Building Strong Partnerships in Healthcare Innovation
In the rapidly changing landscape of healthcare technology, effective collaboration between innovative companies and healthcare organizations is essential. Eric Yablonka emphasizes the importance of identifying key decision-makers and finding sponsors who understand the proposed solutions. He shares his experience with early adopters of wireless systems, noting that being in the right place with the right solution can enhance success. While financial constraints and staffing challenges remain, the industry is increasingly open to advanced technologies. As organizations recognize the potential for these innovations to improve clinical outcomes and patient experiences, aligning with the right partners becomes crucial for transformative change.
Listen to Narinder Singh and Eric Yablonka discuss advice for collaborating effectively with external innovators to enhance healthcare technology adoption, highlighting the importance of building relationships, identifying key decision-makers, and aligning solutions with organizational needs.
Video Transcript
Narinder Singh:
Related to that, you talked a lot about the internal partnership. What about the external? What advice do you have for companies like look Deep or others on the partnership with outside innovators trying to bring new thinking, new capabilities and how that partnership can be most aligned and moved as efficiently as possible
Eric Yablonka:
As an advisor and a mentor for startup companies, I can tell you the number one question is who is the decision maker and how do I get to talk to that person? And of course the answer is it varies and I think the biggest challenge there is for innovative companies is to really find a sponsor in the organization, someone that might pull you through and it can be an IT or it can be in the operating side or the clinical side, but to help pull you through. And it’s not unusual to try things out or to experiment with things. I think that is whether they be proof of concepts, POCs or just early adopter types of opportunities. I picked a vendor in the mid two thousands, put in one of the first wireless distribution systems in a hospital. We were their second customer I believe in the us and we really looked at as game changing and we were building a new hospital and the idea of building it in versus adding it on was just perfect timing. So I think being in the right place at the right time also has something to do with innovators who are trying to solve problems and being in the right place at the right time means you’re solving the problem they want you to solve, not the problem you’re trying to sell.
Narinder Singh:
It reminds me of, there’s one of these movies where the character’s superpower is good luck and good timing and we don’t often think about that. We think about how fast our system works or some great AI piece, but this notion of being in the right place at the right time with the solution the hospital wants versus what you’re trying to push I think is an insightful one. Eric, this has been great first of all, but I would be remiss if I didn’t end by asking the kind of zingers that you can only ask a retired CIO, the things your colleagues won’t go through and talk about. And I’ll be equally frank. So I came from a career outside of healthcare, helped Salesforce and Google and Workday move the cloud computing revolution along and Mark Benioff used to say very often, that crazy bar I believe from the sun founders, less happens in a year than you think.
More happens in a decade than you can imagine. I think from outside of healthcare we then asterisk that accept in healthcare we think that your apps are antiquated, that you lag behind other industries in adoption and we know that patients are riskier, we got to be more careful, but it feels sometimes like that’s an excuse for an action. I’d love to get your thoughts on what do you think are the good reasons and the bad reasons that healthcare seems to lag behind other industries in adoption of these kind of mega trends, whether they be cloud or mobile and now to be determined with ai,
Eric Yablonka:
Right? That’s a really good, that’s a question that’s been asked for a very long time. We’ve talked about budgets and how those can be a constraint in adopting new technology or the vendors could be the constraint in adopting new technology. You can go back eight years and I don’t know how many very few cloud-based EMRs were available or hosts for EMRs that you could work with. I mean that was sort of talk of the future and now I can’t imagine anybody who’s really pining to put in new servers and host build out a data center. At least today, a couple years ago it might’ve been a different story. So the technology is different, the world is different, but the constraints are still the, we started out talking about financial constraints, staffing issues, and those constraints really make it very hard for an organization to come up with a hundred million dollars to forklift an EMR making the number up but $50 million or to put in the latest and greatest digital pathology systems, which drive huge storage costs.
I mean an organization has to really understand the implications of the technology and why it. With that said, all we read about in healthcare these days, at least all that I get from the various news sources I get is around the changing technology in healthcare and the enablement of advanced capabilities. The industry has seen this before digital imaging was brought up, I brought that up earlier. It’s a good example of something where the early adopters, I remember working with companies called Laurel, bought by ge, Fuji Medical and others, just great companies, but people were loathed to buy digital imaging systems. The technology was a little slow, storage was expensive, et cetera, et cetera. Today, not a lot of film. Occasionally you go in doctor’s office and see the film box on the wall, but not a lot of film anymore, even though you still have to take your CD when you’re going from one place to another. But digital imaging is a great example of where it was. I don’t know if we can afford it. I don’t know if we can do it to, I’m a radiologist, I don’t work without it.
Period. End of story. So there’s not going to be a no to these kinds of advanced capabilities in the hospitals. It’s going to be a yes end. Yes. And how can I improve the performance of my organization from a clinical outcomes perspective? Yes, how can I improve my financial performance? Yes. How can I prevent burnout from my physicians, nurses, and other staff? Yes, how can I really differentiate myself from other organizations with the patient experience? I think there’ll be a lot of yeses, but getting to the right decision maker is always a challenge and understanding how you can quickly add value and meet the promise in the sales cycle will mean everything to the healthcare organization.
Narinder Singh:
Couldn’t agree more. Let me push on that a little bit more with the story. Sure.