've been talking about when you brought it up, Scott, maybe indirectly but you know, think about it. When I talked about in the beginning that we've been in business for over 48 years, our healthcare, we, that was day one for us. We're in healthcare day one for over 48 years and day one for Mike's company and the combination of the two, everything that we've been talking about is clearly a differentiator in the market.
- [54:24]
C
Well, all that means we'll have even more to celebrate on the 50th anniversary of Inner Systems coming up soon.
- [54:29]
A
Mark, we will be invited.
- [54:32]
C
I look forward to that. Mike, all kidding aside, this is really, really cool stuff. Kudos to you and the team. But I got a couple more questions. Maybe not the thousand questions that Scott mentioned earlier, but I bet we could. There's a lot, a lot of moving parts here. So if you look ahead, let's check out how your crystal ball is working here. If you look a little further ahead. Mike, what else do you think that we haven't touched on, that all this innovation means for health care and how it impacts the current need, Immense need for innovation and real action.
- [55:06]
E
You know, Scott, actually I would say one of your comments earlier, you actually did touch on something that I think is worth coming back to to highlight. It's this whole idea of rural health and the health care system expanding within our own country to reach every corner and to make sure that anyone in need of healthcare services has access to those healthcare services, whether a big metropolitan city or you're in a real rural area right out in the countryside. So I think that as those initiatives continue to grow and move forward and in America, that initiative is really gaining quite a lot of traction. I believe what we're going to see is a much greater demand on the supply chain. I think now rural hospitals are going to be providing more services, more procedures than maybe they did in the past. There's going to be a greater need for supplies and inventory management to be on hand for those things. I think we're going to find the supply chain use cases starting to really, really grow and that the role of technology is going to be imperative to make sure that everything goes right.
- [56:20]
C
Imperative is absolutely the right word. Mark, what do you see?
- [56:26]
A
Yeah, so well said by Mike. The only thing that I would add is by going to rural health, it extends the supply chain. By extending the supply chain, you have even more instances of disruptions that could happen. And as we all know, the whole geopolitical events from state to state, country to country, it just makes it a much more complicated environment that needs to be managed.
- [56:56]
C
So true. The complexity is off the charts. It really is. And Scott, that complexity is not going to stop. We're going to address some of it. But you know, disruption is a name of the game when it comes to supply, the intersection of supply chain and health care. How do you think this is all going to play out based on what Mike and Mark shared?
- [57:16]
D
Well, I tell you, I am feeling very much more hopeful right now than I was 45 minutes ago because I absolutely know, as all supply chain practitioners know, the environment will continue to be more unstable and traditional supply lines cannot be always trusted. And if we have excess inventory or the wrong inventory in the wrong place, it means bad outcomes, either from a cost or from a patient health standpoint. Or if you're trying to buy gum on the store shelf, whatever it is, we have to use technology to overcome some of these headwinds and some of these, the volatility that is now built into the way the world operates. So I'm excited that Mark and Mike are doing this, this amount of work to help us get to those better outcomes.
- [58:07]
C
I'm with you. Let's get the manual work out of our healthcare organizations. And let's leave it if you want to wash your Corvette, hey, that's all the manual work you can knock out in the afternoon or on the weekend. But really we gotta, we could do so much better. And I'm excited about what Ready Computing and Inner Systems is doing here together here today. All right, so I'm sure we're going to have some audience members across the SCN Global fam that wants to connect with y' all want to learn more, whether it's about channels360 or if it's about Inner Systems, Supply chain, Orchestrator or talking healthcare and supply chain, which is a really fascinating intersection. Let's make sure folks can, can connect with both of y'. All. And, and let's start with Mike LaRocca. How can folks connect with you in Ready Computing?
- [58:52]
E
Well, I think the easiest thing is LinkedIn. I use it quite a bit. I would welcome any invitation from an audience member. I would love the contact and, you know, so I'm on there. Michael Araka, Ready Computing. You should be able to find me. Okay. You could also email me at Michael Laka, ready computing.com. we also have a general inbox if people want to send a general inquiry into just infoaddycomputing.com outstanding.
- [59:18]
C
Especially hospitals and healthcare systems out there. I bet you'd be happy to sit down and have a business and how we do better conversation with all them, huh?
- [59:28]
E
Absolutely.
- [59:30]
C
Good stuff, Mike. All right, so Mark Holmes and you get out. You, you do tons of virtual work too, but you're getting out, talking with the business leaders, meeting their teams. You were describing some of your global travels earlier. I'm very envious, Mark. I'm very envious. But how can folks track you and the Inner Systems team down?
- [59:49]
A
Sure. You know, the same as Mike, LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. You know, reach out to me, make sure it's Mark s. Holmes on LinkedIn. Believe it or not, there's another Mark Holmes and we never knew each other and we both agree to how we would put ourselves out into LinkedIn. So Ms. Holmes or LinkedIn, and then from a website standpoint, to learn more about what we do within healthcare, within supply chain, go to energy.com supply chain.
- [60:17]
C
Outstanding. And don't do any more scuba diving for a little while. Okay, Mark?
- [60:20]
A
Or maybe I will.
- [60:28]
C
That's good, Mike and Mark, I'm telling y', all, this has been one of my favorite recent conversations. And again, I really appreciate innovation yard driving. And again, we'll have you all back and we'll have plenty more use cases and outcomes to dive into. Okay, Scott, the group you have got. We asked Mark and Mike some tough questions, but you've got the toughest one of the day because as we've. Me and you. Me and you have both shared. We're pretty excited about all this information and innovation we've unpacked here today on this episode. But what is your patented one key takeaway here today, Scott?
- [61:01]
D
Well, well, I think it's this, that the crisis in the healthcare system, together with the advanced technologies that are coming our way, are being packaged in a way through the work that Mark is doing and the way Mike is executing that work, that is really making a difference. And so my key takeaway is let's make sure that they have all the support they need to continue to do this important work. Because you know what? We need healthcare outcomes that are even better than today at a lower cost. And these guys are on to how to get that done.
- [61:31]
C
I like it, Scott. Optimistic. Key takeaway. I'm always game for that. Well, what a great conversation, folks. I want to thank our esteemed panel again. Mike LaRocca, founder and CEO at Ready Computing. Mike, thanks so much, my friend.
- [61:45]
E
Thank you, Scott. And Scott, thank you both for having me. I really appreciate it.
- [61:49]
C
You bet. What a great story. And Mark Holmes, head of global supply chain market strategy at Intersystems. Mark, always a pleasure to reconnect with you.
- [61:59]
A
Same, same. Love it. Thank you very much.
- [62:02]
C
You bet.
- [62:02]
A
All right.
- [62:03]
C
Scott Negroit, always a pleasure co hosting these sessions here today. And this was a special one, huh?
- [62:08]
D
Yeah, no, it's very good. And you know, it leaves me with a feeling of optimism and a positive view on how we use technology to make our our lives better. So I thank you very much for having me.
- [62:19]
C
You bet. To our SC and global famous, the smartest audience all of global supply chain. Hope you enjoy the conversations as much as we have. But, you know, you got homework, right? You got to take just one thing from all the good stuff that Mike, Mark, and Scott shared here today, and you got to do something with it. Deeds, not words. That's how we're going to transform healthcare. That's how we're going to transform global business and leave no one behind. So with all that said, Scott Lewton here on behalf of Supply Chain now team, challenging all of our audience members out there. Do good, give forward, be the change that's needed. And we'll see you next time right back here on Supply Chain Now. Thanks, everybody.
- [62:58]
B
Join the Supply Chain now community. For more supply chain perspectives, news and innovation, check out supply chain now.com subscribe to Supply Chain now on YouTube and follow and listen to Supply Chain now wherever you get your podcasts.