This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by Panda Health. Digital health decisions are getting harder. Panda helps make them easier. Panda partners with health systems to extend it capacity, reduce the complexity of digital health decision making, and rationalize existing solutions.

Whether you are evaluating new tech or getting more out of what you already have. Panda helps you make confident decisions faster. Backed by peer input, market intelligence, and trusted advisory support, check them out at panda.health/this week. Health,

Welcome to This Week Health. I'm Sarah Richardson, a former CIO and President of this Week Health's 2 2 9 Community development where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. Our interviews in action are a series of interviews catching up with healthcare leaders throughout the industry.

Now onto our interview

Sarah Richardson: (Interview 1) Hey, we are live from San Diego and I'm so excited to do an executive [00:01:00] interview with Jason Taylor from Panda Health, one of our partners, and coming off of a fantastic city tour dinner here in San Diego tonight. Jason, it's so good to see you.

Jason Taylor (2): It's great to see you too.

Sarah Richardson: Usually we're like running from city to city and wearing yellow hats.

And you have some buddy ears though tonight for the kids. I

Jason Taylor (2): do. They're, unfortunately, I didn't bring them for the shot. That would be pretty

Sarah Richardson: amazing.

Jason Taylor (2): We might do that later. We'll do second take. We'll put the bunny ears on.

Sarah Richardson: It is April Fool's Day.

Jason Taylor (2): We'll give it a shot.

Sarah Richardson: Anything is possible. Yours is pretty amazing.

We've done several city tour dinners together. It's been a minute since we've had one, and I'm so glad you were here in San Diego. We had a full house tonight.

Jason Taylor (2): It was a really good crowd. I thought not only in terms of the number of people who showed up and how full the room was, but the quality of the attendees and the discussion and the thoughtfulness they brought to the topics.

Sarah Richardson: Because cities like San Diego are concentrated and we've made a concerted effort to come to cities where there are only a few health systems because you get a mix of the leaders from those [00:02:00] health systems and their breadth and depth and the expansive the populations they're serving. It is quite incredible to see how many people it takes to get some of these initiatives done.

So when you have three or four people from Scripts, or Sharp as an example. You start to see what this city has to deal with in its three and a half million person population. What were some of the highlights of the conversation that really stood out to you and ways that Panda could influence some of those decisions that they need to make?

Jason Taylor (2): I think that's a great question. There was a theme that surfaced and we heard it from Scripps and Sharp and the others in the room, that there's a lot of uncertainty right now around. The policy climate and what's coming from Washington, how that's going to impact healthcare in 2025.

So there are constraints coming on reimbursement and revenue. We are looking at potential cuts to Medicaid that could be five to 7%, cash impact to all systems across the board. We're looking at a consumer confidence problem based on the economy. So electives are starting to trend down and we've seen that happen.

Every other time we've [00:03:00] had kind of an economic downturn. Elective procedures are one of the things to suffer. So the two main revenue sources, Medicaid pays really quickly. Electives are highly profitable. That creates a lot of revenue uncertainty. At the same time, we've got cost uncertainty between inflation and tariffs.

We've got PPE costs that are going up double digits. We've got construction costs going up. What that's turning into and what we heard tonight, I think kinda uniformly is. There's a lot of wait and see happening right now. There's a lot of uncertainty around what's going to happen in 2025. Where can I make my investments?

That doesn't mean that, everything stops. It means the focus is shifting away from what's the cool new toy that I can go buy to? How am I rationalizing my existing budget? Right? How am I looking at my app stack and my tech stack? To say, where can I effectively make cuts without compromising service or patient care or patient experience?

And try and kind of consolidate those [00:04:00] dollars so that I'm not forced to deal with it in other ways, like staffing cuts or just frankly decommissioning things.

Sarah Richardson: But we get forced into these situations every few years. There cyclical reasons why we all of a sudden have to go into efficiency mode or optimization mode, realizing that all the time.

If we functioned in that type of head space, the type of innovation that gets driven by, once again, governance, relentless prioritization, the ability to do maybe do cost back and charge models that allow organizations or parts of the organization to be responsible for the technology and how they are using it.

What's to say that we don't create a mindset? That allows us to operate in almost a scarcity space that creates the abundance that our healthcare systems are asking us for every day anyway.

Jason Taylor (2): I think what we're seeing right now is that a lot of systems are coming to the realization, they don't have a good longitudinal view.

And so when we look at the past two years, AI clearly has been the explosion topic. And [00:05:00] it's become fairly ubiquitous. Every single vendor, every solution is AI driven Now. Not necessarily new. These are big data things that are now AI things, but systems have become far more reactive to the pressures of need and the demand of innovation.

So the non-tech leaders are demanding efficiency and innovation, and we need to be at the forefront of ai. And I've heard gen AI can cut 40% of my costs, et cetera, et cetera. What we've seen is a re-explosion of this kind of reactive point solution innovation without a longitudinal platform or kind of consistent workflow view.

And I think that's where a lot of the smaller systems are gonna struggle. More because they don't have the breadth, they don't have the staffing to commit to investing in a true business analyst level understanding of workflows. So one of the things that came up tonight, for example, is ambient technology, for example, is a great solution.

Everybody's still looking at it. There's a lot of investments being made. How do you transition from ambient is a good [00:06:00] way to make my doctors happy because they don't have to take notes anymore. They don't have to have their back to the patient. It's a better quality of care. But how do I transition from, I've got an ambient solution, I'm reducing pajama time to, I've got an AI note solution that creates, an asset that's usable through a broader continuum of care.

So my note doesn't just kind of make the doctor happy. Now it creates something I can actually push further down the workflow into what is the right post episodic care pattern? What is my billing or coding, result that needs to come to that? What is my kind of future engagement that needs to come to that?

Because most workflows in a hospital spin off the doctor's note and if we're just solving in this ambient case for make the doctor happy, that they're not kind of manually typing everything. We're missing opportunities and I think that's the transition that a lot of hospitals are going to be kinda struggling with is do you have, the relationships and the [00:07:00] presence and the analyst view to say, this is the longitudinal problem I'm trying to solve in the delivery of care.

And not just my doctors are complaining about pajama time in this example.

Sarah Richardson: So when you think about a engagement with a new client. And they're looking at combination of application rationalization, and they also want to bring some new innovation in. So the one thing replace fiber.

So aspects, what is that initial due diligence process like when they engage with you for that type of expertise?

Jason Taylor (2): So what Panda is focused on more than, what Panda thinks as just another voice in the void is. Creating the social intelligence or kind of momentum factors that say, here's what the crowd is doing.

And that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right answer, but it's a critical thing that informs, risk and approach that health systems should take. So we are collecting through our interactions with our own members and through kind of social mining that we do, we are creating a view of [00:08:00] momentum around different solution sets.

So when one of our members, and we have about 60 right now and a lot more in the process of joining, when one of our members comes in to onboard, to engage with Panda, the first thing we're doing is getting to know that system in terms of what use cases are kind of on their radar for primary solution.

How do they solve them now and what, how does that fit into the overall kind of reference architecture or roadmap that they have? What we're doing is we're using our social intelligence that we gather to inform potential decision making. So an example of that would be, we heard this tonight.

Somebody invested in a way finding solution three years ago. And I can absolutely guess what vendor they went with. They had problems with implementation, they had problems with adoption. And it didn't prove out the ROI that, that everybody wanted it to.

Our engine, knowing that would say, well, first of all, the problems you're having are the same as everybody else had with that solution, but that product that you bought is not one of [00:09:00] the top five. Kind of way finding or digital front door compliance solutions that people are embracing right now.

So we're trying to do is create this kind of social awareness or democratization of what is healthcare doing, on mass. To inform decisions or roadmap or even investigations that systems are doing and starting to pull them together. So connections between, a health system and their peers or others facing the same challenge or even helping to rationalize it's things you've already got.

So silly example but an easy one. Credentialing systems are all up in the air. Most of the old legacy ones are gone and there are very few options. You could go out to, tender RFP to find a new credential system or if you already have simpplr, you can talk to Simpl 'cause they do that, right?

And we can provide not only that awareness, of what your stack can already accomplish, but what your peers are doing, right? So if we can come back and say 60% of your peers are doing, this [00:10:00] just going to simpler and saying, can I extend and kind of reduce my vendor count, just extend into that credentialing.

Then it helps steer and de-risk and shorten the time to decisions and, take away the burden of the resourcing that you have to put into managing app stack. 'cause some of these systems have eight or 900 applications right now. They don't have the staff to properly rationalize.

Sarah Richardson: But how much of the conversation goes back to one of the things that we talk about in our HCSP program, which is what if they're not ready for it? So you can say, I want way finding in my hospital. If your hospital is not ready for way finding, how often are you able to let them know you're not mature enough, or you need to update these policies and procedures in order to be able to take on a new system and have it go as intended?

Jason Taylor (2): That it's a great question, and it's actually a really tricky topic. When you look at any kind of health system making a tech decision, you've got different kind of momentum forces. So you've got a user that desperately wants to solve a problem. Usually in the [00:11:00] absence of a systemic view of what's that gonna do to the rest of the tech stack or workflows or anything.

You've got tech that is trying very desperately not to just explode, point solutions everywhere. And you've got vendors who want to sell their technology and are obviously going to prefer to talk about the things that work well and not the challenges, right? So it's hard to surface obstacles kind of in a constructive way that everybody can look at.

And what we found, as we've been through our iterations and pivots, is that Panda coming in and saying, in our experience, this doesn't work very well because the change management is 98% of the problem, and you're not prepared to deal with that. it has applicability to some of the stakeholders, but not all.

So where we've turned that is back into that kind of social momentum to say, we could tell you, but that has less value. What we're gonna do is put you in a room with three other people who just did this and have them tell you, because if I'm Keck Medicine of USC and I [00:12:00] hear that, Johns Hopkins tried something and it failed, I'm more likely to listen to that than a third party who's trying, could be one of, a thousand voices telling you how this should work, or does work.

So the secret sauce for us is that social intelligence of, democratizing, if you look at or listen to. Aaron Mary, for example, at Baptist Jacksonville he's, he's, he's kind of made a theme almost out of saying, we are going to go out and try things and fail fast. The reality is that 90% of health systems and hospitals don't have that luxury fail once, and there's two years of budget that's compromised because that's kind of the scale of where they're at.

So our job we see at Panda is to take the lessons that the Aaron Marys of the world are learning, and socialize those. And democratize them back into all of the systems that can't afford to fail and learn from Aaron. When a university in the upper Midwest wants to look at robots, we're gonna connect them to somebody who's already tried robots.

Instead of saying, here are the challenges with robots.

Sarah Richardson: So here's my final question for the night, because [00:13:00] this comes up all of the time. Organizational change management, the hardest aspect of getting anything done in an organization, probably post governance. So once you decide you're gonna do something.

You are still on the hook for getting it done now. I asked the question over and over again, partners and health systems, if everybody knows that OCM is the hardest part, there is very few organizations that have a formal OCM office or structure in place. Correct. How do you help mitigate that for a successful implementation?

Jason Taylor (2): It is really hard, right? It's not only do they not have it in place, but. It tends to be one of the things that is cut to make budgets fit, right? So even a well proposed or structured, engagement that says you will need to dedicate X amount of time to OCM. It tends to be one of those things that says, well, we can't afford the, a $1.1 million project.

It has to be under a million. And the first thing that gets cut is OCM. The second thing, by the way, is testing. And neither one of those things are good decisions. We, We know that from a lot of experience. I think the biggest thing that health systems need to focus [00:14:00] on in this is to, you know your point, we've decided we need to, I think we need to go back before that, right?

The biggest influencer of organizational change management is what's in it for me, right? It's internal motivation, not externally motivated like A CFO telling you, thou shalt it's, this will make my life better, I will sleep better, my job will go better, errors will go down. Whatever the, the case is. You need the people who are actually going to make the change involved in the decision and feeling a stake in the decision.

And I've said, and I've said it very poorly or in inefficiently, the biggest problem we have in healthcare is that we frequently find that we have asymmetry in this kind of decision triangle, which is, who pays for what I'm trying to do, who benefits from what I'm trying to do. But who actually has to change and do the work to adopt it.

And frequently they're three different people, more efficient, workflow may not be better for nurses, but nurses are the ones who are gonna have to [00:15:00] make the change. In their practices and the way they're used to doing things to influence this thing that might not actually benefit them, might benefit patients, which is fantastic.

We love that. Might just benefit profit. It's so engaging. The what's in it for me well in advance and letting them, the change stakeholder group, the adoption group influence what change training, adoption support, et cetera, they need is critical because we will continue to undersell the change management.

And it truly is 98% of everything we do. The tech is easy. It sounds flippant. The tech is easy. Right. Change management is 98% of everything we do. So if we don't have stakeholders engaged, pre-decision, we're setting ourselves up for a lot of failure.

Sarah Richardson: Yep. Well, a good part about the partnership with Panda and those utilizing those resources, is that to your point, they can socialize it, they can see it, they can understand if they're ready, and they can have a better implementation plan for the efficiencies that are required today, specifically because of [00:16:00] all the uncertainty that is out there.

Jason, thank you for being a partner with this Week Health. Thank you for everything Panda is bringing to HIT. More importantly, thanks for being in San Diego tonight for a very successful city tour dinner.

Jason Taylor (2): Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate it.

Sarah Richardson: Thanks for tuning into this executive interview. That's all for now.

Thanks for listening to this interview and action episode. If you found value in this, please share it with a peer. It's a great chance to discuss and in some cases, start a mentoring relationship. One way you can support the show is to subscribe and leave us a rating.

If you could do that, we would appreciate it. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.