← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Edward Marx on Leading with Humility, Human Innovation, and the Future of Healthcare Tech | Ep 1051
00:14:57
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Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Ed Marks. The youngest child of Holocaust survivors, Ed moved to the United states at age 10. At 16, he served as a medical clinical janitor, where he discovered his healthcare calling. Ed took successive positions as a combat medic, anesthesia tech, strategic planner and Technology manager. He quickly learned how the convergence of clinical, business and digital saved lives. His passion ignited. He jumped feet first into technology and operations in the C suite of Cleveland Clinic, NYC Health and Hospitals, Texas Health Resources and University Hospitals Intermixed. Ed served as the supplier side as well. He was the CEO for consulting firm Divergent Global, Chief Digital Officer for Tech, Mahindra Health and life sciences, and CIO of the advisory board. Concurrently, he served 15 years as an Army Combat Engineer officer and combat medic. Today, Ed is focused on his own advisory practice and board work. Ed does a fair amount of speaking, writing and podcasting. Some of his bestsellers include Voices of Innovation, Healthcare, Digital Transformation and For the Mayo Clinic, Patient Experience and Diagnosed. His podcast Digital DGTL Voices is top 3% globally and his blog CEO Unplugged has over 1 million views. Ed is also active on YouTube, X Instagram and TikTok. Well, good afternoon Ed. Welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks for having me so excited.
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Absolutely, Ed, I am too. I appreciate it. Like I said, we share some of the same paths in our careers across healthcare and technology. I just appreciate you making the time hailing out of Dallas there. So Ed, jumping into your first question. Your journey into healthcare started humbly as a janitor at 16 years of age. How did that early experience shape your leadership style and career philosophy today?
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I think it had a pretty big impact in that, as you stated yourself, the word humble, it really kept me humble. I believe so. I always looked at anyone who had any role in healthcare as being a caregiver, as an important person. And so it didn't matter what sort of level what someone did. The fact that they were serving in healthcare made everyone equal and everyone important. So I think it was great to start out that way and understand all the different types of roles from again being a janitor all the way to being a cio. And I think the second thing it sort of taught me or reinforced, I think these things were probably already in me, but it just really reinforced it all. And that is service. We are here to serve other people. And again, no particular role is better than another role. We're just all here to serve. So if that means Sweeping, that means sweeping. If it means giving some anesthesia gas, that's what it means. If it means making decisions on technology, that's what it means. So all about humility and service.
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I love that message, really do, and I certainly can resonate and I embrace that. I wish everybody would just remember where they came from, you know?
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Yes, right.
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Staying humble is so important. So I appreciate that. Ed, Ed, you've held C suite roles at major institutions like Cleveland Clinic, New York City Health and hospitals. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned about driving digital transformation in complex healthcare systems?
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Well, you know, it has very little to do with technology and it's really about relationships. I used to always say relationships cover a multitude of sin because the fact is when you do these big transformational type projects, or even small ones, you're going to make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. My team's going to make mistakes. The client, the customer is going to make mistakes. But if you have a good relationship, people are willing to give a lot of grace and mercy, which is really key for success. Otherwise, you know, as soon as there's a little bump in the road, someone might use as an excuse for not progressing, for not transforming. But if you really work hard on developing relationships, when those bumps come and you've already told them they're going to come, then they will be your ally, not your enemy. So I always shared best practice for me, just learn the hard way is really focus on relationships. So it's less about technology and focusing on relationships. I think the second thing, you know, if there's maybe three things, the second one would be having a compelling vision that gets everyone excited. You know, it's one thing to have to do something hard. And both you and I are former military and we know we've been on forced road marches or worse. And if you're doing it just because, oh my gosh, I got to do another 20 mile road march with heavy gear and carrying a weapon and all that sort of thing, man, it's tough. But if you know that it's because you're about to liberate some innocent people, it's a lot easier. So when you have a vision, it makes things easier. So when we're doing big implementations of something, whether it's AI or electronic health record or whatever it might be, if people understand the why, like why are we doing this? What is the vision, then they're more than likely to embrace it, be excited about it, and again, be your ally. And the final thing I learned that is really effective with all sorts of digital transformation is speaking the language of the customer, meaning never use tech talk. I always strive to use the same language of my customer. So clinicians primarily, right. Are a lot of times the internal customer. And if I go in there and talk all sorts of tech jargon, one, they're not going to know. Two, they're going to be maybe intimidated, and three, you're going to automatically therefore put them on the defensive because they don't want to act like they don't know and they're just eyes roll over that sort of thing. But if you speak to them in a clinical context, then they're going to listen and respect you. And so I always worked hard on that. So I've had many times I could tell you, but for the sake of time, you'll have to take my word on it. Where I was doing presentations in the C suite and guests did not know who the CIO was in the room, nor the CMO or the cno because we all spoke each other's language.
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That's amazing. And that's something that I certainly embraced over time as well. You know, if you can speak the business and not the technology, you can relate. Take it down to layman's terms. That's the best. But I like how you highlighted and I'll real quick, three things. Relationships obviously cover a multitude of sins, meaning giving grace and mercy when the bad stuff hits the fan, as they say. But you also mentioned compelling vision that gets people excited, and I think that's so important. And obviously, you know, we did touch on speaking the language of the customer. That's awesome. So, Ed, you've written bestselling books like Voices of Innovation and Healthcare Digital Transformation. What common barriers do you see when it comes to implementing new technology in healthcare? And how can leaders overcome them?
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Yeah, I think there's two that on the top of my head, certainly after I listen to the podcast upon release, you know, I'll think of a couple more. But the ones that come to mind right now as we're sharing is people are busy and it's not that they are afraid of technology or don't want to change, but they're just plain busy. And so you're going to come in and you're going to say, hey, look at this neat thing. And you're going to have to take these training classes and you're going to have to do things differently. And they're thinking to themselves, I'm too busy. I'm already working too much. I'm Missing my family. And now you're going to do this? Now I'm going to throw up every roadblock, unconsciously or consciously, that I can, so that people just turn away. I mean, I just heard a story. I could not believe it. I just heard a story yesterday of a very fine academic medical center that was implementing nothing like massive transformation, just minor transformation. And the pushback from the operations was so severe, they actually stopped. I mean, I had not heard a story like that in a long time, so I was a little shocked. But I think a lot of it is that people are busy. The other thing is we don't include them in that change management. So we just show up one day and kind of maybe we do give them that compelling vision. Hey, everyone, you know, 90 days from now, we're going to do this differently, and here's why. Because it's going to save people's lives, it's going to improve experience, whatever it might be. So let's just say we do that. But then we show up 90 days later is the next time for go live. That's a big mistake. And that's the other thing. So the important lesson here is if you want to get ownership, if you want to get them to even lead the way, and not necessarily, you know, or use the word partner with you, the way is include them. And so bringing them up front, like, hey, here's what we're thinking about. How should we do this? You know your area better. This is what we might have worked for us, you know, at a project a year ago or at a different organization. But how about here? Tell us your opinion. And by the way, so here's the kicker. Would you mind being our champion? Will you lead this? And then you get out of the way. You don't become the face of this transformation. You don't want to be. This is my personal belief, you don't want to be the CIO leading transformation. If the transformation is on a clinical process. I want someone, a clinician to lead that. And I'll be behind them and I'll be helping them create slides. You know, think of human centered design principles, all that kind of stuff. But let them be out front, let them lead the way. Then you're going to get a lot less pushback because they can't point at someone and say, oh, it's those people in the ivory tower. No, it's one of our own. It's Dr. So and so. So that's the other thing.
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That's amazing. And thank you for sharing your experience. Obviously, Some things out of the books that you've written, but yes, people truly are bus. And what I find, Ed, is that really they just, you know, change is hard for people and they don't want something new and major. And, oh, I got to do this extra work as well. A lot of anxiety behind it. But it's important to have good change management, as you mentioned, and bring in the stakeholders early and do some communication and let them lead and be the champion of this. I think that's so, so important. And you and I both learned that, you know, whether it's a $20 million er, EHR implementation or whatever it is, we want the clinicians out there leading the charge. I appreciate that, Ed. Last question of the day. Looking ahead, what innovations or technologies are you most excited about that could radically reshape patient experience and outcomes over the next five years?
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Yeah. So whether or not it's AI that everyone talks about now, or blockchain or what have you, I think it's going to happen in three primary areas. So I'm not so much focused on the actual tech as I am. What is it that we're going to radically transform? What's the promise of the technology to do these things? And I think one is the coming center and forefront with voice. So everything's going to start to be voice driven. And you're seeing some of that early now already in a variety of industries, certainly healthcare, even my pcp. I had my physical last week and she was using her phone, which was doing all the recording, so she had a hundred percent eye contact with me. And then I talked to her about it afterwards, obviously, because she knows who I am and I know who she is. And she just talked about how it improved her lifestyle because she has a lot less pajama time or working on a computer after hours, just trying to catch up on notes. She has a better rapport of patients, and I think that's the way we're going. And it's going to go the same way on the patient side. And I've seen this in the OR as well. I served a shift in the OR when I was in Cleveland Clinic, and I know what it's like and how it can be vastly improved through voice commands and having the system make sure that you're hitting all of your checklists and things like that in order to ensure a great outcome. So voice is going to continue to be huge, you know, even voice, to the point that there's some technology already where through voice you can tell or predict that someone is going to have some sort of, you know, horrific health event. So that's cool though because it's way early warning. So that's, that's an area, I think hyper personalization. You know, today in healthcare especially we don't personalize very much and we really should. And we're seeing great personalization in other industries like the consumer industries, travel industries, where they know who you are and you don't have to keep telling them all the time your different pieces of information and all the annoyance that goes with it. And so I think we're going to see hyper personalization not just with the basic interactions but also the more complex patient interactions. So instead of you and I, if we both went in for the same complaint, they would just logically give us both the same prescription and the same dose. Now with hyper personalization in the future they will know have our genetics already, our DNA, they'll know deeply our family history, they'll know a wide variety of things that they can't compute on their own but in the background that can be computed including new things that you share in real time about your situation. And so the clinician will be prompted for best next question and continue to dig down but using all this AI capabilities in the background to help them really personalize what not only your diagnosis is. But again back to my really poor example, what your prescription might be and it'll be different than mine now as a result. So it's no longer this, hey, everyone is treated the same. We have one sort of care template, but no, it's going to be hyper personalized which should lead to better outcomes and better experience. So that's another area and maybe the third one and I think there's a lot, but another big one is virtual care. So we've seen a lot of early promise. I think people are getting more comfortable with it. We're seeing better reimbursement models come out, especially when it comes to value based care. So I think we're going to see a lot more of virtual care. And again I think it when done right and leveraging all these modern technologies, we can be better predictors of oh, that person's going to have a fall. So you don't have to be there. You know, you can tell via the camera, you can tell again via voice, a lot of different things. So I think we're going to see more and more of the virtual care coming out and again leveraging all of these new capabilities and technology. So I think those are three super exciting areas. There's more but that encompasses quite a bit that will touch pretty much everyone.
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That's awesome. Thank you. And I just want to highlight the three things. I think they're so important. You know, we talk about AI all the time and a lot of other technologies, but you're absolutely right. If we can get more time facetime with the patient, these our providers using voice driven or voice centralized types of technology, then they don't have to be at home for three hours doing their their notes, of course. And then hyper personalization. Oh my gosh. I'm telling you, in the consumer retail market, they've got it down. Healthcare always lags behind. I feel as a tech technology, healthcare CIO and I see this, but I know we're trying to get up to par and this would be huge for both patients and the providers. And lastly, virtual care. You're right, we're getting there. I know it's going to be faster, better, cheaper, more improved by leveraging some of the technology in the virtual care space. So I really appreciate your insights And Ed, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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Yeah, thank you for having me. And thanks for what you do with your podcast. I learn a lot from it. Thank you.
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Bye for now.