DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Three Things You Can Do This Year to Take your Tech Next Level (ft. Ed Marx)

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed discusses the importance of developing strong partnerships with vendors and the strategic insights gained from these relationships. He emphasizes the value of field trips with executive teams to foster collaboration and learning, as well as the benefits of engaging with both healthcare and non-healthcare organizations. He shares practical tips for creating meaningful connections and highlights the significance of shared experiences in enhancing teamwork and decision-making.

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, everyone, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Always sponsor free, ad free, just pure content, which is what I love the most. And normally have awesome guests, I think once in 250 episodes. So it was just myself, and this is going to be the second time that we're doing it. I just want to start the year off 2025 to give you some ideas, some hacks that have worked in the past for me and for others in terms of developing really strong partnerships with vendors.

And the byproduct is equally important, and that is the strategic insights you'll gain. and the kinship and closeness that you will foster amongst your executive team. So I'm going to break out a couple of ideas. All of these are pretty simple to do. Some of them cost a little bit of money in terms of travel and your time, but that is it. These are not major investments. So something that you could easily handle within your budget. So the first thing that I want to talk about is doing what I call,

field trips with your executive team. So I've done this at every organization where I've served over the last 20 years, and it's highly, highly effective. So what does it look like? Well, you sort of come up with some criteria for what makes a strategic partner out of your vendors. So for a medium size health system, you know, you can work these numbers, whatever works best for you. But we divvied up all of our vendors into four categories. One was strategic. one was tactical, one was vendor, and one was emerging. And strategic usually had four or five. And again, you have to come up with your own criteria.

For us, it was the influence they had in our organization, the amount of spend we had with them, and how would they fit into our overall structure and strategy. The second were tactical. We had probably 10 to 15. And this, again, is similar criteria, but not as big. And then vendors, which was the bulk of them, you know, probably 90%. And then we always carved out three to five that we thought were emerging. These could be startups.

They could be other vendors that have been on the periphery, but may make that jump into strategic or tactical. And then we had responsibilities assigned. So I, as the CIO, had the responsibility of being the main relationship manager with the strategic vendors. And then my direct reports divvied up the tactical and the emerging. And then directors and managers, so forth, would handle the bulk of those vendors. So whatever structure you use, you just need to have a structure and have it organized.

And then we would have routine meetings. So with the strategic vendors, we had a scorecard. And we would meet with them formally and go through a scorecard where they also rated us because we wanted to become better. And then on an annual basis, we brought in the strategic vendors. And then we brought in like our chief strategy officer and some other C-suite people. And we met for an entire day. And in the morning, we kind of laid out, hey, this is where we're headed this next year. were the headwinds we're seeing. These are the tailwinds we're seeing. And then we asked them to do

similar but short, non-commercial presentations about what they're seeing in the industry, what they're seeing as best practices. And then they had an opportunity to share, you know, two or three recommendations for us. And again, this is not just me and my direct reports, but it's also members of our C-suite. So you get a lot of great perspective in doing that. And then the last couple hours, we gave them our hard problems. Like, again, they saw our strategy. and we had them break out into groups. So this is four or five vendors, partners, that are all breaking up together in smaller groups

and tackling these problems and ideas and coming forth with a solution. So it was great to have four or five of your strategic vendors all working together to come up with a solution, whether or not it was electronic health record related. It didn't matter if that was one of your strategic vendors, which it was for us often. But they would just cross-pollinate because they would hear things.

Then they would present back. And it was just fascinating. and the great ideas we had. All right. So that's pretty simple to do. The next is a field trip. So for a few years, it just so happened that most of our strategic vendors were somewhere along the West Coast.

And so I would approach my C-suite peers that I thought would be most appropriate to attend. And we would just head out on a road trip. So it might look like something we tried to spend, couldn't spend a whole 24 hours with any one vendor, but probably like 18 hours. might come in in time for dinner, have dinner with the executives of that vendor, then spend half a day with them, breakfast, lunch, and then we would go drive or sometimes fly, again, depending on the logistics and who these vendors were, to the next one. And at the end of three

or four days, we had hit our five strategic vendors and maybe some emerging ones. And it was just amazing because, again, there's nothing like being in their environment. They can show you all their prototypes and things like that and how we can partner and do things together. You would also have access to their CEOs. So again, I'm not name-dropping any vendors. I'm not name-dropping any CEOs, but I can tell you the CEOs of these Fortune what, 10 in some cases, Fortune 100, for sure companies, they were there in attendance and they came in and talked with, you know, our counterparts. And sometimes if I could get my CEO on one of those field trips, absolutely, they came. So it was pretty amazing experience to do that.

And we do that once per year. And again, the cost, yes, there's some costs for travel, but that is it. So what you gain out of it is really important. If you want to have sort of that next level IT happening in your organization, these are the type of things that you need to do in addition to the obvious of keeping the trains running and those sort of things. So doing a field trip like that, super important. Another thing that we did was we would identify a non-health care company that we all admired for a particular reason.

So one year, it had to do a couple of years, actually. We were really about mobile and about the consumer experience, the patient experience. So who do we admire? We came up with a couple of organizations that we admired. Again, I'm not going to name drop, but these are organizations that are, again, Fortune 10, some Fortune 100. organizations that you know you probably use their apps. And so I just reached out again, through one of our vendors that also had a relationship there is typically how it worked out.

Sometimes it was direct through LinkedIn. And I would say, look, you know, we're this healthcare system and we're trying to get better and we know that you're sort of leaders in this space. We would love to spend a day with you. I'm going to bring my team. I would love to have your team there. And it'll be beneficial to you as well. So in the morning, we would present sort of our strategy where we're going to be.

going, we would ask you to ask lots of questions, poke holes in it. And if there's anything like Haum and that we wanted to do deeper dyes and we would write them on a whiteboard, our parking lot. So maybe it was analytics, right? They asked a lot of questions about analytics and they also have questions for it. So we put it on a whiteboard. So then we would flip and they would present their strategy and we'd get all these insights and aha moments. And also we could contribute to their success by finding areas that they could sharpen or maybe change a little bit. So, super fascinating to work with these companies, again, these name brand companies. And you develop these long-time relationships. That's the other side benefit is now my C-So knows the C-So of this retail

giant. And so they can compare notes all the time or have someone else that they can phone in a crisis. So it was great, great, great all the way around. And I don't think I ever had a company turned me down to do it. They were fascinated what's happening in health care and they everyone wants to help someone in health care. So it was really, really good. I happened. to be located in a major metropolitan area. So that helped as well because some of these companies were headquartered here, but definitely made trips all around the country in order to do this. Then the other organization that we would sort of do the same thing with was a healthcare

organization. So again, I would identify or my team would identify a health care organization that we really admired and we're like, let's do, let's have one of these meetings with them. And so we did. And again, you know, depending how far away they are from you, the very, minimal costs, just travel. We would go there. They would come to us. We would do the same thing. And we would learn so much, way more than you could, you know, reading a blog or listening to a podcast like this or, you know, different ways that you might normally, you know, running into a friend

at a healthcare conference. Those are all great for sure. But nothing like spending a whole day and just showing everyone, you know, where you are and getting their input and just the camaraderie that you get out of that as well, spending all that time. Which sort of leads me to another side benefit, but again, these side benefits are almost as important as that primary benefit. And that is just the time together that you have, let's take in the first examples I was giving with your C-suite. It is so hard to get time with your C-suite outside of like, you know, the weekly meetings or however often you, whatever the cadence is for your meetings, it's hard, right? So now you have this time together. You have the airport time, you have the airplane time, you have, you know, waiting for your flight and

grabbing a beer or water or wine or whatever it is that you drink, the meals that you share. It's irreplaceable because you just don't get that kind of downtime with your peer group. So these really are beneficial. Also, you know, I never forget, we went up to see our EHR vendor and just hearing everything at the same time with your peer group is so important, as opposed to you hearing something and you kind of bring it back, but it's never the same, right? Because people have so much stuff going on. But when you all hear it at the same time, you look and you have the facial expression, you have the head nods, you know, all that kind of stuff, you're really connecting. And then on your way home or at the airport, you're writing down like, hey, let's implement

this and that. It is so powerful. These are huge, I call them hacks, but I should really rename it accelerators. If you want to get next level with your IT in your organization to do these sort of things because you just can't get it any other way, especially like I was saying, if you're the one that goes to a conference and you're all excited and you come back, no one's as excited as you are because they didn't hear it themselves and it's hard to interpret for them. And again, there's so many distractions going on that it's really hard for you to have that same sort of shared experience. So those are some things that I really encourage you to try in 2025. Again, it doesn't require a heck of a lot of effort to do these things.

You might want to just try it with a healthcare peer at first. Maybe that's across the state or something or could be in the same city, although I understand the conundrum there. But just do it. Get there in person. Don't try and do this over video or anything like that. I think you'll get a lot more out of it. Then as you have success with that, pick a company.

Just pick a company in your, I'm trying to make this as easy as possible and take away any excuse not to do it. Pick a company in your city, or in a close by bigger city. I guarantee you there's some sort of headquarters or big company there, and it doesn't have to be a Fortune 10 or 100 company like I was sharing in the beginning, but it could just be a company you admire that's doing some cool things. Then you just do exactly what I said. Show them your plan. They'll show you their plan, have some deep discussions on common areas. I guarantee you both parties will leave happier, enriched, with more wisdom than they had before that day started. Then you might want to do the trip, the vendor trips I was talking about.

And if you can line them up together, right, that's less time out of the office. That's why I did it the way I did it and explained it the way I did, is if you go and do a two, three day trip here and there, that adds up. And people question all the time away on your little trips. But if you do them all at once, you know, you've gone for four days or whatever, you can really accomplish a lot in that amount of time and just get it done with. And then it's easier for everyone for scheduling because it's like, let's block out these four days as opposed to let's block out two here or two there and so forth.

So figure out, do it go visit a vendor. Maybe it's just you and your team the first time just to get a good sense of how to do this and comfort with it. And then go for the bold one and just pick your three or four partners, whatever the magic number is. Hopefully they're geographically somewhat close. And then you go to your C suite, your peers and you say, look, I really want you to make this time investment. I want you to hear directly they're going to have their CMIO there or their medical person there, their nurse person there. They're going to have their CEO there.

They're going to have, you know, whatever the equivalents are, you know, let them know that and let them know how important of a meeting it is and how it's being set up. And I don't think anyone's going to turn you down. Again, I've had pretty much 100% success. In fact, my favorite story, and I'm trying to think how to tell it without revealing who the vendor was. but my CEO had never, ever, ever called me on my cell phone previous to this moment. But we did one of these visits, one of these, I call them a West Coast wing because a lot of times my strategic partners were on the West Coast.

And we came back and my CEO, he was giddy. And he was like calling me like on the plane. He went back a second time by himself to meet with the CEO again of this major, major, major company. And he calls me, like walking out of the play, he never calls me. He just have to understand the dynamics here. He had never called me. But he was like just like a kid and so excited about the digital transformation that was going to take place with this partnership and the price point. So that's the other thing.

The discounting. So when you form these partnerships, if you do them right and you invest in that relationship and you go out and visit and you meet up with the CEO and their C-suite, it's just a game changer when it comes to your pricing. as well. So there's so many reasons why to do this. And then it always baffled me a little bit when I'd share these stories with other people, maybe in a presentation or just talking to my peers, and they're like, have never done it before. And so there's no shame there. I'm just saying, hey, go and do it, because if you want to develop a world-class tech to match the rest of the clinical quality of your organization, you've got to make these sort of moves. And I'm telling you, it'll make a big difference. And I'll just end with this.

You know, a lot of times, not every time, but a lot of times when we went through the agony of budgeting, right, never any fun. And a lot of give and take that happens amongst your peer group, I recall my peer advocating for more investment in IT or they would lead the investment. They're like, yeah, I would love to have these Da Vinci robot. I mean, this was a literal conversation one time. I'd love to have, you know, a few more of these Da Vinci's because my medical staff, you know, they really asking for. We needed these different hospitals and obviously the revenue and all the kind of stuff. And she said, but what we really, really need before that are these three things. And it was all tech related.

And so it was just amazing. And obviously it's like I got two votes now. I just don't have one vote. I've got, I doubled my votes in some case with triple or quadruple. And why did they know this? Was it because I was so convincing? No. It was because they were there also.

And they heard firsthand. they saw firsthand, they got connected to peers by that strategic partner. And so that made all the difference in the world. So I'm telling you, if there's one thing you want to try in 2025, and I just gave examples on how to do it, like how to start, like low risk, low cost, you know, almost failure proof, and then kind of stair step you way up. By the end of the year, you could have accomplished all these different things. And I'm telling you, I just really encourage you to do it because it is a game changer.

oftentimes we're like always looking for like what is the one or two things we can do that that'll really move the needle for us. I'm telling you these are the type of things that move the needle. You just got to go out and make it happen. So that's it. Hey, I just want to say thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We are number 21 on Apple Podcasts under tech. I don't know why they put us under tech. I don't recall me choosing that. I think Apple chooses that and it's fine. It's a fine category, although I don't want to think the podcast is tech, but we are about digital transformation, so it sort of works. But it's only because of you, the people who listen to the podcast every week that we could achieve such rankings.

And other rankings, the equivalent is like a top 3%. Sometimes it slips to top 5% in the world across old podcast. And again, thank you. And it's a result of awesome guests. And I think our format has a little bit to do with it as well. So that's it. Thank you. I'm out. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mark. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review.

And most importantly, thanks again for listening.