Bringing the Data Together in M&A (ft. Brian Eckhardt)

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 Marx.

Thank you for joining another episode of Digital Voices, where we try to cover all things digital acceleration or transformation across the entire spectrum of healthcare, including Pharma, big tech, life sciences, payers, and of course, providers. And sometimes we delve into the area of sort of the underlying tech. So really excited today to have a colleague of mine join me. But before he does, he kind of a sneak preview. He does hail from Canada. So Megan, have you ever visited Canada?

Never been to Canada.

So it can't be that far from where you live. I'm in Virginia. I don't really know how far it would be. Not too far, but I would, I would need a passport.

Yeah.

And an airplane and I could get there. Well, I recommend it. It's a beautiful country and my family used to vacation there every summer, actually, just beyond in Ontario, in this great region, uh, beyond Toronto where it was just these pristine lakes, just beautiful, beautiful country. I really appreciate Canada. And so happy to welcome my friend Brian Eckhardt. Brian, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you.

So Brian is the CEO at InfoMagnetics Technology Corporation, but I think you Pretty much go by IMT.

It's a lot easier. Yeah.

So we first met a few months ago because we have a mutual colleague, and he thought that, you know, it'd be interesting for 2 CEOs to get to know each other. And so I was glad that he did and found you and what your organization does pretty fascinating. And I know we have both on a personal level, and we'll get into that maybe when you sort of introduce yourself. But we have some commonalities in terms of our origins and things like that. So that's pretty cool. But the question that everyone always wants me to ask first when we start Digital Voices episodes is what songs are on your playlist? Like what songs do you like to listen to or type of music?

Well, I might give you a non-traditional answer because much like everybody is moving to the cloud and wants subscription services, and we'll talk more about that later, once I found out what Amazon Music was and Apple Music. I found it a whole lot easier now to just pick a channel and let them pick for me. But, you know, in terms of channels, you'll find me on the classic rock channel, you'll find me on the folk music channel, even indie rock. Certainly a lot of, uh, I'm very eclectic in what I like, and I really like the idea now that I can just go to Amazon Music and say, I think I like this kind of genre today, and let them figure it out for me.

Yeah, I like doing that too. And then that way it makes, yeah, it makes it easier for you. It's a good, better experience. And then you get to hear things that you probably forgot about or wouldn't have picked, and then you liked it. So that's pretty cool. What about your life message or mantra? Are there sort of words that sort of guide you, guiding principles, anything like that?

Growing up where I did and the life experiences I've had, I think, um, I think all my life I've kind of followed this mantra of, uh, just be kind and charitable always, not just when it feels right or when it suits you. It It's hard work. It should be an effort. And, um, you know, being charitably kind to people, patience, tolerance always gets you farther in life than any other approach.

There's a lot of wisdom right there. I can appreciate that. So tell us a little bit— we kind of hinted at a little bit, but, you know, tell us your story, whether personal or professional. You can go either, both sides, as far back as you want. But I think our audience would like to know a little bit more about you, Brian, you know, who you are and, you know, how you came to where you are today?

You don't know where I live in Canada if I tell you I'm in Winnipeg. I grew up in the prairies about a 2-hour drive north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, which might also be a challenge for a lot of people in America to find. But, uh, it's very much the prairies. If you've traveled through Kansas or if you've gone through Iowa, you know, it won't look a lot different. And it's that kind of Prairie Midwest mentality and culture that I grew up in. And I graduated with electronic engineering and also with economics and commerce degrees and actually started working in the telco industry in 1981 when I started, and not healthcare or IT. And I was a costing engineer. I was using my economics degree. So that was interesting and got me to spend time in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, with a— National Telecom Industry Association, helped the telcos lobby during deregulation, got to, got to experience the whole political side of the industry. And then when I settled down, I went back to Winnipeg, and for a little while I actually took a job as an engineer and traveled all over the north to very, very remote places. So I've seen the nooks and crannies of northern Canada that Most people have not seen, and that was an eye-opener for me. Finally, I did settle down kind of in the mid-'80s, got married. We have 2 children that were born here in Winnipeg, and they're both out on their own now. But, you know, my career took a turn in about the mid-'90s when the telcos started to say, we need to get into the IT business. Every telecom wanted an IT company, and I had some background in mergers and acquisitions. I helped start up an IT company at our local telco and ended up getting into the IT services world. That's how I kind of got into what I'm doing today. You know, it was the genesis of my company, which was really towards 2000, 2003, is when our telco kept getting acquired and I kept getting bounced around. And then I decided, you know what, I think I'm going to do this on my own.

That's pretty good. Yeah. You built a company. I cannot relate to building the company, but I can relate sort of to running companies. So I definitely want to spend some time on that during our time together. What are some of the core services that you ended up focusing on with IMT?

Well, when I started the company, I kind of thought, well, what are we good at? What am I good at? What can I leverage or take with me to start a company? And I had a relationship with a bunch of guys in Chicago. Who had a very small company at the time, about 50 to 70 people, called Initiate Systems. And I partnered with them. I said, hey, I want to be your systems integrator and I want to be a Canadian partner. And they hadn't even thought about Canada as a market yet. So I was really their first business partner. They were really still kind of in startup mode. I had about 4 people, as I mentioned. They had about 50. And we got very lucky because Initiate Systems built what is today called an Enterprise Master Patient Index, right?

Right.

So kind of the bit of luck that we both enjoyed was right around when we got together and said, let's start working together, Canada was going through a program through, through an organization called Canada Health Infoway to inject about $1.5 billion into the healthcare system to help build EHRs. And Obama at the time did something very similar as part of Obamacare and was injecting in a few billion. So with all that extra money and people now being tasked to create health information exchanges or EHRs, we, we were there at the right time with the right product and the right team. And we grew very, very quickly. So today our core services and our industries, we focus on health and we focus on human services more recently. And we try to provide what we call data and analytics services, specifically focused around providing that 360-degree view of a patient or a client or a provider. That Enterprise Master Patient Index has kind of evolved and matured into something much more than it was 10 years ago. And right now what we're doing is we're leveraging that, working with multiple stakeholders in every organization, providing more data and analytics around the foundation they started to build an EHR or, you know, an HIE.

That's really good. Yeah, the timing, uh, definitely was, uh, fortuitous. So what are some things that you're proud of in terms of, uh, the accomplishments of your company? I wanna talk a little bit about data management, some of the things that you just mentioned, but I always like to ask CEOs, 'cause I'm actually, I ask it selfishly 'cause I'm just trying to learn, uh, myself. But a couple things that you're, you're proud of in terms of your organization.

I, I'll, I'll stick to the organization, what I'm proud of with the organization. I think first and foremost is starting IMT because I do remember going to see my wife while she had a 2-year-old in one arm and I had a 4-year-old on my hand and saying, I'm quitting my job, giving up a pension and an income. We're gonna start a company. And I think she thought I was quite mad. We got it off the ground and today I'm glad I did it and very proud of, you know, the support I got and the people that we have. And so starting IMT would be one of them.

Yeah.

Another one I'm very proud of is At IMT, we've always had a focus on charity, and we support multiple charities. But the charity of choice that that I chose because we have autism in the family is an organization here called Saint Amant, and Saint Amant Foundation supports developmental disabilities and autism programming, things like ABA and so on. And we've raised in the last fifteen years, we are personally responsible for raising about a quarter of a million dollars. And then, you know, through the matching activities and just activities we've done with our donations, we've probably got about $1 million we've raised for them. So we're very proud of that.

No, that's great. And then I could tell that from Brian, from in the beginning talking about sort of your mantra and the way that you're oriented in terms of being kind and charitable. So it doesn't surprise me. And that's always awesome when, when we look beyond ourselves and our companies and we try to do something for the greater good. And that seems to be what you're all about, and I think sort of how and why we connected a bit. So we talked a little bit about data analytics, 360-degree view, and of course, the basis, the original basis, sort of this EMPI. And so Brian, looking forward, what sort of services do you think are coming up next? As we go through digital transformation and all these different things, is there something else on the horizon that you're looking— 2 words?

Yeah, of course. I think one of the good things about COVID and I say that not tongue-in-cheek, there's a silver lining in COVID where with everyone being home, we did a lot more Zoom calls, Teams calls, and so on. It actually increased my access to a lot of the thought leadership inside my clients who became more kind of willing and accepting of doing a Teams call. as opposed to a face-to-face. So it gave me a chance to kind of collect a whole lot more information around what they're thinking. And I continue to talk to them all the time. I think what we're seeing, if I talk to my customers and to the thought leaders in my customers, it's pretty consistent in healthcare. The first thing that they're asking for, of course, is security. Security and compliance to governance regulations. As you know, Ed, there's been a number of high-profile breaches and cases in the news this year of very large healthcare organizations. So that would be number one on their mind. Sort of the second thing on their mind is cloud, cloud-based solutions. Everybody wants to talk now about, I don't want to be in the wires and pliers business. I want to get out of infrastructure. And can you just provide to me what you're doing today as a service? How much per year? How much per month? And to that end, where we're seeing real challenges in finding people, both ourselves and our customers, who are what I'd call cloud savvy, people who have grown up more in a cloud-type career and know how to deal with having multiple clouds. I work with Amazon, I work with Microsoft, or hybrid clouds. I have some in my data center, I have some in Azure. That, that's a real challenge. Those people are difficult to find. It's kind of early days, people who can say I've got a lot of experience in that area. And I think the third area that everyone is interested in now is data sciences. And a lot of people are just beginning to understand what data sciences are because a lot of people will say, what's— we've got data warehouses, we've got data marts, we've been doing this for years. What's the difference? And I have a data scientist on staff. They have a big poster up on their wall which says, let the data speak. And they would explain to you the difference between data science and data analytics is When you build a warehouse, when you build a bunch of reports in Cognos, you're saying, I know the question to ask, I want the answer. Go through the data and find out how many people do we churn, how many value-based patients came in this month. With data scientists, it's really more of giving them access to all the data and asking more open-ended questions. I wonder why we have so many readmissions within 30 days. I wonder if this new program is more effective than that one. And letting them look at the data and saying, here's what I found. Can you interpret what I found? They look for patterns, trends, and you try and work with them to say, I think this is telling me something. So it's much of a collaboration.

Yeah, that's a great explanation because I've had people ask me that same question. I don't know that I was as clear as what you just shared. That's really interesting. And I, and, and I think you're, you're spot on the, where, where I'm seeing things move. And, you know, one of the reasons, you know, so interested in speaking with you and, you know, what makes one of the other hallmarks of your company is we are seeing a lot of M&A and I don't know what it's like on Canada. So I'd be interested in that as well, but extreme amount of M&A activity. And I think it's gonna continue to increase here in the lower 48, I guess, as we might call it in, in the United States. And where is the data need typically? Like when you work with clients that are going through an M&A, what sort of services are they typically looking for? But not to confuse everything, Brian, the first question is M&A activity in Canada, because I'd be interested, because I know the Canadian health system is much different. And then second, when you are in an M&A situation, what are clients looking for?

You might be surprised that Canada's not all that much different in terms of the activity. The only thing that might be different are the drivers. So a large part of Canadian healthcare, people in the US might be surprised to learn, is private. Most of the diagnostic imaging radiology labs are private. Most of the pharmacy world, drug world, is private. And most of the fee-for-service physicians, your family doctors and so on, those are private organizations. And the provinces are simply insurers. Now we have a one-party insurance system. We have a single universal payer, but they're still only acting as a payer in that regard. So most family docs and a lot of the ancillary programs, dental, lab, radiology, and so on, are private. What's public is the delivery of acute care, hospital care, and so on. There is M&A activity because what we do in Canada is we tend to decide we should centralize and have One organization deliver everything in a province, and then we decide we should have regions and devolve and decentralize. Well, we decentralized heavily throughout the early 2000s up to about 2015, and now we're centralizing again. So as a government decides we're gonna go from having 7 separate regions to one, they have the same challenges where each region has their own systems. One is Allscripts, one is Cerner, and so on, and we're gonna go to one. which one are we gonna pick? So, uh, we do actually see a lot of M&A activity in, uh, in Canada, but it's not driven by organizations doing acquisitions. It's driven more by governments deciding to reorganize.

Yeah, very interesting. No, I'm glad I asked the question. So yeah, and the second part of that was, so with an M&A situations, you know, I know it's a big data challenge for organizations because they've got system, and even if they're acquiring a health system, a hospital, whatever, with the same system, it's just as difficult because it's not like you're just going to put all the data together and everything is nice. So what sort of services do you all provide? Or in general, what's needed in these sort of cases when there's an acquisition taking place?

Larger organizations, they'll want to see the client overlap. They'll want to assess what patients do we have in common, how many would be new patients. If they have large— we did, we helped one organization out that had some very large value-based care contracts. So, what people overlap in there and how would we manage that? The other thing we see helping people with is in migrating data from one system to the other, reducing a lot of workload by enriching the data first and making sure that we can help them move that quicker, move that along quicker. Accountable care organizations would look at when they're merging, You know, how can we bring the data together to help meet more of our metrics for patient, you know, top-ups, that kind of thing? So we, we actually do get involved quite a bit on the person side with that kind of person data in the MPI on an M&A because there's a lot of drivers around that— ACOs or value-based care or just what's our overlap, you know, what do we have as relationships with providers.

Yeah, I know when I was at every health system, actually, I'm thinking back even back 20 years ago, When I was a CIO, I think in every situation we acquired other hospitals. I mean, and of course, like the examples you were giving earlier, Brian, of activities going on in Canada. I mean, it's not just hospitals, but, you know, the whole spectrum. But I know this is top of mind for many leaders, digital leaders of organizations. And this is probably one of the most difficult things to— challenges to overcome and do right. is this whole sort of data migration, cleansing of the data, and things that you were enriching the data and then making sure that you have a pristine single instance of data when all is said and done. And so it's very much an art form. I would say the hardest part of M&A is probably culture, but the second part probably comes down to all the data capabilities that you've been talking about. And you mentioned earlier, you don't only help typical hospital clients and type of clients, but as you mentioned, with, with health services and other areas around healthcare. But you all have had a multitude of different types of clients, and I, I find that pretty interesting.

Yeah, I think the big one for us that we're seeing interest in is now human services starting to replicate, if you will, what healthcare did 10 years ago. Human services now beginning to understand that they need a 360 view of their clients, and they have 12, 14 programs in human services, and they should see across them and have one client profile, one client record.

Yeah, it's very, very critical to managing your organization and, and helping your communities. I wanna head back to leadership. So we sort of, after we talked a little bit about your personal professional story, we, uh, jumped into leadership and, and then just now finished talking about, you know, the, the importance of what you do and the whole data management and the 360 view and those sorts of things. So, I wanna sort of end up with leadership cuz a lot of our listeners are really leaders, as I mentioned, across the spectrum, and they're always, uh, interested in keen insights. What's the most important advice you ever received?

That one's pretty easy. Early on in my career as a vice president in the telco world, before I started IMT, I had a pretty tough CEO. He came from a military background and he was tough but fair. And I, and I like him. I respected him. And the one thing he taught me was the value of discipline and rigor. And, you know, I used to get up at 5:30 in the morning and get in the office at 6 because I learned by 8 o'clock when people wanted my time all day, I better be prepared for the entire day and have it mapped out. So, you know, he taught me things like the balanced scorecard approach, which I've taught to my executives, and that being disciplined and Being always prepared, being ready, having read materials if someone's walking in your room. It not only helps you to be a more effective CEO, it sets an example and creates a culture in your organization that you won't tolerate any less from your people.

That's really good. I like that. I, I, it makes me think of a couple things I'd love to jump into, but I, I wanna keep going and, and keep learning from you. What's maybe one or two things that you've learned Leading, you know, companies. So, as we've mentioned, you've been CEO of IMT for quite some time, and you had other leadership positions before that. One or two things you would say to your peer CEOs, you know, someone like myself early on, or what sort of advice would you give?

I guess I'd give two pieces of advice from my own personal experiences. And one is focus on culture more than you think you should, the culture of your organization. And, uh, Learn the importance of change management and try and learn a little patience and understand how long it does take to actually make changes in your organization. Strangely enough, decree does not work no matter where you work. The other thing I would say is you have to constantly be communicating. Talk constantly to your clients, your partners, your staff. And one of my mentors, a great CEO I used to work for, he told me one day, Just remember that every minute you're talking, you're learning nothing.

I like that. That's good. No, this is good stuff. This is really helpful to me, and I'm sure our listeners as well. So we have talked quite a bit, you know, and some of the things that you mentioned, Brian, take a lot of energy and take a lot of focus. So what do you do to recharge your batteries and sort of remain fresh?

Well, my hobby is photography. It's a passion. I grew up in a family of photographers, so That's kind of my art form. That's my relaxation outlet. I like to do wildlife photography. I like to get out fishing, canoeing, take my camera. That's really what I do to kind of get away from all the noise. We have a cabin in the woods here about 2 hours away from here. Doesn't have internet, which I really enjoy, and I hope they never put it in.

Yeah, I love that. I think we all need that detox, but it's so hard. And then It's so ubiquitous. There's very few parts of the world where that's the case. I have a similar go-to place with my wife in India. It's kind of fun. Yeah, though, that's good because, as you know, it's so important to stay refreshed and take care of yourself. So we covered a lot of ground here. This is fascinating because we talk a lot about M&A when we talk digital transformation and data management, but we never had any guests come on that actually does the nuts and bolts or helps organizations with the nuts and bolts and help make them successful. So, it's so good. And then the leadership things that you dropped on us, Brian, were super, super insightful. And so, I wanna leave the last minute to you. Is there something that we missed or something we talked about you wanna double down on?

No, if the last question goes to me, it's kind of an open-ended question. And if you, you know, if anybody wants to respond and offer up any thoughts, I think, COVID has changed the world forever, and it's certainly changed the way we work. And, uh, you know, I'm always asking people now, with the way COVID has changed work, how are you coping with it? How are you dealing with it? The changing attitudes around work from home, flex time, and so on.

Yeah. Question to me?

Uh, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So the nice thing with Divergent, where I serve, is that it's been a virtual company since the get-go. So for about 15 years. So it didn't really provide too much of a change. But I do miss, and I'm definitely a virtual type person. And trust me, I won't go into it. Take too long to tell a story. But I was doing this back in 2009, 2010, introducing this to my health system and with a lot of resistance but success. But nothing beats the in person still. So you have to create those opportunities. Yeah, you can do something virtually. We do that. Like we just had a Halloween thing and. You can definitely, in a celebration for, you know, awards won, those are good and important. And you also need to supplement it with in-person whenever you can. So we had our first in-person maybe 3 weeks ago now with the leadership team and the sales team. And it was so good to like see people in the flesh and, and, you know, hug them. And it's like, oh, you're a real person. And, and then you can get more intense, right? You can do things that you couldn't do in a virtual. So for me, it's, we're gonna keep being virtual cuz that's by nature the, the company, but gonna create as many opportunities as we can to be together in person. So it could be at, with a client ideally, and, or, you know, at a conference that we're attending anyway. But I think as a leader, we have to create those opportunities for meaningful person-to-person in-the-flesh interactions.

That's great. Thanks, Ed.

All right. Well, you can see why I wanted Brian to be our guest, a very insightful, uh, leader. And the things that they're doing to help other companies is pretty, uh, spectacular as they go through M&A and other things. Also, what really struck with me— I always take copious notes— is the data science part of it. That was a really good explanation, so kudos to your data scientists, Brian. That does wrap up Digital Voices, and we thank you for listening.

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