Flourish: Redefining Success - Lisa Esch's Story of Transformation and Fractional Leadership
June 17th, 2024: In the first episode of 'Flourish,' host Sarah Richardson explores the forefront of healthcare innovation with guest Lisa Esch, a seasoned digital transformation and strategy executive. The discussion covers Lisa's journey from her role at NTT Data Services to founding Advisory.Studio, focusing on the challenges and opportunities of fractional executive work. They delve into the issues of ageism, the importance of networks in career transitions, and the potential of generative AI in transforming healthcare operations. Key topics include the significance of a clear value proposition for startups, the impact of emerging technologies, and strategies for reducing administrative burdens in healthcare.
Key Points:
Stay connected, stay curious, and keep flourishing.
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📍 📍 📍 Hi, I'm Sarah Richardson, former CIO and President of the 229 Executive Development Community, with a passion for empowering others to reach their full potential. Welcome to Flourish, where we delve into captivating career origin stories, sparking conversations that inspire, inform, and foster a sense of community. Join us as we explore the journeys that have shaped successful professionals and uncover the insights that can help you thrive in your own career path.
Thanks for joining us.
📍 Welcome to today's episode
Introduction to the Guest
of Flourish, where we explore the forefront of healthcare innovation. Our guest is Lisa Esch, a seasoned healthcare executive with extensive experience in digital transformation and strategy. Lisa most recently served as the Chief of Innovation, Strategy, and Offerings at NTT Data Services and is now founder and CEO of Advisory.
Studio, focusing on executive coaching and fractional executive services. With a strong background in developing and implementing cutting edge digital health initiatives, Lisa has been instrumental in driving change across the healthcare industry. Tune in today as we delve into her insights on the future of digital health and the impact of emerging technologies. This is our first episode of Flourish. Lisa, thank you for being the very first guest.
Sarah, it is wonderful to be here.
And I'm excited to be your first guest today. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
Absolutely. And Flourish is all about our career paths and journeys. And to me, especially about the connections we make along the way. And I feel like I've known you a long time, but I realized that we actually met at a dinner at Fall Forum in San Diego about three years ago.
It's probably about the timeline. And yet so many things have happened in three years and our friendship just continues to grow. And that's really what I want people to be able to take away from the conversations inside of Flourish is that. The friendships are real. We do what we do every day for a living because that's our passion and where we find the momentum to do what we do.
More than anything, you create the relationships with people and how often they turn into friendships where you're like, I'm calling Lisa first as an example. So I love that we get to tell that story too. But I really want to hear about. Your new endeavor. When you look up something and you say advisory, CEO of advisory.Studio, you're like, I could do that someday.
I could be a CEO of a company. So many of us are always thinking about how you climb each rung of the ladder to get where you want to be. And so for you starting advisory.studio, whole new endeavor, whole new effort, tell us about that.
Sarah, you were one of the first people I called when I was ready to transition.
So I remember that phone call several months ago. And what I really. was thinking about transitioning into something new and what the opportunities were out there. I had the best role at my previous company. I worked with amazing people and it was really a fun place to be in technology and transformation and all of that, but it was time to do something else.
And when I looked at what could be out there, I could do Another company thing, or I could really take my experience and, touch a lot more companies and a lot more people and help accelerate this transition that's happening in the marketplace. And there's so many people like me in this. part of their career in this place in their career that part of what the advisory. studio is, it's a team of people. There's a network of us out there that have all different kinds of experience. So as you're trying to tackle challenge transformation problems you need projects done, those types of things. There's this depth of talent out there. very experienced and that we can come together and support each other and get work done really quickly because of that experience.
What I love about your profile, as I was continuing to review, because you always go look and say, do I need to, do I, should I be amping up my profile? I love that you have 40 years of experience listed, and that's a big deal. So I'm curious, very specifically, as you think about navigating and overcoming challenges related to ageism in your career, and what advice you give to other women or men facing the same challenges.
challenges. And I say that because I tell people I have 30 years of experience and I'm going to be 50 years old next month, because I feel like that matters. And we were so long told to hide that aspect about it. Don't tell people when you graduated from college, because then they'll know how old you are.
And now rethinking that, what are your perspectives on that very question of ageism?
Navigating Ageism in the Workplace
it's interesting that you bring that up, because I typically, when I hit 25 years of experience. I just changed it for the last 15 years, it says over 25. And it wasn't until now that I was brave enough to put 40 down.
My first job in a hospital was when I was 18 years old. I've got over 40 years of experience. And I really, and I took my dates that I graduated from college off. And I didn't put those things there because ageism in the last, ageism It's very real. People look at you as being at the end of your career.
What are you going to give me? Are you going to be as hungry? And when you're looking to work in a corporate environment it's not something people have those thoughts, they have those private conversations. And in others, it's just this unconscious bias that might not be intentional.
And so for me to put that on my, profile now, I was encouraged by my daughter to do that, actually. She's Mom, that really matters. And so I put it out there. And when, as we look at how we're putting together the team for Advisory. Studio, they all have 20, 30, 40 years of experience. And there's deep experience with the team that we're putting together.
And I'm excited to be part of that and to have this. this group of colleagues who could easily go out and get jobs, or they can do the consulting and the advisory and really help pick the things that they want to work on and help drive the transformation that we're seeing in the marketplace. And that's probably what excites me the most, is being able to really bring that expertise and help a startup, help an organization that needs to transform, help someone move to the next space.
And that's what we can do.
I love that.
The Rise of Fractional Work
So tell me more about the motivation to pursue the fractional work instead of traditional full time and really curating all of these connections with very specific or even very extensive skill sets, years of experience, industry experience. Fractional is becoming more and more common.
I think it hit my radar a little over a year ago. And now I hear about being for many a preferred element of work. It's almost like a new gig economy is this fractional work that we're seeing. So when you made the decision to do that, what was the, what was that fork in the road for you?
So part of it came out of my experience probably the last three or four years where I was watching smaller companies, startups in particular, invest in full time employees.
and then have this heavy burden of having a full time executive or having a full time role, figure out what to do, how do you get the most out of that. And sometimes it wasn't a good fit or a part of what they got part of what they needed, but then they were paying it didn't always work.
And so to me, I've been advising for a while now for, particularly in the startup space. Hire fractional. Get that senior expertise that can just really hone in on messaging, on value, on relationships, on strategy, in a way that just somebody with less experience That might be full time with you, can't do.
And so part of it was just really seeing the marketplace in what somebody needs. But also, fractional can be something with a medium or large organization as well. You might be in transition and need a specific skill to help you through transition for a specific amount of time. And it, could be a full time job.
It could be fractional, but it's a, defined period of time with a defined outcomes that really help you get through that. So I think that there's this economy out there that really is supporting fractional work. And I think it's a smart way to really drive transformation in a business and growth in a business and be very specific on what you do.
So the conversations I'm having right now. Often I'm still being pinged for full time roles for X, Y, or Z and I, talk to them, I'm like, you don't need me full time. We can probably get this done in this amount of time. And those are the kinds of things that we're talking about then with, the fractional work.
And it really is, it's fun for me to be able to touch several different things at one time and still balance my work life balance as well.
When you introduce that idea to an organization, they're like, we want Lisa. And they realize that you're like, you actually need me maybe 15 hours a week.
How open are organizations to hearing candidates say that? Because typically, it's the pursuit of the full time role. And maybe there's people out there want that career change. So I guess my question is probably twofold for you is, how are organizations receiving that response from you? And then, If a person really wants to do two fractional gigs versus that full time corporate role, how do they even think about getting there?
So I'll tackle your first question about the, like, how does an organization respond to that? Some of them are open to it and some of them aren't. Culturally, in their mind, they just See this, it needs to be a X kind of a role. It just depends on what it is, but it's also the market is changing and the talent pool looks different than it did previously.
And so organizations are open to having that conversation and maybe they only need. 10, 15 hours a week and you can do the job in that, which it might take somebody else full time. I have a really good friend who's a sales leader and she, I've worked with her in a previous organization and I tell you what, she is like, she gets the work done.
She is most efficient, Sales leader I'd ever met and man, she could just get her, activity down, she got the work done and she works smart, not a lot of time. And it really taught me something this 10 or 15 years ago, and she's still out there in the market today. So whenever she gets to land her new gig in the next transition, that's the kind of talent she brings to them.
And so I think that culturally organizations need to think differently about. That kind of talent. Or maybe it's too early for someone with my type of experience or a senior person's experience to be engaged. So you can start with a small amount of work and, navigate through. You have to get away from thinking about time.
And if you're not putting 40 hours a week in or as a leader, 50 or 60 hours a week in, are you getting what you need? And you can't measure. leadership like that anymore. You have to really define the outcomes and the activities, focus on those things, and then pay for that in a fractional way.
And you can oftentimes be a lot farther ahead than just bring it on somebody full time. It's just, it's doing things that maybe aren't necessarily. As important as you think they are, because when you're fractional man, you are doing exactly what you need to do to drive the highest best outcomes in the shortest amount of time, and everybody's lined up for that.
And so you take out a lot of the work that maybe isn't necessary as an executive
That provides a tremendous advantage to the organization who understands that perspective, because burnout's real everywhere.
And I remember seeing a presenter not too long ago who talked about the Zoom revolution has actually added two and a half to three hours a day to our plates. And we're actually, especially women, getting paid less for the time they're putting in, and getting burnt out faster, and staring at yourself all day, and that psychological perspective of you and I would never sit this close to each other if we were in person.
It's a little bit of our knees touching in a conversation, which is just, even if you're great friends, it would be super awkward for an whole hour in a conversation. And Wow. If someone can come in, get it done, move on, et cetera, just that burnout perspective is a huge, it's a huge win across the board.
It is.
Yeah. And I think it really helps in the fractional piece. It's definitely something to consider. And even if your organization, you don't think it's ready for it, you'd be surprised at what you can get done with defined expectations and outcomes.
Is it easier for a practitioner to go out, and I say practitioner in terms of people like you and I, is it easier for us to go out on our own and try it, or do you find a collective, like what you've created with your organization, does someone say, you know what, I want to go work for Advisory. Studio, and this is my way into the fractional space, or do you just hang out your independent shingle, like, How do people think about the best way to do it?
Yeah, I think for me, it really was my network. And when I was ready for transition this time in my career, the people that I'm talking to and reaching out to are like, Oh I'm going to make this transition too.
How are you thinking about this? So there's this, Oh, I know someone that did that. Talk to them. And so it really is. The network of people and I've had the, just the privilege of working and connecting with amazing people throughout my career and going back and reconnecting with those that you haven't talked to in a while and then still connecting with those that are probably the most three to five years people are willing to help you.
You let people know what you can do, how you do it, what you're thinking about. And they're like, I know someone that could use that. So it really is just a trusted network. And my team very, curated. It isn't for everyone. And the standard's pretty high. And when we when I put my word out there when we're going to do something together, it is, very trusted and so it, is my brand now and so we've got to be really careful about how we deliver on that and what we do.
But been in the industry a long time and I've worked with amazing people and people are willing to help other people. All the time.
One of the things you're doing that I, love, is the evaluation and selection of startups, where to invest about the founder experience, market potential, they can't afford a chief growth officer, chief strategy officer, 40 hours plus a month, they could 40 hours a month.
Wouldn't that be an awesome job? That is 10 hours a week. If you had that opportunity, that's what they really need.
Challenges and Opportunities for Startups
r. Is financing drying up? Is:When you think about key factors in considering startups that need investment or looking for certain areas of help, what are the things that you focus on?
A couple things to unpack here. First of all, last year, the money dried up, this year is the year that the, probably half the startups are going to go under because the funding isn't there.
They didn't hit their numbers. They got money in the bank, in the big boom, and they were overvaluated and there's just no way they can do, deliver on what they promised. So there's going to be a lot by the end of the year. I've heard talk of half of it, 50 percent of them are going to go away.
So there's going to be a lot of IP out there for cheap that other organizations can scoop up that are just waiting. So one of it is the money just isn't there. And the institutional investors dried up. People got really burned. So 25 will be a better year. We'll start seeing some of that turnaround.
But in the meantime, the last three or four years, I've probably I've looked at several hundred startups, part of it was to curate our startup marketplace that I put together with our, my last employer, we were able to bring innovation to our customers in a way that I work for a large IT company.
We were never going to be creating that kind of thing, but they trusted us to bring good ideas. So the job was to bring good ideas. I have sat on the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, their project healthcare cohort for the last four years now. And here we pick 15, and we mentor them and we guide them with funding and ideas and how do you move forward and all those kinds of things.
in January, we kicked off the:I did a roundtable with all 17 of the startups, and they had 5 7 minutes, and give me your pitch, and what's your value proposition? And all those kinds of things. And a lot of them were fairly early at, and we're having a difficult time even talking about what problem they're trying to solve.
And so being able to really define the problem they're trying , to solve who's their buyer, what's the value proposition to the buyer, if you can't talk about those three things. You've, you're going to really struggle in this space. And oftentimes founders are the ones pitching the idea and they're talking about how they built it, what it, they're talking about what it does, but they're not talking about the value of it and what it can really do.
They're talking about how it's built or how it's unique. So there's a lot when it comes to the value proposition, promise trying to solve, and the market. And I'd say anybody that's trying to. Build a solution and sell into provider right now is really going to struggle because culturally, organizations, in healthcare are slow to change.
So you might have a really good idea that's going to solve something, but you're competing with all these other things and no money and no budgets and just broken healthcare. It's really hard to break into that part of healthcare. If you're driving something along patient engagement, in the payer, in life science, those spaces, sometimes med device, those are a little easier from a standpoint of the market because there's, money out there to be spent.
spent on buying your, what you're creating. So that's a big piece of it. Looking at whether a founder, is this the first time they've done it? If not, how close are they with other like founders that can help get them launched if somebody has had a successful exit. That's usually a really good indication they can do it again.
And even if the idea isn't great, you can tweak the idea if you've had somebody that knows how to do it. So that is key. Now, there are many, organizations that are new founders that have never done it before that are successful. But that's oftentimes a big hurdle for organizations in getting funding.
And so those are just some of the things that you think about and anything, there's so much hubbub right now, generative AI. There's a lot of noise. If you're just going to build another point solution there, man, you better be unique and not just another, like another widget because that's not a long term strategy.
So there's a lot to it, but it boils down to the value proposition, the problem you're trying to solve. Who's your buyer? And what's the value and ROI back to that person? If you can't articulate those things, then you're going to really struggle.
I think we could turn this podcast today into a masterclass on how to get your pitch out there.
We're entering healthcare services, to your point, like maybe it's not the hospital, maybe it's med devices, life sciences, pharma, et cetera. And yet, Here's what I always find fascinating, why I ask the questions about startups, but I do, I'm fascinated by how many amazing ideas are out there. I'm fascinated by the founders that I meet, and I'm on a couple of boards for them, because I believe in what they're endeavoring to achieve.
Whether or not they're successful, I'm hopeful that I get to be a component of that, because I love why they're doing what they're doing. But again, Why you're doing it, how you're doing it, and the actual value that gets turned into the monetization of it to be cashflow positive by a certain point is a real conversation, it's a real thing.
And even yesterday I was speaking with one of my friends who's become CIO of a company, it's about three years old now, it's an amazing idea. And whether or not it ever gets enough teeth, To stick around in the marketplace, they're not the only ones doing what they're doing. Then I ask the question, what's the workflow like?
What's the patient experience like? Where do your clinicians come from? How are they not getting burnt out? How are you integrating it back into the EMR? What does the primary care physician see versus the practitioner who's feeding in this information separately? All of those pieces come in and they're like, These are all excellent questions.
Now, this person was able to answer them, and I knew that they would be able to, and they're like, it's taken a long time for us to get there.
You really there's a lot of good ideas out there that'll never make it, that's why you have to take a step back and look at what is really going to drive the who's going to buy it, unless you really come into a place where you can identify who your buyer is, that they will have budget for it, and then if they buy it, that culturally, the organization will use it.
, you've got to understand that piece of it and have a way in to get it in there and test it. So that's a big piece of it. But the other part of it is then if it, what if it is a really good idea? How do you scale it? What if you're a software company? How do you manage the account? Like you can't like, Scaling from a eight people in a garage is really challenging.
So you have to find partners. Do you just, do you white label it? There's so many other things to take into account, but there's a lot of good ideas that will never ever come to fruition because they're not transformational enough. And if you, and then you have to look at what's a deal size. Is it a bunch of little deals?
You'd have to have an army of Salesforce to sell that much to get to 50 million. There's no way you can do that. There's just other things. Once you get those first three questions asked that take you to your next level as to whether or not you invest in, I coach a lot of executives on those things.
And so it can be brutal. The first time you pitched to me,
so as you think about this, that startup landscape, when you think about emerging technologies in general that you believe are going to shape the future of healthcare, not just in startups and in general.
What has you most excited and what are your like, that's the phone call I want for my company.
Yeah, if you're in data and analytics and AI and generative AI, I do a lot of advisory and consulting on setting up governance for gen AI, how do you pick partners, foundation models, do you go with Microsoft?
Google, AWS, like whose, tools do you use? Do I just wait for Epic to just get it built in? I do a lot of advisory around generative AI and AI strategy and then governance over it. So as a startup, That's good, and that's bad, because if you've got tools and capabilities that you can help there, you probably, you're in a space that people at least will have budget for.
So everyone will be spending money on AI, generative AI, in the next three to five years, on some type of project. But when you come to do that, there are two paths that you can take.
Point Solutions and Business Transformation
You can take Point solution, go after a very specific process and problem that, that you can fix with gen, with a generative AI tool and go fix that.
But then you end up as an organization with all these little point solutions all over your sys, all over your system, and it may not connect unless you have a strategy and a way to make all that connect. If you're doing something that's. Business transformational. So look at all the inefficiency in healthcare.
And if you can take out that inefficiency with generative AI, preemptively, and help with workflow, burnout have, technology do the work of people and let people do the things that only people can do you'll be gold. And so those are the things to really invest in. And there's some cool companies out there in healthcare doing that.
And I think that's great. But again, as a large organization, you need a strategy before you go spend money on it. And you're going to, you have vendors coming to you. You need to just take a step back. How are you going to measure it? What are you going to do? But generating AI is going to transform.
The workplace in every single industry, and you can sit back and wait and watch your competitors take advantage of it and catch up later, or you can leap forward and do that, but that's putting that strategy together and doing it now is really important.
The Role of the CIO in AI Strategy
That's important for the CIO though, as well.
Yes, there's the company that wants, needs your help to figure these pieces out. If you're sitting in the CIO chair, and you're thinking about how to deliver this perspective to your board, to your peers, and whatnot. Even yesterday, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about AI revolution is losing steam because it's trained itself on everything that's out there, and it's more expensive to keep mining it than it is to produce the results.
And there's Someone that's going to latch on to that article. There's someone who's going to latch on to the, Oh my gosh, we are so far behind, how come we're not doing this? And there's all that in between. That really is the CIO, CDO, CMIO. You pick a C suite technologist, they're responsible for conveying that message.
If you're in that chair, you're speaking to your board as the CIO, what are you going to say to them?
really is a balance because they have probably 100, 150 ideas for Gen AI projects. Every single department in that organization is coming to them They're just being bombarded. And, so they have a hard job because they have to balance. The politics of people groups needing to do stuff for today and having budget for that, along with the heavy burden that technology costs an organization, and how do you start the strategy to be removing the work And the processes and digitizing those things and using AI to, to do that work to become more efficient so you can take that spend and do it for the innovation and the other transformation things.
It is a two pronged approach. There's a balance of point solutions that you can go get, easy wins, create value, create money, create savings. There are. Solutions out there that will do that today that you will not risk your job on. And then along that parallel path, though, you've got to put that long term strategy of business transformation in place because there is so much inefficiency in healthcare that generative AI can really solve.
This is not a five year transition. This is in six months, you'll see a difference. In 12 months, you'll see a difference. In 90 days, you should be able to get things stood up. It's not that complicated, only if you make it complicated. So there's that whole piece of it. And then you're, that's where, It's important to have a CIO in the business, understanding what that is, but the CIO can drive that business transformational change fairly quickly.
Low risk.
Low risk.
The Evolution of EMRs and Organizational Change
the older systems, but in the:And we started to pull insights out of that. And I remember all the people who are waiting for it to go away. I was like, it's not going away. And there's a lot of conversations. I worked in an environment where union negotiation came with the onset because it wasn't meaningful use yet as an example.
When you think about that incrementalism and partnering with the organization, so that it's not happening to them, what would you say? How would you. Make it sound like we're doing these things together for these reasons. This is how it's going to impact the organization in a much more thoughtful approach versus a mandated approach.
And that's really too often when you feel like things happen to us. When you think about that organizational change management element, what has worked for you in the past
The Importance of a Clear AI Strategy
?
Part of the noise and the chaos around AI is, first of all, it wasn't born last January. It's been around a long time.
These companies the the three bigs have been at this for several years. And so their, models, their foundation models, just pick a partner. You have to have a strategy. You have to take a step back. What are you going to try to accomplish? Pick your partners and then bring your organization in and, figure out where the highest return is, and that's why you need partners to do this.
You can't figure this out yourself. The experts sit outside your organization. Bring them in. They'll help you. And you can go faster with this because the faster you go, the more savings you create, the more value you create, the more employees you retain, the more positions you retain, the higher you can reduce your claims denials.
There's so many things that you can do that that are just part of the business of healthcare, let alone what the experience of healthcare is, because that's a whole nother strategy that AI can really augment and support. So I'm just talking about the business of healthcare versus the the clinical, the patient, and that piece of it as well is needing a strategy.
You have to have a strategy. Is
it too unique to think that you would hire a fractional CAIO to dip your toe into that water?
No, I think it's a, that would be a good place to start because again it's, you can do that assessment up front and guide the people in your organization. But having that outside guidance is really important.
I love that. We said, start simple, start with something that makes sense. Have a problem to solve versus just introducing one more aspect into the mix because we've all been in IT, you and I have been in IT for 70 years. Guess what? When something gets introduced, when's the last time you retired a piece of technology or equipment?
ning of something was back in:What did it replace?
Yeah, it's tough, but it, you have to come back with a really defined strategy, outcomes you can measure. And then work through how to get there and putting the right team together to do it. And it'll be a combination of inside outside.
I love that perspective. You make it approachable in a way that's I can do this.
I can have these conversations. I can think about these aspects. versus the overwhelming nature of some of the things that come at us every single day.
Speed Round: Healthcare Technology and Automation
I want to ask you what I would call a couple of speed round questions, we'll see where we land with these. And so you did touch on the AI aspect and a couple other elements.
If you could automate one task in healthcare, what would it be?
Oh, check in. We just still overcomplicate it. You do something online and, you still have to sign paperwork or do things.
Having my records follow me everywhere I go. And so I had a complete record with me at all the time. And I didn't have to repeat putting information in every time I saw a different physician, a different health system.
I think that our disconnected medical records is, so beyond where we need to be today in technology. It's, it should be fixable and we haven't fixed it yet.
And yet our listeners are going to go, oh, but here's eight solutions that do that today. There's so much progress being made. . But here's the deal. Not everybody's going to give you the information. Not everybody is going to give you the information, even though by law they need to. But interoperability is still a challenge in getting everything in one place. So I love that solutions are coming out that are doing it.
And my goodness, whether you've got myriad portals that come with your EMRs, to your point, it's really exciting. It's hard to get all your information in one place. I have moved seven times in 20 years for a myriad of reasons. My records are everywhere.
Everywhere. I just remember how sad I was when Microsoft Health Vault shut down.
They were so early on, what was that, 15 years ago? It was a long time ago. They were onto something and we're just not ready to fix that problem or it would be fixed.
Even now, I moved a couple years ago, reestablishing all my care. And I have a physician who's on electronic records, but you still have to validate your information on paper once a year.
I was like, really and I told them how they could do it in an automated fashion. And they were like, you're the patient. We're good. I was like, Okay, next. It was interesting. What's your favorite app or tool that helps you stay organized at work?
OneNote. I use OneNote to take notes in.
I organize things. I if I've had meetings and notes, I stick it all in there. OneNote is a, is the single tool that I just collaborate and put everything to. So I like OneNote.
It's a tried and true staple. I think we've all used it for a decade plus or more, and it's the one that just keeps on going.
Don't mess with it. Don't break it. Please don't fix something that's working. And if you could debunk a myth about health care, what would it be
Challenges and Hopes for Healthcare Interoperability
? That we're fully interoperable that's the beginning of our conversation.
Or that everyone's on EPIC. The system's on EPIC.
It all comes together now. Or the system's on whatever. Just the inability to share and have access to patient information is a huge obstacle that is ridiculous.
And in the next three to five years, What are you most hopeful about in health care? When you say, okay, you know what, five years from today, this should be true for, me, for others, et cetera.
I think the patient experience should be different. I think that, when we access health care and get it, I think that having our claims denied, not paid right, delayed, physicians get paid on time, hospitals get paid, insurance companies get paid, everybody I think that administrative burden.
that happens and it sucks up what, 20, 30 percent of the cost of healthcare, which is a complete waste, and it just, it riles me up. If, AI and Gen AI can't fix that, again, we don't want it fixed then, because that is where administrative waste, administrative burden, is where technology can really help take out the high cost of delivering healthcare.
And imagine if a physician's It has three or four people managing paperwork and approvals. If they only needed one, you could have imagine that, and then you could have more clinicians and you could, just change all of that. So it's, we've got to clean up the administrative burden.
Yeah.
Cause then you can get access to care and health equity and tackle all the other perspectives. Let's be honest, an aging population that's going to need additional support and that same population has the hardest time navigating care to a degree. And also the advocacy that goes with the ability to age longer, healthier, happier in place.
But when you do get sick, you need help. And that becomes that population that, to your point, if it can be automated and easier to get what you need, imagine how much healthier and longer we can live in that exact environment
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
. Lisa, thank you so much for being a part of Flourish. Thank you for being the first guest.
Thank you for sharing your perspectives, your years of experience for your friendship and the ability for us to come back. And then every time we do chat in person or when we just pick up the phone and do that, because I've had very significant conversations with you in a parking lot, right?
Hey, These are the reasons we do what we do, because outside of the things we hear and see, you can pick up the phone and literally call somebody who has a perspective, has an answer, and quite honestly will steer you in the right direction. And that's what Flourishing Together is all about.
Thank you for today.
You are welcome. Thanks Sarah.
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