Driving Innovation & Transformation (ft. Zahid Ali)

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.

Welcome to another drop of Digital Voices. We continue on our theme, sort of global theme and international thinking and learning. And we're gonna really talk a lot about spurring innovation today and transformation. And before we get there, Megan, how do you personally take ideas to reality? Have you ever like had an idea and then make it happen?

Yeah, I'm a planner. So when I've got an idea, I like to kind of look at the big picture and create steps to get there and get it done. I will say sometimes that does get in the way. I overthink things or I might spend too long in that planning phase. So sometimes I just jump right in too. So I guess it just depends on—

Yeah.

On what I'm trying to bring to reality, but both work for me.

Awesome. Yeah. So Zahid Ali and I are gonna talk a little bit about that today and probably both types of, uh, sometimes just jumping right in and sometimes being a planner, but never overplanning. We'll get into that as we get going. But Zahid, we met pretty much virtually, so we've just had this virtual relationship over the last couple of years because you're prolific on social media. You have a lot of great ideas. You're all about digital transformation. You've won All sorts of awards, been recognized by everyone, the who's who, whether it's Forbes or HIMSS or Future 50, all the different accolades one could possibly have. So I really appreciate you being our guest. And I know we'll get into a little bit, but I don't want to give away too much. But I know we share a lot more than just our passion around digital health, but also we both like to hike and climb and stay close to nature. So welcome to Digital Voices.

Yeah, thanks, Edward. And it's really my pleasure to be here with you, just speaking with you. And actually, we have physically met. And while we were there at KIMS '22, we came across, but somehow you were in a session and I just stopped, listened to you, and then I just went away.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll be more intentional this time, next time you come out.

Yeah.

I would love to visit. Pakistan. And as you know, I have family in North India close to the border, and we can certainly— plenty of mountains for us to climb together there.

No, it's really a great place to visit, and it has a lot of natural beauties, and you can compare it with the best places in the world. And usually, world sees it, it's not pretty safe, but it's very safe. People are very good, very humble, very hospitable. And you have been to India many times, and it's the same culture over here, actually.

No, beautiful people. I understand. The world is dangerous everywhere. I always tell people, you don't have to look beyond the United States to find danger. But that's really not the point of today, but it's kind of a fun topic. Listen, everyone wants to know what's on your playlist. So we always ask people, get to know them a little bit. What kind of songs do they like to listen to?

So basically, I usually love to listen to what can be soothing. So for that purpose, I love to hear Yanni, Kenny G, Kitaro. So it's all like more about instrumental music. It's not— no voices at all. So this is what I love.

Is there a Pakistan artist that I should look up? I'm just curious because I don't know that I have any Pakistan artists.

Yeah. So one of the best person who is considered to be top rated in his voice and his voice has Beaten many AI algorithms as well. So his name is Nusrat Fateh Khan.

Well, we'll put that in the notes so people can look that up. I love international music. Obviously, I got into Bollywood because of my wife, but I need to add some Pakistan music to my playlist. I'm sure actually my wife probably listens to quite a bit because it's so close. But anyways, that's cool. What about a life passion or mission that you have? Is there something that sort of drives you in everything that you do?

My passion has been really providing, because we see a lot of ailments, a lot of problems around. People are not very affording. If we see healthcare has been more and more complex, when we talk about quality of care, so we always speak more about the cost. So my passion is to bring a model of care where we can provide like the wellness, the care to the large population. So that is affordable, that is equitable, And that is accessible. So this is my passion, and I wanted to see people healthy. That brings me into my comfort zone, actually.

I love it. That's great. Tell us a little bit about your story. Obviously, you're a very interesting person from Pakistan. Tell us a little bit about you personally, professionally, whatever you'd like to share.

I started my education into medical. I thought I should be a doctor, and then I realized that that is a bit boring field. You can't just think out of the box. You can't do many things. You, you just have to grab more and more knowledge. And so because my maths were very good, I'm one of the top guys at that time in mathematics. I scored the highest ever possible numbers in mathematics, even in my country and even to some extent in the world as well. So then I went to math. I started studying computer science. When I graduated, I thought because my logic, the way I solved the problems were truly amazing. So I adopted the healthcare IT field from the beginning. So I'm maybe out of few of those guys who spent 2 decades married with healthcare IT. So I did not went into any field Have not worked in any other field. So my passion, my working all has been into healthcare IT.

That's great. And you've been a CIO?

I had been a CIO, I had been like consultant, I had been like a program manager or leading. I worked with top-notch organizations like World Health Organization, Center for Disease Control. If you talk about the leading academic medical centers like Stanford, Harvard, UCLA. So I worked with all of those organizations. And on to other parts, so I had been very active with HIMSS. I wrote mobile apps guidelines. I was part of a social determinants of health committee. I was writing some of like parts for HHS onto the innovations. So what innovation HHS should consider for them. I was also part of that exam committee and even, uh, that role, uh, Chief Digital Health Transformation Strategist program. So that's some, uh, something pretty important. And we all thought over that, uh, initially it was something like, uh, organizations are having director's role, director IT, then it graduated to CIO, then CTO, then chief digital officer. But now it's more like these roles have to come up to transform the organizations. Actually, it's more strategic. Initially, if we see the CFOs, the Chief Operating Officers, they were graduating towards CEO. But now the people who are like deep with the data, who understand the transformation, they would be graduating to CEO. So I think in future, more and more CIOs or VPITs would be graduating towards the CEO role. So in order to go to that, adopting that role, I think this certification program by him is, uh, is the key learning for our purpose.

You're very well accomplished. And I like what you have to say there, that I always believe the same thing, that a CIO and a learned one, which I wanna ask you about here in a second, you're giving all sorts of clues how they might become learned and take classes and things like that, should be CEO, right? Because they have understood the fabric of the organization, right? From a tech perspective, tying everything together, and then as a business leader, learning the clinical side if they don't already have that. They're in a perfect role to become CEO. We've seen a couple, right? And I think that the opportunity is ripe for more to become CEOs. So I'm glad you're— all the different things that you're doing, especially with HIMSS, are really making a difference. So how do you keep up? So digital, right? Every day there's something new breaking, something new. And How do you keep up with everything? It's like the physician, I forget the exact stat, but a physician has to keep up with thousands of pages of new material every day in research, and there's no way, right? So, how do you do it as a technologist? How do you keep up with everything?

There are a couple of ways that I adopt, especially one of the ways I follow a few people, and you are one of those people. I listen to the people, what they are doing, and this is one of the best ways I acquire the knowledge. And the second way, I put myself into hot waters basically. I work with those people, I try to learn, and my way is very agile. It's like I am learning and I am applying at the same time as well. So this gives me quite a lot of edge. And I listen or learn a lot of like from Deloitte, their studies from McKinsey. And actually I am part of Those researches and studies with many top organizations. So this gives me a two-sided sword, like I learn and I apply the knowledge at the same time.

I think that's key what you just said, because a lot of people don't do the learning. So really important to do the learning, and you just gave a lot of examples how you do it. But then to really make the learning stick and become real, and then adding to the body of knowledge, you apply it. Like you do, and then you're adding and then you're sharing, which is what I, I really like about you. You know, a lot of people, they don't wanna share. And without going down this rabbit hole, I'll just say this, that not everyone is like you and I and other colleagues that we have, you know, that are willing to share because they feel like they need to hold onto it. It's like a competitive advantage. We're like, no, no, no. Your passion should be like yours to help people in their journey to wellness. And so, If you truly believe that, then you want to share everything that you can. And so that's what I appreciate about you. Now, you're pretty darn good when it comes to sharing and the use of social media. How did you master social media and how can you share with our audience sort of how you leverage social media, you know, the different tools you use?

My way of operating on social media is a bit different. What I do, write blogs, I write articles, try to put some context of provoke thinking. Basically, I try to provoke a thinking pattern into the people who just read those things so that they can get the inspirations and they can also give the feedback of what I'm trying to say so that they get more involved. And the way when the people are involved, when they are like learning from it, they are commenting on it. So actually I am just making it more refined. And this is also the way they get the knowledge. And the other thing that I am doing, obviously it's also making an impact through social media. So every day at least 3 or 4, like sometimes CIOs, sometimes like state people, and sometimes more and more startups. So they come to me and they say, look, man, this is something that we have done. And we just wanted to share with you and we wanted to hear from you how we can take it forward. Every day I try to like answer 3 to 4 such requests on social media. And I'm part of a new chip accelerator and I'm part of like as a mentor and advisor and I'm part of a mass challenge. So we are advising like many, many startups actually. So right now I'm advising at least 12 different startups. So I spend time with them, I educate them, and it's two-way. Again, it's two-way. I learn from them, I share my knowledge because they are the— actually, they are the changemaker, basically. They have more knowledge, they have more power to do things. And the people like us, we have more acumen and we have the actual domain knowledge. So this is how we try to marry. the knowledge that I have with the skill set they have so that they can come up with something pretty innovative that can change the world. And I really feel very accomplished when, when I talk to these, uh, young guys and they are doing seriously phenomenal job actually.

You're providing a lot of really good ideas for our audience, you know, on how to not to remain current but to add value to How to teach others, advise others. And it's— you're right, it's symbiotic, right? You help others and they're helping you, and, and then, you know, you create new things and innovations and you, you know, fulfill the mission of creating health, you know, wellness and better healthcare for people. We mentioned a couple times already that you're from Pakistan, and I'm always curious, you know, our audience tends to focus mostly on North America, but it's really important to get a broader global viewpoint. I'm curious Do you see differences in maturity with digital transformation geographically around the world? What are some of those differences if you do?

If we talk about the US, because I had been very active into the US market and working with all the top-notch players over there with the tech companies as well. So the way they see all those problems, it's like something pretty inspirational. So they receive those inspirations from what they see. And if we talk about the emerging world or developing world, they see things from different perspective because already there are either no systems available, or if the systems are available, they are into a very infancy stage. So the processes are not properly in place. So they make the models of innovations pretty differently. So I think with this COVID example, so almost every country had done something Great. If we see India, they, they, uh, with the, uh, they, they started this telemedicine initiative. And in Pakistan, we started a complete model of integrated disease services, and that is recognized as one of the best examples in the world by WHO, by World Bank, by, by World Economic Forum, because, uh, it— Pakistan was one of those countries who was least infected by the COVID And I went to like many countries, even Egypt, to certain African countries, then Middle East countries. So a lot of countries who cannot buy those technologies, they actually have created those technologies by themselves, and they have created in a very fast way. So that opens up a new paradigm of thinking. So if these countries with the low resources can do that, So why this established world cannot, uh, like simplify those processes? So it has to be like, I think majority should be linked, uh, with the experience actually, how the things can be made simple for the people. So like appointments, like a lot of other things. So I usually correlate healthcare, I try to correlate healthcare industry with 2 different fields actually. So one is the airline industry The second one is the banking industry or financial industry. If we compare on different levels with these industries, so all the like booking system for the airlines, even for the hotels, so they are centralized. So why any person cannot have all their medical records on one app regardless where they are going? And if we see the payment systems, so all the banking system talk to each other. They have common protocols. You have account in one country in a bank and you can simply send money to any other country, any other bank in the world. So why don't we have this kind of system with healthcare system? So healthcare has been predominantly built around the insurance companies and more and more focus was onto the documentation. I strongly believe the next wave of innovation and making things simple would happen in the developing countries.

I agree with you. We've seen that, as you mentioned, in other industries and sometimes in the developing countries, there's a leapfrog effect that happens. I just think back again because of my familiarity with India, but I suspect it was the same in Pakistan where, when telephony became a big thing, India didn't have the money to pour into the big infrastructure to lay cables for all the telephony, for all the phone lines. Well, you know, a few years later, every— the world moved to mobile. And so India never had to make that expense. They just leapfrogged and went straight to mobile. And everyone, you know, mobile— I remember seeing a quote, you know, more people had access to mobile phones than quality water. So it became that ubiquitous. And yeah, I think you're right. Sometimes out of, you know, when we talk about innovation, it's sometimes out of necessity that innovation is born. And if you're— if you're sometimes— if you have— if you don't have the motivation for innovation, I don't think it develops quite as quickly. I guess we can, we can sort of say that. So how do you see the future of, uh, you know, sort of integrated care delivery? And we don't need to tackle the globe anymore, but I was just curious, you know, how you saw things from a global perspective. But what's your thoughts on where we're headed?

My thinking is healthcare has no borders, actually. Yeah, any virus, any problem can travel In seconds from one place to any other place, so they they don't actually even need the humans to travel from one country to another country. These viruses can travel in the air; they have their own media travel from one place to other place. So now the challenge is quite bigger. So just seeing the landscape of the problems that the world is facing with the increased population, the world has to come together. Build a system of integrated care where they can exchange the knowledge, where they can share like what genome sequencing they are finding, what kind of virus sequencing they are getting, what kind of DNAs they have, and how, where, where in missing sequence particular virus is attacking. So if we can create that knowledge base, a collaborative knowledge base, that's pretty important. And And for that purpose, the people is the best resource. We have to give people and we have to train them so that they all have the same kind of understanding about the problems, about these biosensors and even viruses, genomes, so that they can act together and And there is a collaborative research mechanism through which an integrated healthcare delivery can happen around the world. Obviously, this should be an orchestration layer. Can be many systems that should be just behind that. One is about telemedicine. You see, there are some kind of stringent regulations in many parts of the world that are not helping in these kind of situations. So we have to get over with those kind of regulatory frameworks in these special situations. And especially if you see telemedicine. So, so our doctor sitting— if the medical tourism is happening in many countries, especially in Turkey, even in India, even in Thailand or some other parts. So why telemedicine cannot happen while the doctor is sitting somewhere else?

Right.

So we have to like get those kind of regulatory frameworks where we make sure that these cross-border things, cross-border consultation, cross-border knowledge sharing could happen in a real-time manner.

I agree with you. As we know, it's not a technology issue, right? The tech is there. I was really delighted. I did a startup prior to my current role, and it was a telemedicine platform, telehealth platform, and we had developers in developing countries, and we used our own platform to take care of our own It probably wasn't authorized from a regulatory point of view amongst the different countries, but we helped save people's lives, our own employees' lives or their families, and they had access to a clinician. And we utilized our remote patient monitoring capabilities, our visual virtual health, and we did a lot of good. And that was just a small sliver, right? What you're talking about on a global perspective, we could really change many millions of lives, you know, by doing that. So I, I love your thinking.

If we just see, calculate the cost of, uh, getting one patient to the hospital, yeah, it's about $80 to $90 in US actually, just getting from the home to the hospital and then getting back to the home. It's average 4 hours. So if a person is spending 4 hours, so what is the cost of economy for a country for that time? So it's huge. So that, that thing can happen in 5 minutes by directly connecting to a doctor. So we have to seriously think on changing these paradigms to make things simple for patient experience, actually.

Yeah, well, it solves a whole host of challenges that the world faces today, whether it's, you know, burning fossil fuels or what have you, you know, climate change everything, right? Because you can do it from your home and not have to travel, and no one else has to travel to that space as well to treat you. There's just a lot of good reasons, right, to be able to deploy some of these. So where do you think we're headed in the future? As we sort of wind down, let's sort of think future orientation. We know that there's a lot of transformation and innovation taking place today. Can you name a couple areas that you've seen where we're seeing transformation and innovation, and then maybe where are we headed in the future?

So future is more about integrated care. Future is more about disease surveillance. Future is more about like IoT devices and taking all the diagnostics and taking all the measurements with the patient through wearables, through IoT devices. So I think these innovations would happen, and especially now There is a buzzword everywhere in the world that is metaverse. So I think this augmented and virtual reality along with AI in diagnostics, these would play a major role. So I was part of one of the studies with McKinsey and we worked out a couple of things and it was just when COVID has started actually. So 70% of the services that were given in the hospitals can be taken out of the hospital. So now even initially all the vaccinations are happening in the hospital. So no, because hospitals are the more viral polluted areas in the world. So, so if you send the healthy people over there, so it's high probability they, they would get some infections. So now there is a new problem actually you— we are creating by sending the people, more and more people to the hospitals. Also, uh, like in these areas, so many, many innovations, uh, like I had been part— I won, uh, Siemens, uh, Innovation Think Tank globally. I was the number one winner in that, and that was, uh, how we can, uh, create a model of a hospital at home. And it's, it's, uh, using all the technologies together. So it's not matter with the technology, the matter is how you apply those technologies To bring an effective model of care delivery.

This is so rich. I wanna keep, uh, talking for a long time. I wish we had a little bit more time, but let me ask you this question. If you were with the C-suite today in the US, so North America C-suite, and that's who's listening to our program, that's our audience. And, you know, they're still sort of, you know, they know they need to do something. But maybe they haven't really gone into digital transformation, certainly not the transformation or innovations we are talking about right now, but they want to. And so maybe you're talking to them or their board. What might be a piece of advice that you would leave them with?

The most important thing in all that in the current world is bring the innovations to the hospitals. Keep your people trained. Your people should be pretty familiar with the design thinking. And they should be involved into the innovations because they have the best knowledge. And especially talking about the hospital. So just today I was just reading an article. So Amazon has purchased one of the startups for $3.9 billion today. So why the hospital cannot do that? Actually, hospitals are like at the cusp of delivery. So, so if they are not, they are like, they act like the consumers of the technologies. So I think the cost would be, the cost of healthcare would be more and more. So they, they should be diversifying, uh, like their revenue streams and through the innovations. So that is like my key message to them. And the second thing, the top, the C-level should focus Onto the people development, so it's more important. And the future challenges we see ninety percent of the nurses says that they they would not be working in in healthcare industry in next three years. So how they can apply the right kind of technologies to solve these kind of workforce challenges? How to keep them motivated? Like how to keep them away from the burnouts? So this is all like. You see, if we say, uh, just commonly see, uh, from the doctor perspective, usually, uh, people, they, they would be busy 24/7. They have no social life, they have no like family life. So this is, we, we have to get over because they are humans and, and if, if they, they are not mentally in good state, they cannot give quality of care. So this is something I would give the message to all the C-level suits. That, make something about it and build a collaborative model where you can exchange knowledge and don't try to reinvent the wheel. The things that some other organization, other people have done, just try to learn from them and adopt that into your organizations.

This has been super, super informative. And I appreciate you sharing all of your wisdom. There's so much content that you've just shared with us. It's just, Even the final section we just spoke about, what would you tell to the C-suite? You dropped around 6 or 7 key actions that everyone should take. And, I'm dumbfounded as well that— and, I think you know this from my previous talks and such and my books— is like, why hasn't healthcare in America, in the U.S., traditional healthcare awakened yet?

Yeah.

still asleep. And meanwhile, like the Amazon— so we're recording this in July of 2022— the Amazon acquisition that you referred to today and all the other things that have been happening with payers owning more PCPs than hospitals, it's changed. But yet many hospitals have been really slow to adapt and transform. It's bewildering. But hopefully Hearing it from your voice as well, and the admonitions that you shared will truly make a difference. Thank you so much for being our guest. It's been wonderful.

Yeah, thanks, Edward. It's really an honor. It's a thrill for me to just speak with you and share my wisdom and knowledge with a greater audience. Thank you for providing me this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

It's fabulous. We'll have your contact information in our show notes. And, you know, your perspectives are very refreshing and reinforcing to what I think, uh, some of us already know and just sometimes need a, you know, kick in the butt a little bit to get, to get moving. So that concludes our podcast. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you at the next drop.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening. Thank you.