Key Takeaways
- Adopt a product-led, patient-first strategy that solves real clinical workflows rather than building technology for its own sake.
In a healthcare landscape shaped by rising costs, an aging population, and technology advancing faster than policy, leaders are under pressure to create solutions that actually move the needle. But how do you build healthcare technology that’s more than just a buzzword? How do you turn innovation into real impact—at scale? In this episode of the American Journal of Healthcare Strategy podcast, I sat down with Jamey Edwards, MBA, President & Chief Strategy Officer of Cairns Health, to dissect what separates meaningful innovation from the noise. Edwards, a serial social impact entrepreneur and former investment banker, pulls no punches: he’s been on both sides of the boardroom, led technology pivots, and grown mission-driven companies—all while wrestling with the hard truths of U.S. healthcare. If you want to learn what it actually takes to create tech that matters in today’s environment, read on.
Why would a successful investment banker leave Wall Street to build healthcare startups? According to Edwards, it wasn’t the plan—but it became the mission.
The transition from private equity to healthcare wasn’t about a loss of opportunity in finance, but rather a growing conviction. “As you get older, you’re just exposed to everything that’s kind of wrong in the healthcare system,” Edwards explains. Family connections (his sister, a physician; uncles and aunts in medicine) opened his eyes, but real understanding came from consulting for his uncle’s ER practice. “I always knew in the back of my head that I wanted to be a Founder. I became addicted to…taking an idea in your head, making it real, making it matter to people in a positive way and have it impact them.”
But healthcare is uniquely broken: from the U.S. physician shortage to healthcare as the leading cause of bankruptcy, the problems are both personal and systemic. Edwards frames the stakes in plain terms:
Patient Experience: “How can we treat patients like data points as opposed to the unique story that they are?”
Clinician Burnout: “How can we treat doctors like consumables that we as the patient get to use up as opposed to…another human being…?”
Systemic Scale: “It was going to take a village…maybe a city or the whole world…to fix the issues.”
Key Takeaway: If you’re considering your next move as a leader, the biggest impact may be found in solving the hardest problems. For Edwards, that meant turning down the “millions” of banking for the mission of healthcare entrepreneurship.
What does Cairns Health do, and how does technology translate into patient impact? Edwards gives us the product leader’s blueprint.
Cairns Health—formerly CoCo Health—is more than an AI startup. Under Edwards and CEO Andrew Ritter, the company pivoted from a simple fall-detection radar to a holistic digital care enablement platform. Their solution:
Ambient Sensing: Radar detects patient activity and sleep, without wearables.
AI-Driven Interventions: Large language models and audio signals inform a “cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia using the intelligent ambient sensing.”
Care Plan Simplification: The result is “an AI companion that takes really complex care plans, makes them simple, and delivers them to the bedside.”
Behavioral Health Integration: Addressing loneliness and mental health for seniors.
The product strategy is explicit: “We’re not an AI-first business; we now consider ourselves a Patient First business and a caregiver first business and a clinical team first business. That’s how you solve these problems in healthcare.”
Direct questions, direct answers:
How much domain knowledge did Edwards need? “Candidly…still coming up to speed every day…drinking from the fire hose on some of these intelligent ambient sensing technologies and how they work.”
How do they keep learning? Through “codevelopment partnerships” with health systems, securing NIH grants, and building with—rather than for—their users.
Key Features of Cairns Health’s Innovation Approach:
Start with user problems, not cool tech.
Collaborate with real health systems (NIH grant, Alzheimer’s use cases, remote patient monitoring).
Build scalable, regulatory-compliant solutions.
Focus on impact, not investor hype.
What’s the difference between “product-led” and “technology-led” companies, and why does it matter in healthcare?
Edwards is clear: a product-led company solves real user problems, while a tech-led company builds for the sake of building. “There are a lot of great technologies…that are like, ‘this is an amazing tech,’ and it never gets deployed.” The graveyard of unused healthcare tech is a warning for leaders:
Product-Led Innovation:
Begins with customer pain points and real clinical workflows.
Works with end-users throughout the process.
Measures success by adoption and outcomes.
Technology-Led Pitfalls:
Builds solutions looking for a problem.
Chases the AI “gold rush,” often for investor optics (“There’s some AI-washing that’s happening…unless AI is a huge driver…you can’t really classify yourself as an AI business.”)
Lacks real-world impact and staying power.
For health systems and vendors alike, the lesson is harsh but necessary: unless the product answers a true clinical or operational need, it won’t scale.
Can you build a billion-dollar healthcare company without making the exit your primary goal? Edwards says yes—and argues you must.
Referencing the Theranos scandal and startup culture, Edwards challenges the “exit slide” mindset: “I never include exit slides…in any of my decks. I find them to be the most annoying slide in an investor deck…If you build a great company, exit opportunities present themselves. If you build a great company, clients want to work with you.”
Principles for Mission-Driven Growth:
“The goal is never to build a billion-dollar company. It might be to impact a billion patients…that’d be a better goal in a positive way.”
Focus on making employees’ work meaningful through mission.
Let market opportunities (including exits) follow naturally.
For founders and executive leaders:
Investors care about impact and sustainability as much as they do about financial returns—especially in healthcare.
Build a business that employees and clients want to join, not just one that’s easy to sell.
How can founders and leaders avoid the “roller coaster” of isolation in healthcare entrepreneurship? For Edwards, Startup Health is the answer.
Startup Health is more than an accelerator; it’s what Edwards calls a “global Army of Health Transformers.” His company, Cloudbreak Health, was part of this network before merging into a SPAC. Edwards is now an Entrepreneur in Residence, coaching others through the ups and downs.
Startup Health’s Model:
Multi-year, longitudinal support (not a 12-week bootcamp).
Community focused on 15+ “moonshots” (e.g., Alzheimer’s, Type 1 Diabetes).
Access to impact boards of industry experts.
Emphasis on founder mindset, peer support, and shared learning.
“All great business is about great storytelling,” Edwards notes. Building a mission-driven business is as much about creating a narrative employees, clients, and partners want to join, as it is about the tech.
Why is healthcare innovation so hard for large nonprofit systems? Edwards pulls no punches: most are stuck in a system that punishes risk and underfunds change.
“This current fee-for-service environment…is not built for innovation.”
Large, profitable systems (e.g., Advocate Aurora, Intermountain, Kaiser) can allocate resources to innovation. Most others—urban, rural, safety-net hospitals—cannot.
“Turns out, a lot of care ends up being rejected even though it was already given…doctors on the front lines are thinking they’re doing what’s right for patients without regard to reimbursement, and then reimbursement…turns out to be a problem.”
Barriers to Innovation in Health Systems:
Underfunded Care: Thin margins prevent real R&D investment.
Regulatory and Political Gridlock: Innovation is held hostage by payment models and policy inertia.
Focus on Survival: “The lay Community Hospital…literally just focused every day on survival, has a problem with innovation and they might need innovation more than anybody else.”
Is Value-Based Care the Solution?
Edwards believes in value-based care, but penetration remains low: “We’ve been talking about value-based care for like 30 years and we’re like five or ten percent penetrated.”
Core challenges: risk aversion, lack of resources, and entrenched legacy systems (especially EMRs, which “intermediate the relationship with the patient” and create “user experience [that] sucks” for clinicians).
What Works?
Integrated models like Kaiser Permanente, which innovate in care delivery, not just technology.
Making tech easier to use, interoperable, and aligned with clinical workflow.
How do you lead transformation—especially as a new executive—without burning bridges? Edwards advocates for patience, transparency, and servant leadership.
“Change management is always such a big problem,” he notes, particularly when new leaders arrive en masse. Edwards’ playbook is clear:
1. Start With Listening:
“The first thing I always like to do is go in and listen…interview everybody. What were their challenges? What did they like about how the organization was previously run? What could be improved?”
Transparent sharing of survey results builds early trust.
2. Set a 30-60-90 Day Plan:
“The hardest thing to be is patient…sticking with that 30-60-90 day plan.”
Communicate intentions, then observe before acting.
3. Servant Leadership, Not Authoritarianism:
“My leadership style was to be a servant-oriented leader…helping all of you do your job, not just do your job but succeed in your careers.”
Make your role about enabling, not dictating.
4. Build Bidirectional Communication:
Ongoing town halls, transparency, and real follow-up.
5. Storytelling as Culture-Building:
“We’ve built a story that these employees really want to be a part of…and that gives them true meaning in their work.”
For administrative fellows and new executives: This approach works. Avoid the “bull in a china shop” mentality. Build trust, model patience, and give people a story—and a mission—to follow.
Healthcare innovation isn’t about technology for its own sake. As Jamey Edwards, MBA, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Cairns Health, demonstrates, true impact comes from solving real problems—patient by patient, workflow by workflow. Mission-driven companies that put user needs above investor optics, embrace change management as an act of service, and leverage community support like Startup Health will set the new standard. The lesson for today’s healthcare leaders? Money follows mission. If you want to create technology that matters, start by building trust, listening deeply, and telling a story people want to join.
<p>hello everyone this is Cole from the American Journal of healthc care strategy I'm joined with a very special guest uh this afternoon Jamie Edwards Jamie please introduce yourself Cole great to be here um I am the current President Chief uh president and chief strategy officer at a company called Coco home we're going through a rebranding so the company will soon be called Karen's Health but at my core I'm a Serial social impact entrepreneur have founded and led multiple companies in healthcare um especially in around Health Equity and previously was also a private equity and investment banker so I have a lot of investment expertise as well to [Music] share I really appreciate you coming on uh you know you and me have talked uh once previously offline and and really great conversation and so I I knew right away I wanted to have you on you know you're LinkedIn presence people love the content that you're posting on there so I really do appreciate it I want to ask you know you talk about Investment Banking you're clearly a good leader because you're involved with organizations at a very high level people speak very highly of you why did you go into Healthcare instead of you know making the millions in Investment Banking such a good question I don't know coming out of like undergrad Cole that I ever expected to be in healthcare um I have aunts and uncles on both sides that are Physicians my sister is a physician and I think over time as you get older you're just exposed to everything that's kind of wrong in the Health Care System um and so when I was a banker I started doing some Consulting work for my uncle and digging in with him on his emergency room practice and learning um kind of cutting my teeth if you will on the provider side of healthc care and seeing all the challenges that they faced every day and it made me want to be able like as I I always knew in the back of my head that I wanted to be a Founder I wanted to build companies of impact um in college when I wrote my first business plan in my entrepreneurship course I was like oh my God the power of being a Founder like taking an idea in your head making it real making it matter to people in a positive way and have it impact them uh and improve their lives like I became addicted to like that concept and so I knew I always wanted to do it I just didn't think I'd be doing it in healthare but the more exposure that I had to healthare uh and the more work that I did with family members and the more exposure that I had to it I realized there were just so many problems to fix and the system was so big and it's such a scale um that it was going to take a village uh more than a village maybe a city or a whole country or the whole world um to fix the issues that kind of beset the Health Care System you know how can we treat uh patients like data points as opposed to the unique story that they are how can we treat doctors like consumables that we as the patient get get to use up as opposed to again another human being is trying to take care of us that we can team with um to make our care better and improve our own health and I think there's just base problems like that when we have a nationwide crisis in a physician shortage and healthare being the number one cause of bankruptcy um those are glaring glaring issues that something's wrong and I wanted to be a part of the solution it is impressive because you you set out to do that investment banking and then you you had this beautiful motiv to improve people's lives and you found kind of an interesting mix of of this entrepreneurship and strategy and Finance in working with organizations you of course went to Cornell for undergrad and then you got your MBA there as well yep um so so it makes it makes sense and and you've been a CEO board of directors president you've had all kinds of roles culminating in in where you are now right can you explain what your role is and what the company does sure so so uh I'm the President Chief strategy officer I'm basically in charge of product roadmap marketing operations um I work with my partner who is the CEO of the business gentleman named Andrew Ritter who was an entrepreneur and Residence at Coastal Ventures and he had worked uh with Veno to turn around one other company prior um this is his second company that he is working with it was a um uh Coastal Ventures portfolio company and the company was basically a incubation ground for really interesting technology that venod thought could impact the world and so they started working initially on a technology that um was a radar device for patient falls so using uh with you know not wearing a wearable not wearing an accelerometer around your wrist or a ring or anything like that being able to detect a patient fall um in somebody's home and then they pivoted that business model or that idea and said what else could we use the radar for and they ended up landing on a sleep solution um and we all know how important sleep is on a daily basis and how it rejuvenates us and they were able to use that radar to detect sleep stages and when people get in and out of bed and track that type of information and they actually created a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia using the intelligent ambient sensing so the radar and the audio mixed with a large language model that would then intervene based on putting the patient in context and so they eventually said well now it's time to commercialize those Technologies and so Andrew and I came in uh did in asset evaluation and said wow we're on to some really interesting things here but what are the two most important Trends in healthc care today and that first Trend was a rapidly aging population without enough people to take care of them uh and the second trend is the home is a center a locus of care so we said what could we do using this Tech and how could we deploy it in a way that helped us address those two main Trends and that was really um what allowed us to end up with what we're calling our digital care enablement platform and creating an AI companion that takes really complex care plans makes them simple and delivers them to the bedside for the patient and the whole idea and this is a big thing for venod was to also use the platform to help address mental and behavioral health issues so things like loneliness of the seniors and making them feel connected but really it's about taking this complexity in our health care System breaking it down into behavioral nudges so that patients can adhere to their very complex care plans these are not uh simple Technologies and and I think because of that they they have this huge capability for impact but they're not simple how much domain knowledge did you have to have about or have you had to to gain about radar and you know physics and how how it interacts with technology yeah candidly coal still coming up to speed every day right like drinking from the fire hose on you know some of these intelligent ambient sensing Technologies and how they work I think what's always separated my career I think from some others is that I've always been you know once I got into Healthcare I was like a healthcare product person first I believe in product L businesses um and so when we started here at CoCo uh Karen the idea was we were going to go to the market and not build a solution that we thought the market needed but rather work with the market in collaboration to build solutions that they would actually use and so one of our initial goals or the main rocks that we were trying to achieve in the first two quarters was to go out and secure codevelopment Partnerships um and so we went out to do that and we've signed Cod development Partnerships we ended up securing an NIH Grant in partnership with a company called IDL uh to work with Indiana University Health on building out an Alzheimer's use case on the platform uh we are working with a company in the RPM and CCM space to help build engagement with their patient base which is a huge problem um in that sector and then we're working with a senior care uh company uh to help people stay in independent living for longer and so it wasn't so much about me learning radar and technically how it worked it was learning about what the capabilities of that technology was and how I could deploy them against a problem set in the space and so I definitely have been drinking from the fire hose and learning about millimeter waves and chirps and what the radar actually sees and the algorithms and the signal processing that it takes to then take that noise and turn it into signal um and then turn that signal into an insight and that insight into something that happens and it can you know really builds value on the front line of patient care so what I'll tell you is the learning curve was steep but it's more about learning what the capabilities of the technology are and then relying on the amazing team that we have to actually deploy that technology in a way that is reliable and scalable yep that makes a lot of sense you mentioned how you believe in product Le uh businesses what's the opposite of that in your mind I think there's different types of businesses that are out there I think you know the main two is like you end up sometimes with engineering Le businesses or technology Le businesses where someone says Hey we've got this super cool technology let's continue to deploy that and I think you know it's it's kind of like technology finding a solution as opposed to finding out a problem that really needs to be solved and then finding the right Technologies to deploy in that situation and that's more of a product L approach so um you know I think it's great to develop technology for technology sake and push AI as far as it can go and to develop you know a widget that does X Y and Z but I think it's much more powerful because there's a lot of great Technologies Cole I'm sure you've seen this over and over again that are like this is an amazing Tech and it never gets deployed yeah right and it doesn't see the light of day or it doesn't achieve the impact it could have because no one took the next step of being like well great what's the solution that we're actually trying to solve for here and so for me a product Le company looks for that solution first works with the market really finds out what the market needs and how it can impact the most people in a positive way and then uses that as the driver of the technology as opposed to vice versa why do you think we've seen the rise in that other type where a lot of companies are creating you know chat Bots or and some of which are useful but it seems like the majority of of them are not right and and so that's kind of just utilizing technology just for the sake of utilizing a technology yeah I think it's such a good question I think it's getting easier and easier to experiment with these Technologies and roll them out even as a lay person um you know I have some friends that are like hey check out the cool chatbot I built and I'm like it's actually really impressive to see what they've been able to do in such a short period of time or using a certain platform to build out you know an AI agent but I think there's just more to it than that and if you're going to build something that's reliable and scalable has proper guard rails in place so it can't be misused um adheres to all of the appropriate regulations especially here in health care um has a proper perspective on safety like it takes more than just a cool technology to do that um but I think people seen it look there's an AI Gold Rush happening right now right and uh we talked about a little bit of this preall there's like some ai ai washing that's happening where people are you know might take a business that uses a small piece of AI as a piece of it and they're like we're an AI company um but unless AI is a huge driver of what you're doing I don't think you can really classify yourself as an AI business and while AI is definitely a key part of what we do we use AI machine learning large language models um intelligent ambient sensing with radar and audio all sorts of different things we really don't consider ourselves an AI business we consider ourselves to be um you know a care plan company and a you know a patient engagement solution and you know a clinical operating system so while we're integrating those things and while you know the new website definitely is like you know karen.</p> <p>um because Karen health.com was unavailable um you know we don't consider ourselves an AI first business we now consider ourselves a Patient First business and a caregiver first business and a clinical team first business like that's how you solve these problems in healthcare there definitely is two different approaches right I mean I know coming out of business school a lot of people have the goal of just getting acquired right when they when they create a startup and so it seems like that that is not necessarily compatible with with what you're saying right because yeah we uh we we can't only please our investors instead you're really trying to please the patient do you feel like at large the economy and this has been a debate on going for years I'm sure that this was discussed back when you were um in your NBA program how can we have businesses that are publicly traded especially Healthcare organizations where the duty is to the shareholder but at the same time the primary focus is is on the patient like your business you know what um it's an interesting question and the first thing I'll say is like I don't know do you remember the whole Theros debacle that happened right if you watched I thought there was some great content that was produced on you know Netflix and Hulu with the documentaries and the fictionalized documentaries but one of the things that was consistent between them is Elizabeth Holmes it seemed always had the goal of like building a billion dollar company like that was her goal right and so she found a mechanism that she thought was interesting to achieve that goal which was the drop of blood and that was what was going to Revol iiz the world um you know whether it's true or not I think the right way to go about it is and we talk about this a little bit actually a lot at startup Health where I'm an entrepreneur in Resident where I coach and Mentor Founders is That Money Follows mission right and so if you're there and you do want to like I never include exit slides as an example in any of my decks I find them to be the most annoying slide in a investor deck is when someone's already talking about their exit opportunities or how they would exit the business like it's kind of irrelevant if you bu build a great company exit opportunities present themselves if you build a great company clients want to work with you if you build a great company that has a story bigger than itself employees want to work with you so for me the focus is on really achieving your mission and using that mission to make people's work meaningful and if you successfully do that and you build that impact in the market then those exit opportunities present themselves so the goal is never to build a billion dollar company it might be to impact a billion patients like that'd be a better goal in a positive way right so I think that's the right way to go about it remember that you know Money Follows Mission it always happens like that I couldn't agree more no excellent advice as well for individuals you know like myself really Founders how did you get involved with startup health and and what exactly is startup health so one of the previous companies that I founded cloudbreak Health which was a Health Equity solution we uh delivered language service language interpreters to the point of care of limited English proficient and Def and heart of hearing patients and we did that you know grew the company at you know 3,000 hospitals across the country and a millions of minutes a month of usage across 250 plus languages the whole goal there was that I was going to something called the startup Health festival and I saw this great community of people that I really wanted to be a part of and so we applied to Startup health and it is a community of Health Transformers they refer to them as a global Army of Health Transformers who are focused on solving the world's greatest Healthcare challenges or health health and wellness challenges um and finding solutions for them and so there are 15 plus different Moon shots the latest two moonshots one is type 1 diabetes the other is Alzheimer's and Dementia care um and these moonshots the whole idea is it takes a village to solve these problems and that you solve them with great collaboration and there wasn't a venue really in healthcare until startup Health came along for people to do that and So within this community you join um and it very much serves as a longitudinal accelerator so they're multi-year programs as opposed to 12we programs and you can join the community and be with other like-minded people who help support your founder Journey so if you take a look at someone's founder Journey it's not a hockey stick right it's a series of roller coasters with the bottom of the roller Co or the top of the roller coaster being your Milestone and once you hit your milstone you realize there's more work to do and so you dive back down to doing the work and and doing the hard stuff so these you know especially with startup Health like they're focused on making sure that their Founders maintain their mindset uh which is a really key and important thing that Founders don't pay enough attention to um they make sure that Founders feel supported that they're educated that they're networked and connected with people who can help them make an impact in their space so the type 1 diabetes um and uh Alzheimer's moonshots both have impact boards those impact boards are made up of movers and shakers in the industry that can help open doors give great advice Mentor coach and do all those different types of things so that's really the purpose of startup health and startup Health has over you know almost 500 companies that have gone through the program uh or in the portfolio and um it's really incredible to see how they work together to create a brighter future for everybody wonderful well I'm gonna have to look into that and by the way cloudbreak was one of those portfolio companies right before we merged it uh into a spack and sold it so um you know that I saw off firsthand the value that startup Health brought to my company and so I was very focused on then you know once I sold going back and kind of paying paying it forward and so I went back to Startup Health to do that became an eir wow I am going to after the show now uh have to look look into this because you know I'm I Want To Be A Serial entrepreneur uh for impact and so I think that's uh seems like an excellent opportunity and of course we'll we'll link to this as well for anyone else who's interested and of course link to your company uh a lot of our guests are in the health system space in the hospital space um you know clearly hospitals are they're trying to solve a problem so in a way they're problem L but at the same time sometimes they get caught up in other areas one of those areas again as we mentioned is AI it was a little disappointing sometimes to see hospitals not always using AI for the most impactful area sometimes they themselves create um and spend resources on on projects that don't have the most meaning what do you think hospitals and Health Systems can do to embrace true Innovation like what your organization is doing is that even possible for nonprofit institutions with 40 or 50,000 employees yeah look it's such a good question I think there are Health Systems out there that do a great job of innovating um you know Advocate Aurora Advocate Aurora Atrium you know that organization is well known for their Innovation um Inner Mountain in you know Utah is known for their Innovation I think actually Kaiser um is fairly Innovative and their Innovation is necessarily on technology but it's on their care model and I think the world could learn a lot from you know that integrated care model and how they take care of their patients and that's why their latest initiative rise in health I think is particularly interesting as well but the lay Community Hospital who's not Providence or Ascension or you know any one of those Orcs that can't afford to deploy technology and is literally just focused every day on Survival right um has a problem with Innovation and they might need Innovation more than anybody else but like can they afford it and is the health system and the reimbursement system more importantly built around Innovation and for me the answer to that is no right this current fee for service environment that we have is not built for Innovation and um you know it's like payers make it so difficult to be compensated for care um you know a lot of care ends up being rejected even though it was already given um and doctors on the front lines are thinking they're doing what's right for patients without regard to reimbursement and then reimbursement on the back end ends to be a problem so uh turns out to be a problem so I think for me it's like if you really want hospitals this I mean we spent Cole $4.8 trillion dollar on healthc care last year like that's a staggering number I think it's half of all the world's Healthcare spend happens here in the United States man don't you think we can do better um by incre like there's good care in the United States it's just not equally distributed and the same is true of the technology that's implemented in these hospitals some of these facilities have incredible technology but others don't um and it's really important that we make sure that we kind of level that playing field over time I think value based care can really help make that happen but we've been talking about value based care for like 30 years and we're like five or 10% penetrated with value based care so still a big opportunity there uh but I would tell you that a lot of these hospitals and Health Systems you know can't afford to innovate in the way that we would like do you think that that is why we can't Implement value based care like we would like is because there's that worry that hospitals won't be able to innovate to meld with it I think a lot of the reasons that value based care hasn't gotten as much traction as we would like is like the Health Care System itself is like super risk averse so that's an innovation problem in and of itself like how do we build a culture of innovation in a hospital and you know you might want to have rasu Shrea on from Advocate a Aurora who's their Chief strategy officer over there to talk about how he has successfully built an innovation culture there um but I think to build an innovation culture you have to be a profitable health system that has the ability to allocate resources in that way it is much much more difficult for inner city Urban hospitals or hospitals that are super rural that have tough pay mixes to innovate and as a result like everyone's just using the funding mechanisms that are in place and I think by the way you also have the added complication that it takes a fair amount of political conviction right somewhere in our government to change the things that are broken in the system and you know we have Obamacare in the ACA but that only went so far and so how do you take the next step well no president really since then has really had healthc care as like a major Focus there have been other battles to fight even during covid covid was the focus not broader healthare right right um and during covid we saw a lot of investment in digital Health companies and Innovation you know going through the roof during that time period but now we're back down to pre-co levels so what does it say about all the Innovation that happened during that time frame and all those companies that had solutions that weren't adopted and everything that goes around it I just think right now also hospitals are focused on their electronic medical records yeah which to me is a double-edged sword like objectively you can see the value of a electronic medical record but when you talk to doctors who use them they're like the user experience sucks and I feel like it slows me down and it intermediates my relationship with the patient because Cole instead of me looking at you and talking to you I'm logging something in the EMR over here and yes there are now ai scribes and things of that nature which are making that experience better but all the data is locked up in these electronic medical records in interoperability is still a challenge and I think those are the obstacles to Value based care those are the obstacles to us all collaborating together around a patient to make their life better I mean we have a lot of Regulation not enough finances and technology that currently is really hard to use yeah it's it's prohibitively expensive as well because yes yes I when people talk about like how much a health system has spent to impl epic you're like what it's like it's a big number I was going to say yeah when you yeah it's and and you have you can't pick and choose either you have to implement all of Epic in kind of everywhere right yeah because that lack of interoperability yeah shifting gears I'll I'll ask a a final you know question or two but it's it's about you know you were talking about political will in the political system I want to ask about political will within the organization yeah so Coco Health it' been around for you said five or so years before you came in y your your role there requires you to innovate and it requires you to make changes right that's why um you know you you're brought in as the President Chief strategy officers to strategize y it's challenging especially for maybe a lot of our audience who are administrative fellows heading into their new role in the health system you want to make a name for yourself you want to make positive changes you want to be good at your job but at the same time you don't want to steamroll people you so how is there any tips on how you've navigated coming into organizations and making positive changes without being overbearing or steamrolling anyone yeah it's such a good question and change management Cole is always like such a big problem and anytime um a new I mean we had not only a new me but a new CEO as well right so a lot of changes at the senior level of this or is they moved from almost like incubation lab to commercialization engine and those changes like people don't like change right even even technology software coders like don't like change right so from that perspective um we had to spend a lot of time setting up a new innovation culture and like what does that look like well I wanted to have a 30 60 90day plan so that I was patient because I think a lot of times you come in and you're like we're gonna change this and do this and you come in like a bull in the china shop and you're like just shaking things up and you want to get things on track and you want to put your stamp on the org and I think organizations are made up of not just you or me but a lot of people and it's really important to the first thing I always like to do is go in and listen right go in interview everybody what were their challenges what did they like about what how the organization was previously run what think could be improved and then try and be really transparent about it so we got here and the first thing we did was like do an employee survey and we were public about the disclosure of what everybody said um so being transparent I think is a really important thing and then I made it very clear to everybody early on that like my leadership style was to be a servant oriented leader like I believe in that or an enlightened leader which is like the next level of servant oriented leadership and so for me I was like I view my role here as helping all of you do your job like not and by the way not just do your job but like succeed in your careers yeah right so laying this groundwork to let them know that I was there to support them like I wasn't an author authoritarian regime from that perspective um and you know change takes time and the hardest thing to be is patient so sticking with that 30 60 90day plan I try to be patient I'll will tell you even now seven months in we're still doing that really hard work we still have town halls with the team where they're giving us feedback on things that you know we that they didn't like that we did and things that they like that we did and I think it's just important to keep that bidirectional communication open to build trust TR because I think that's one of the most important things is like hey we trust you guys to do your job you trust us to do ours and to build that followership and we tend to build that followership at least in the style of me and Andrew the CEO and letting people know that we're we're there to help them and that uh that patience is even more challenging when you're you know two years into your career compared to the 20 uh years of experience that you have so yeah because you see what needs to be done right and you just want to go out there and do it but sometimes that's not the right instinct to follow um and I think the other thing is like all great business and I've given this advice over and over again at startup Health all great business is about great storytelling like if we're doing our job here at CoCo Kens like the idea is we've built a story that these employees really want to be a part of and they can get behind that really gives them true meaning in their work um we've built a story that really resonates with clients and shows them that we're really helping them move the needle for their patients or their caregivers or the clinical team so we're very much focused on like what that story is and and how it falls into the mission and how that can drive meaning for our team wow uh I'm very impressed I have I have notes and uh you know of course we're gonna take the transcript of this and it'll give me even more notes um but I really appreciate this uh I I know this is recorded for our audience but it's almost like a a personal mentoring session as well and I I really do deeply appreciate it I hope that we can have you back on we're going to link to all of your organizations and your LinkedIn here uh and then you know that way people can can check out the work that you're doing but I couldn't be more appreciative for you spending you know half hour of your time with me today Cole super grateful thanks for hosting what are very important conversations and I'm looking forward to you know I learned stuff from you here as well so looking forward to Future collaboration learning more from you too and if people want to engage with me yeah linkedin's a great place to do it um but if anyone has questions about what we do they can fire me an email or hit me up on LinkedIn or come to our website I'm sure a lot of people are going to take you up on that so be be careful careful yeah no worries no worries okay</p>
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