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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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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