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Bill Russell: [00:00:00] Today's episode is brought to you by Abridge. There's no secret that care teams spend too much time on documentation before, during, and after patient visits. Abridge transforms clinical conversations into complete, compliant and accurate notes in real time. Integrated directly into the EHR workflows.

With linked evidence, every part of the note maps back to the source conversation, so clinicians can quickly trust and verify what they're signing. It works across care settings, specialties and languages, and has been shown in peer reviewed academic research to reduce documentation, burden and clinician burnout.

See how leading health systems are improving clinician wellbeing and patient experience with abridge at this week. health.com/abridge.

I'm Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. This is an executive interview

[00:01:00] quick powerful Conversations with Leaders Driving Change. So let's get started.

Bill Russell: All right. Today I am joined by Guru Sundar. Chief storyteller at Abridge. I'm sure you have another title, but I like Chief Storyteller better, so well,

Guru: welcome to the

Bill Russell: show.

Guru: Well, thanks for having me. It's been, it's a pleasure to finally be on this prestigious virtual stage with you.

Bill Russell: I'm looking forward to the conversation. We're actually gonna talk about the the conversation. So you invited me out to to San Diego. Yep. For the uh, bridge event.

You guys, this is your, this was your second conversation that you had sec

Guru: second year. Yeah. Last year we had it in Pittsburgh, the roots of the company. And that was nice. And this year we took it all the way over to San Diego. And it was really cool. Yeah, that was a great venue.

Bill Russell: I mean, look out the window over the midway and the, obviously the sun in San Diego was, it was pretty nice.

You know, I wanna talk about what makes this event special. I've been to both, so I went to the [00:02:00] Pittsburgh event. I went to the San Diego event. It's really the meshing of. Art and science. Yes. I think is the thing that makes this really special. And in both cases you start at a art venue and you end it at a science venue.

And the conversation sort of mirrors that along the way. I mean, give us an idea of what you guys are going for. because the world doesn't need another event.

Guru: Right? There's a new event popping up every week, but that's for a separate podcast.

So when we first concepted this, you know, with Shiv, the idea was, you know, we're trying to think differently. We have a big vision for what we can do with our partners in healthcare, and that's gonna take more than just providing a better solution for a current problem. And you know, we take inspiration from many different places, art, science, music, professional sports.

You know, cooking, chefs, culinary, all that stuff. And so we thought, well, why don't we expose some of our closest [00:03:00] partners, health systems folks like yourself to some of that ideation. And, you know, Shiv is quite the artist himself. He can recite Pantones off the top of his head which is fascinating.

And you know, he used to be a skateboarder. He is really into music. And so. We wanted to bring some of that magic and the experience to others. And so we started in Pittsburgh, I think last year we had Rick Rubin was sort of our, the moment to remember. And I still remember that. I still feel it actually.

It's like this moment of Zen and pause. And this year was a little different. We had multiple speakers. I think we had Dan Daniella Amede from Anthropic, we had Spike Jones, the director of her. Which is a crazy, I've watched her years ago to see like her, like become like essentially real was fascinating.

We also had Will Guera who's the founder of 11th Madison in the restaurant. An author of Unreasonable Hospitality, and we also had John McElroy, which was a cool way to end. So yeah. Little bit about the why.

Bill Russell: Well, I, it, you know, you [00:04:00] started the day before having spent enough time in Huntington Beach when I was a CIO you had Laird Hamilton.

Yeah, that's right. We had Laird, yeah. The night before. And that was it was interesting to hear him really discuss the I, the, here's the thing I took away from it. He was being, so he's one of the founders of helicopter skiing or surf boarding, essentially getting drug into a wave with a helicopter.

Uh, And he said, you know, there was one where he set this record or whatever, and they're dragging him in, and the whole time they're dragging him in, there're like, don't let go, don't let go this. No, you shouldn't let go. And he describes, he goes, you know, one of the reasons that this place was so good for surfing is the water literally is very shallow.

Like the wave is massive, but the water is shallow at certain points. And he goes, and if you go down, the coral is right underneath. Oh, wow. And so he is describing this and I, I'm just thinking, man, how do you do this? But he started talking about how the subconscious reacts [00:05:00] faster than the conscious.

Yes. And it wasn't until after he was looking at the video and he made several moves that were just. Out of the ordinary. And he, you know, after the fact, like he said, I don't even remember doing that, but after the fact he goes, yeah, if I hadn't done that, I would've been in trouble on that wave.

Yeah. Like, but your subconscious reacts very quickly. And I thought that was. That was really interesting. And to end with McEnroe, first of all, McEnroe is hysterical isn't he? I mean, he, like, you could've put him up on stage by himself. He would've just, he was, he was fantastic.

Guru: I remember him walking, walking in.

He was like very somber his hat on. I was like, okay, let's see how this goes. And he just, like, he turned on and he was McEnroe, he was. You know it, if I closed my eyes, I thought I would be watching some like tennis event of some sort.

Bill Russell: But that was his message. His message. Yeah. The thing I walked away from was in his pinnacle the year he did the best.

I think he won like. You know, I don't know, some ridiculous number of tournaments. He won the US [00:06:00] Open. Mm-hmm. And and the A TA, the American Tennis Association was finding 'em like every other day. Yeah, that's right. They were sending fines and he said, you know, I got calls from these people.

Who really understood what was going on. because tennis was starting to really spike in terms of its interest. And it was sort of capturing the interest of the American public and the world public really. Mm-hmm. And people were calling him like Jack Nicholson and others saying, do not change.

Yeah. Let 'em find you forever. Do not change. What they don't understand is it's entertainment. People are engaged, they're entertained, and tennis is benefiting greatly from you being you. Yeah. And and so I, it's that kind of thing that that makes this event, I think, really special. I mean, and of course you have, you know, various people come up there from a healthcare perspective and talk, and that gets the, the conversation going, but I'd love the, I love the cross section of the whole thing.

Guru: So on those two, like, you know, non-traditional speakers [00:07:00] at a healthcare event, Laird and John, what did you take away to your day to.

Bill Russell: It literally it was those two things. It's like all the work and stuff I've done f from Laird, it's like all the work and things that I've done up until this point will allow my subconscious to do the right thing at the right time, and I almost don't need to worry about there's, I could sort of rely on that.

That was what one of his messages. And for McEnroe it was that whole idea of lean on the thing that you are, that makes you, you. you. don't try to be somebody else. Don't try to be some other, I mean, if you're a company, don't try to be some other company. Yeah. Like lean on what makes you, you is was really his, his message. And I think those were really valuable.

Guru: [Mic bleed]

I love that conversation. That's the subconscious piece was quite interesting. I watched some big surf documentaries sort of in prep for the event, and I was like, this is nuts. Like I've done, I haven't done anything extreme.

I've done some like downhill mountain biking that is the closest thing to that, but it's, it was [00:08:00] kind of wild. And then obviously, like John being John and just who he is, I think. It, you know, as a, as a someone that like really abides and like believes in brand, it's like I walked away saying like, Hey, brand is something you need to believe in and be consistent about.

You can make like small changes over time, but brand is who you are and your personality shouldn't like randomly shift all over the place. And I think a lot of companies even that I've worked for, like they have this tendency to like, oh, like let's be someone indifferent today. No. Like, let's be who we are.

If there's an issue with who we are, we have to change that gradually in a sustainable way. And so that was really inspirational to take away from

[Mic bleed]

Bill Russell: It permeates the entire event, right? So you have the evening we're sitting there and they're going, well, this is gonna be family style.

And every time I hear the work family style, I think, ah, this is gonna be, here we go. And then you bring out the chef who tells the entire story around the food. And I don't remember her name, but

Guru: it was amazing. Zapeta. It was amazing. Incredible. The tamales. [00:09:00] Have you ever had tamales like

Bill Russell: that?

No. I had, yeah. So that I, and I think it's that it's recognizing that in every field there's art and science.

Guru: Yeah.

Bill Russell: And there is, and you know, and hearing her story, hearing the entrepreneurial story even, you know, McEnroe sort of an entrepreneur. When he said he only made $20,000 from winning the US Open I think we all think he made bajillion dollars while he was a pro tennis player, and he didn't.

In fact, he said the one time. He said he made more money playing in exhibitions with Eli MAs Stasi, like over a week he made like a hundred grand, which was more than he made like the rest of

Guru: the year in

Bill Russell: all the

Guru: That's right. Yeah. Which is honestly like a bit of a sad part of like professional sports even today.

There's

[Mic bleed]

challenges

[Mic bleed]

Bill Russell: so the next day did not disappoint Shiv. Your CEO Shiv Rao was on the stage with Eric. Yeah. Larson. Eric Larson is the President, TowerBrook Advisors. And I was talking to [00:10:00] a CIO and she was telling me that she said, oh yeah, Eric advises our board all the time.

He comes in to talk to them about what's going on. And he really shook things up. I mean, he did, that was not a status quo kind of conversation

Guru: about healthcare. He was the, we call it like, when we're planning this, you know, you always need someone just like in a meal, right? You need something to set the tone.

Right. Take me out of my thought. Take me out of my day to day, like bring me to a new place. We had done that physically, but mentally it was the tone setter and so we were looking some for someone provocative experience, but also like intriguing and I think it was, I had never heard him speak and.

I was captivated.

Bill Russell: Well, the thing I took away, and I've been saying this now in, in a bunch of different venues that I've been in. He said you should close all your nonclinical administrative positions today. That's right, because we're gonna replace those with AI like nonclinical [00:11:00] administrative positions.

If you continue to hire for them, you will be overstaffed. In about a year, a year to year, 18 months, you'll be overstaffed. And that was pretty provocative of a statement. He wasn't saying clinical, by the way. That was a clear distinction.

Guru: Yeah, he, and there's, you know, there were some folks in the room that were, I would say traditionally non-clinical and maybe the role of clinical will change over time, but I think it, you know what, this is all gonna do even for me in my day to day.

It's like it's gonna force us to be different. It's gonna force us to like focus differently. And embrace, you know, and also just like find our way to be human, right? And I think we've lost some of that. You know, we've all been like buried in like administrative work to some extent. You as well probably.

But how do you get back to the core of like what you enjoy doing?

Bill Russell: Yeah we're implementing a lot of AI over here and it really is to, and I keep talking to my team, it's like we haven't had margin because we had [00:12:00] such explosive growth. And it's like, all right, so we are now going to offload a whole bunch of stuff onto ai.

So that you have margin again, so we can dream about what comes next. And they're kind of uneasy about it. They're sitting there going, well, but this is what brings value to the company. I'm like no, you searching your email, finding a specific item, updating a spreadsheet. No, this is not what brings value to.

I mean, it may have been in the past, but it won't be,

Guru: Moving forward. That's a good, that's a really cool point. Like, you know, even at the conversation, something. That I think people like took a moment to understand was like, what is their passion? What is their purpose? And sometimes you get mired in a lot of things that aren't your passion or purpose, but like keep you busy.

And one thing that like, I think this all forces to do is like forget the waste. What is your passion and purpose that makes you the happiest? And there's a fear of obviously not being busy. But the upside of being like much more [00:13:00] happy and content and joyful is so much bigger. And I think we have to remember that

Bill Russell: I would love to be able to figure out how to help people to be more content.

Yes, It is the thing that escapes us as I mean in healthcare it, we're moving so fast, it's hard to be content about anything. Like we're, just now being, we're like we're celebrating some go live. And we're in the middle of the next three challanges

Guru: But what does the go live mean?

Like what is it for, you know, like ultimately like people that are in healthcare I feel like sometimes like we're in the thick of it. We don't like, take a second to understand where this connects to. How is this connected to what matters to me?

[Mic bleed]

And there, there was this documentary years ago, it was called Happy, I don't even know if you could still find it, but it was about all these different families and different parts of the world, several, like in low resource settings, and they were all talking about like, what makes them happy.

And I watched that and I was like, wow, my focus is in the wrong here. These people quite literally have very little. They have their [00:14:00] families and that's a lot of it. And they're the things that make them happy are so pure.

Bill Russell: When I think of the word content, shivs one of the people that sort of pops into my head.

Yeah. because I mean, I mean, a branch has had some, you know, significant success this year and I don't think it's changed them at all. And also some, you know, some of the announcements and things from competitors and stuff that have come out, and I think I talked to him pretty close to all of those things that are going on.

And I'm like, it's the same person. Yeah. There's no wild, well, there's no swings. I mean, he is, he is who he is. I'll tell you another person who blew my mind was Daphne. Koller.

Guru: Koller,

Bill Russell: yeah. Founder, CEO of Insitro. Was talking about drug discovery and where they're going. And how AI is allowing them.

And they have a partnership with Bristol Myers. Squibb. And, but how fast they're able to, they decided to take one of the hardest disease diseases, ALS so Lou Gehrig's disease, [00:15:00] and to try to essentially figure out, you know, what was going to work with ALS And what she was describing was essentially with these AI models, they were able to do something that would take.

Hundreds of years. And they were able to compress it into a very small space and and now have, you know, something that's working towards trials and whatnot. I mean, and it is just like, so we took the hardest one so that we can go to the next and the next. Yeah. And you know, it's not like you have to hire a team of a thousand.

You just have to pay for the space, power and cooling for the ai. Algorithms to run and then obviously have the really smart people like Daphne and her team on the other side who are making sense of the things that are coming out the other side. I was incredibly optimistic coming out of her

Guru: conversation.

Absolutely. And I think like one of the things I fundamentally is like, we don't understand our bodies. We don't understand disease. because there's a lot of data that like, it's just hard for like humans to process and. I [00:16:00] think what was like noble about what she said is very similar to what you said is like as we enter this world that is like AI powered, you know, and we're much more sort of capable now.

We need to attack the most complex challenges, right? Because attacking the most complex challenges is scary, but also is gonna teach us the most. And it's something that, you know, we hold ourselves accountable to, like attack most complex care settings, situations, et cetera. And that was inspirational and like, and just like inspiring because in order to solve the challenges of healthcare, when I say healthcare, it's not just.

Systems, it's like patient journeys, et cetera. We have to have people that are, you know, dreamers and believers and want to dive deep. And so that was inspirational to me.

Bill Russell: Yeah. One, one of the things I love about what you guys are doing is first of all the name of the event, the conversation is really awesome, but the lunchtime.

I thought it was really cool having each table have a topic and have a facilitator to have a [00:17:00] discussion. And I think they could choose which, what table, based on the topic they wanted to sit at. Yeah. It was nice. Yeah. We ended up having a great discussion at our table. Just give people some idea of some of the topics, you know, empathy in the age of automation.

2026 Forecast AI's Next breakthrough in healthcare. Who pays, who provides continuing the conversation? Nurses as innovators, redesigning care beyond burnout, restoring meaning to medicine. That was the table I was at. Nice. And the physicians were incredibly engaged and I would say optimistic.

So I don't know if that's the people you invite are optimistic or. Uh, They're optimistic, but they, they feel, I think for the first time, I mean, they're leery of some things, but they're, for the first time they're feeling the impact of technology on a positive level. Yeah.

Guru: To the burnout challenge.

I mean, we're, we have very special, you know, health system partners are very privileged to, to do the work we do. And I think that brings in sort of really [00:18:00] interesting humans. And so it's no surprise. What was your sort of big takeaway from that table that you facilitated?

Bill Russell: it was that optimism.

it was interesting because we didn't talk about Abridge, which also is kind of fascinating. There's so little marketing that goes on at this event. Yeah. No marketing. it's like, I think the only thing that was marketing about it was there was Abridge on my tag and Abridge and, but for the most part we didn't talk about it, but, you know, the ambient listening solutions that are out there are one of the first solutions that we've done as technologists in the healthcare system that people were clamoring for. They're like, give us more. Give us more. Mm-hmm. This is exactly what we want. We want something that's going to ease the burden.

We want something that's going to help us to focus on the things that we want to that we think bring value to the patient. And so. You know, so there's a lot of optimism there. There's a lot of concern, obviously with health systems looking at AI and like the, there's [00:19:00] not a great understanding of where it's going to be applied yet to deliver value.

I know we, we know in the ambient space, ambient listening computer vision we know in the imaging space. Mm-hmm. And there's very defined use cases that's really working for us. But what they're worried about is just the mass amount of talk, of just like, oh, you can put AI anywhere.

Yeah. And and that's not the case. We need to figure out the guardrails. We need to figure out the the places where it makes the most sense to, to bring it into the system.

Guru: I think it's like, you know, there's gonna be like more structured governance and control, but like, also velocity, which is interesting.

So I'm excited for what's ahead in 2027.

Bill Russell: I mean, I'll close with this. One of my favorite parts of the day was Macaro saying I wasn't late. Who's that guy who said I was late? I wasn't

Guru: late. And I think he was talking about you. He was talking about me, but he was looking at. One of our mutual friends, Amir, who happens to look a little bit like [00:20:00] me.

So I think that's, that may have been the highlight of my year actually.

Bill Russell: He was looking at Am Mirror and he

Guru: was like,

Bill Russell: I wasn't late. I wasn't late. I don't know where you were. You had moved. I was on

Guru: the other side. I was out of his line of sight.

Bill Russell: That was

[Mic bleed]

Guru: And then Amir

Bill Russell: finally said it.

Guru: It

Bill Russell: wasn't me.

I didn't say it. Was he late? Just outta curiosity. I don't know. He wasn't late. He wasn't late. Didn't matter. He closed he closed that really well, and yes, it's fantastic. So, what are you thinking for 2026?

Guru: I'm actually working on the date right now. TBD on the details, but I'm hoping to send you a saved date in the next few weeks,

[Mic bleed]

Bill Russell: It it does take that long to, to put these things together. I think people think we just throw 'em together at the last minute, but that is not the

Guru: case. I call it like for us, like on the brand side, the renewal of our renewal of our vows every year, you know, we get to renew our vows with our closest partners and Spirit Special.

Bill Russell: Is it the kind of thing where, where Shiv like walks into your office and says, I've got a great person [00:21:00] for that. We should have, I mean, does he have like people lined up?

Guru: Yeah, it happens sporadically. It'll like, he'll go to something and he'd be inspired. He'll have his like, top five list. And so yeah, we're starting to have those conversations, we say, and if you have any ideas that you want to pass our wave, feel free to text me.

Bill Russell: guru, thank you for the invite. Thank you for the for the conversation. It was fantastic. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for joining us for this executive interview with me, bill Russell. Every healthcare leader needs a community they can lean on and learn from. Subscribe at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this conversation with your team. Together we're transforming healthcare.

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