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

Welcome to this week, health my name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week Health. A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 Spring conferences, vibe in Nashville and hymns in Chicago.

Special thanks to our cDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

You can check them out on our website this week, health.com, now onto this interview.

 All right. Here we are from VI and VI and Nashville, and we're here with Josh Clark, who is give us your title.

Vice President of Global Vertical Alliances and Solutions, but I'm a principal in our healthcare and life sciences business.

There you go. Principal and healthcare and life science.

That which explains why you're here, explains why I'm here. At this conference specifically? Are you talking. Clients or are you talking to potential partners?

I'm talking to everybody. Be honest with you. We use shows like this to not only connect with our alliance partners organizations that we use as routes to market people that we sell through, but obviously we want to get in touch with, end users, whether they're existing customers or prospects.

But the other thing that we do with this show is we spend a bunch of time kind of going around and using it as a way to. Get a better perspective on what's going on in the market. We get those interactions as we talk to customers and prospects and others in the industry. But we find that shows like this really help us understand where the market's going and help us identify opportunities.

Did you do the hosted buyer?

We have some folks on the team who've been doing hosted buyer sessions. They've been really good. We're also a foundation member of Chime, so I actually just came from the CEO lunch that Russ runs, which is really good. Sam CEO for HDA was there, gave a really good perspective on sort of the challenges of being the largest, health delivery network in the United States and what it's like to run 185 hospitals.

So what are some of the things you've picked up so far over the last couple days?

Yeah. Data is at the center of delivering cares. And I think we all kind of knew that, but you know, over the years the sort of amount of data or the rate at which data was created in healthcare was limited by the pen.

And we've taken that away, right? As there's been a digital transformation in healthcare we've increased not only the amount of data, but the rate at which it's created. And I think we're all getting to a point where we understand that. Using humans as the only mechanism to read, interpret that data is no longer sustainable.

And it's not only been a shift of kind of removing the paper and pen from the workflow that's created all this data, we're getting data from sensors. We're getting data from different areas of the. Way we deliver care. Everybody wants to do improved healthcare outcomes, data driven insights, things like that.

But we used to take the data and we'd use it once, and then we'd store it. Right. And so you had this episodic care that was being given. Right, right. For years we've been talking about the continuum care. How do we track a patient care from the time that they're born to the time that they, And their life.

And it's now a point of which that data that used to just be stored off to an archived here that nobody ever looked at again, that kind of held onto it because of a regulatory requirement. Now they want to see that data, not just so that they can take better care of me or you, but so that they can de-identify that data and use it to drive improved population health, not only on a local level, but on a global level.

And so some of the companies and customers that we've been talking to are ones that. Not only use that data for their own environment, their own, population, but they want to expose

it and share it to other organizations.

Well, it's interesting. As a patient, there's two aspects that I look at the data that they're storing for me.

One is I have the option to say, I don't want you to store my data. Yeah. I don't trust you. From a cybersecurity standpoint, I have enough of those, credit Yeah. Protection things. But on the flip side, if they are gonna keep it and use it, I want to know that it's being used.

Yeah. Not only for me, but also for my family. Like generational knowledge. Of,, and we heard this from Geisinger. They have generational. knowledge Of the communities that they serve and it helps them serve those communities better. Yeah. Yeah. They're pulling all that stuff in. But what does that mean on the other side?

I mean, so on an IT side, When I got there, we had nebulous data retention policies. Yes. Is that still the case? Is it nebulous?

I think over the years, organizations have gotten more comfortable with the fact that they're creating all this electronic data. And in the beginning it was really hard to interpret what the regulations were, and it was mostly being done for regulation.

And I think that, the time that we're in now, is people understand the data. and They want the data, and they need more support from infrastructure. Companies like us to provide a data storage platform that can grow with their organization, can be agile, can help them notify, this data's in use, this data's not in use anymore.

We can move it to an archive tier. We can de-identify it, we can make it available for other people to start using. But I think now, The struggle is not so much with understanding the regulatory requirements, it's understanding what the need is for that data today and the future use of that data, which is really hard to predict, But you know, you take an example of like a precision medicine program. You're generating data from biological samples that are gone after you do that, right? You sequence a biological sample and the biological sample, it can't be used anymore, So do I keep the data that I get because I know the science will improve, and if I run a test today, that doesn't show an.

insight In a year, in a, in two years, in ten years, can I rerun that data through new science and get insights that I didn't have before? When you're talking about the person, that's one thing, but when you're talking about generational information, like you were talking about before, it really gets complex.

I think the question I want to ask is about the move to the cloud and its impact on how people think about pure storage and the stuff that you do.

Yeah. For me, my belief was always that the cloud was an option, not a destination. Right. I think a lot of healthcare organizations

and we're seeing that play out. Yeah. Yeah. So people are like, yeah, we use cloud for that. We use this for this. I mean, there's a lot of different compute environments that people are choosing to use based on the use case, the need, the, potentially the security posture, but definitely

the reach, right? The cloud gives you the ability to increase your geography and be closer to your population.

Yeah. I'm a big believer in healthcare that you need to have the right data at the right time to deliver the right type of care right. I think the cloud is an extension of that.

It's having the right workload in the right place at the right time. And like you said, there are certain workloads that are a little less dynamic and more static. They serve a certain population, maybe they don't have to have a. But as healthcare organizations expand out of their local geographies and become global healthcare delivery organizations, having the capability or the agility to move that data to the right place, especially when you're dealing with IPA and GDPR and whatever other regulatory constraints that you're under, having strategic technology partner like Pure that can help you increase your.

Whether that's on-prem in a hosted data center through a managed service partner or in a hypervisor like AWS or Azure. Being able to kind of keep the technology the same regardless of where it's running. Right? Manage it in the same way, I think really kind of helps reduce the burden on organizations to have Knowledge in their staff, right?

Like one of the biggest challenges that we've seen in healthcare is that as technology changes over time, there's a resistance to adopt it. At first it was, well, we don't want to have a patient care issue, right? You get past that hurdle of we can change things and patients can still be okay, and even better than they were before.

Now there's so many different types of technology, so many different companies out there that are providing, it makes it really hard to make sure that your workforce has the skills and knowledge and experience to be able to do that. Right? And so, one of the founding principles of Pure was that we were gonna just disrupt the entire storage market cuz we knew it could be simpler.

We knew it could be faster, we knew it could be cheaper to operate. And we knew they could be evergreen, right? And so one of the big things that sets us apart is being able to keep the data where it lives. We feel data has gravity, right? It's a big lift to always have to move data that you're using and kind of change the wheels on moving F1 cars, right?

We make that really simple. Whether that's happening on-prem in your environment or in the cloud with a hyperscale.

📍   📍 All right, we'll get back to the show in just a minute. If you've been with us for any period of time this year, we've partnered with Alex's Lemonade Stand to raise money for Cures for Childhood Cancer, and we are so excited. We set a goal to raise $50,000 and we're already up over 27,000, our 26,700 for the year.

So we're close to 27,000. I'm rounding up. We went to the Vibe Conference and with your. And the help of just an amazing community, generous community. And our partners as well. We were able to raise $16,500. So thank you all for your generosity. We're gonna do it again. As you know, we did Captains Cures for Childhood Cancer, at the Vibe Conference and anyone who got their picture taken with Captain who was facing the camera we gave $1 to Alex's Lemonade.

We're heading to hymns and bringing Captain again, and we're gonna do the same thing. As you know, captain is my producer service dog. He'll be roaming the floor. If you see Captain, stop us. We would love to have your picture taken and we would love to have you participate in this campaign.

We really appreciate our partners who helped to make this possible. For this one, so far we have rubrics, so we still have a couple of spots If you want to participate, if you want your company to participate, let 'em. That they can participate in this and we will give you the details. You can shoot us a note at partner at this week, health.com.

It's real simple. If you're on the floor, you see Captain, get your picture taken. Anyone facing the camera, go ahead and post it to social media Twitter or LinkedIn. Tag this week. Health, that's how we do the county. And again, 16,505. I think we can do it. At the HYMNS conference and really make a dent in our goal to get to $50,000 for childhood cancer.

It's gonna be exciting. We appreciate our partners who stepped up during the Vibe Conference, and obviously we appreciate rubric being our first partner to step up for the hymns event. So look forward to seeing you at hymns now, back to the show. 📍   📍

So lot of different partners, lot of activity. What's next? I mean, what's next in healthcare? What's next in, the data platform and yeah. Things that you

look, I think there's still a lot of room for us to innovate, especially in healthcare.

One of the big challenges that organizations face today is that they have existing relationships and not all of them are focused. Evaluating whether they're existing partner is the one that can take them from here to there. Yeah. Right. Like, I think we all believe what got you here won't get you there.

I think there is sort of a gravity that's going on now where it's like, you know what? The money is constrained. My staff is constrained. Yeah. There's a gravity around existing partners. Mm-hmm. And I mean, I've. I've heard that from CIOs. I've now heard it from some partners like that. It's really hard to get that first meeting if you're not in there.

And I'm like, yeah,

well Covid didn't make it easier.

No. Well, we didn't know where they were. Right. During Covid. Exactly. So that became a challenge for sure. And now it's just, do we want to add a new environment? What's the case to be made for adding a new environment in this world?

You have to be easy to use. You have to be easy to, I. You have to add a measurable benefit over what they currently have. Yeah.

So we're finding that in certain areas of the world, organizations are constrained not just by space, but by power. Right? Right. And so it feels to me like our focus on not only the technology where we disrupt it, not only the business model, right?

Where we changed the way that people worked with their traditional infrastructure partner. Right. But our focus on driving down. Getting disk out of the environment. You can see that in the launch of our flashlight eprom, right? We're driving archive at scale and an all flash system. But you know, even further than that, we're also focused on doing it in a very sustainable way.

So our ESG program, when you get into places like Europe where there's a huge constraint on power, right? Like everybody thinks that good things go on forever, right? I got a data center. I got enough power to handle for the rest of my life. That's not true. And so because of the way that we've innovated on the technology, we've innovated on the business side, we've done it with a eye towards sustainability.

Those organizations are now able to do more with less.

, it's interesting that sustainability. Conversation has been coming up. Yeah. It used to be things that we talked about, but now I've heard of, full-blown programs. Stanford being one of 'em. I talked to Michael Pfeffer about their program.

Yeah. And he is like, yeah. He goes, we're pushing our partners on their sustainability practices. And I imagine there will be a little bit of shake up there because it's like, Wow, we haven't thought about that. You know, You need storage. We provide storage that that takes, whatever. But , there is a difference between the players if you've designed for sustainability.

Yeah. Versus yeah. Hey, we stack up Okay. With the rest of the team. Yeah. What does it look like to design for sustainability?

That's a great question. I think what we always try to do is not only design a product that draws less power, takes up less cooling, takes up less space, but do it across the supply chain, It's not just that we deliver a product that's sustainable, we do it in a way where throughout the lifecycle of manufacturing, design, et cetera, we're focused on sustainability.

Yeah. If you could show that sustainability, that's a, that's a winning proposition. Especi. Having interviewed Mike, on their sustainability program, they are looking for that

lineage Yes.

Of

it's not just what you do with the end product, right? It's how do you get me there and how do I operate it there?

How, how do you build your product? Yeah. And what kind of materials are you using and. Hey what's gonna happen to this after its life? So, I'm getting the hey, we're over time looks so no.

It's always good to talk. I appreciate the time. Thank you very much. One of the sharpest dressed group of people at the conference, the pure storage people with their orange. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it's phenomenal that they've taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community. It is greatly appreciated.

We wanna thank our partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.