From AC/DC to AI... Engineer to CEO (ft. Eduardo Conrado)

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 edition of Digital Voices. I have a longtime friend and former colleague of mine, Eduardo Conrado. Eduardo, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thanks, Ed. Great to see you again.

We met back in 2018. You were the Chief Digital Officer for Ascension. I was at the Cleveland Clinic, and we got together, just sort of compared notes, and I've followed you ever since. And it's been really cool to see your meteoric rise to become president and soon CEO, right, of Ascension?

Yeah, thank you. Here at the end of December, I'll become CEO.

Yeah, that's so cool. I can't wait to dive in a little bit. That'll unfold it. But Eduardo, the first thing everyone wants to know that listens to Digital Voices is what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to get down to?

Oh, a little bit of everything, to tell you the truth. But I grew up in the '80s when I first moved to the US, so I'm a big fan of the '80s bands, you know, AC/DC, Back in Black, I would say. But the more relevant stuff, my daughter's always sharing her playlist with me. So, you know, when you're on Spotify, we're sitting in the car with her and like, oh, we love that song. And then she's like, Dad, I'm just gonna push you my playlist forward. So, I got this hybrid, the '80s, the stuff that I'm used to, which never gets old, to tell you the truth. And then the new stuff that my daughter listens to. And the funny thing is some of her playlists has '80s songs on it. So, full circle.

Yeah. I found that the same too, actually with one of my daughters where she got really into the '80s music, kind of like, you know, her dad. So, that was kind of cool to see that. happened. And I thought about, I think I did that with my parents too. You know, I started listening to Frank Sinatra and stuff from their day.

And so, yeah. You know, the other funny thing, my wife is from Norway. So there's always an ABBA song that sneaks into the playlist. Scandinavian music, also timeless, I would say.

Yeah, that's super cool. What about life message or mantra? Are there, is there a quote or sort of words that you live by?

Yeah. Um, I'm not sure if you've, if you've read the book from, um, Friedman, um, New York Times writer, but he, He wrote a book a while back called They Used to Be Us, which compares the US to China and then kind of how both of the countries developed and the competitive spirit that the US had. So one of the quotes that he has at the end of the day is act like an immigrant. And, you know, immigrant in the country, I migrated here in '79, which I think the US is one of the best countries in the world. They're the only country where after moving to the US, you actually feel American. on it. I would, I would say that no other country allows you to do that, but, you know, kind of moving here also, you kind of have to have that immigrant spirit to, you know, don't take no for an answer and then just work hard on it. And I sent one of the guys that the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Yeah.

Yeah. Not, that's a good one too. Yeah. Friedman's a great author. I've had several of his books and yeah, there's all sorts of stats that show that how well immigrants can do, right? When they come to the U.S. and take advantage of everything. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where did you, were you raised? That sort of thing.

Sure. I mean, I moved here late '70s, as I mentioned, from Nicaragua. Um, unfortunately in the '70s, there was a bunch of civil wars happening in Central America, Latin America, a lot of civil unrest. Nicaragua had, um, a civil war from '79 to '89. It lasted, uh, 10 years.

Mm-hmm.

So we were gonna move here, wait it out because we lived in the capital. And so when it came to the capital, my dad said that he was a Fulbright professor. So he said, just come up for the summer and we'll wait it out. 10 years later, I'm in graduate school here in the US feeling American, right? So I got an undergrad in engineering, industrial engineering. And then so my first jobs were as an engineer for Texas Instruments on it. And when I got started working as an engineer, I thought, you know what, I love the technology component, but I'd like to get more onto the business side. So at that point, I decided to go back and get my MBA, but I also wanted to work international on it. And then, so I got a Master's of International Management from Thunderbird thinking, you know, I'll get the MBA component, but also kind of with the international slant while I was at Thunderbird. I met my then, my wife now, which we were both studying there. I went and got a second degree in ESADE in Barcelona where the focus of that MBA was more financial. Thunderbird was more international and marketing. And then so Caroline and I ended up moving to Europe, to Spain, and then we moved to Norway. And this was early '90s and we thought we were going to stay there, but there was an economic downturn on the in Europe. So we ended up moving back to the US, early '90s, moved to Florida. That's where Motorola hired me.

Yeah.

26 years later, I kind of moved between Florida, Argentina, to the headquarters in Chicago, many years in Chicago, and then multiple roles in Motorola. Being a technology company, I could use my engineering background, but then I was working on the marketing side. I was the chief marketing officer of the business-to-business side of Motorola, then From there, ended up moving into technology. So if you remember, at early days of technology and when CRM first came out, Siebel and stuff, the IT teams didn't touch it.

Yeah.

It was mostly the marketing teams that were touching that. And then so the CIO at that point said, hey, you know what? You go and deploy the CRM. And then so I kind of got into the tech stack at that point, ended up picking up IT as a responsibility at some point in my career. And as I picked up IT, it was just to kind of make it easier for customers to deal with our tech. More and more, the hardware-centric world of Motorola was moving to a cloud-based, application-based-centric product offering.

Yeah.

So from IT, I ended up moving into the chief technology officer responsibility because we were shifting our portfolio from making chips to actually doing cloud-based products. From there, it moved into, okay, we can build the products, but we can also buy products in terms of expanding our portfolio by buying companies and using our balance sheet. So I ended up picking up strategy role within Motorola. So my last role in Motorola was the Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, where I had CIO, CTO, and strategy under me, which allowed me to learn the business side, Yeah. Of Motorola, which was great.

Yeah, no, that's super fascinating. And your kids are lucky to have sort of that multicultural background too, with moving all to those different countries and having those experiences. That's pretty cool. So you make your way into healthcare. How did that happen? What was the catalyst?

So when I was in Motorola, probably 22 years into my career there, I got a call from recruiters saying, hey, we got a nonprofit healthcare that's looking for a board member. And the profile that they want is somebody that's been in an industry that has been disrupted. So think about telecom in the '90s, early 2000s was getting disrupted everywhere. Paging got disrupted by cellular. Cellular analog got disrupted by digital. Digital cellular got disrupted by smartphones, you name it.

Yeah.

So, you know, portfolios were changing and being disruptive. So they wanted to have somebody that was in an industry that was disruptive, have technology background, and had strategy in the role. So it kind of matched my profile. I interviewed with Tony Trosini and the board at that point. I got to learn a little bit at a high level in terms of what the focus was and the mission and vision of Ascension. I kind of liked what they did. There were some similarities in terms of the mission criticality of the products and services that we sold at Motorola. Main customers were police, EMS, and fire. Think about it.

On it.

Yeah.

So, I joined the board and I was on the Ascension board almost 4 years. And then Tony asked me to join the management team and we ended up creating a role. This is early days where, you know, the technology stack on healthcare was going through a transformation on how do you architect and simplify it. on it.

Yeah.

Also, data was trapped in a silo and then innovation needed to happen, kind of. And then, so I came in, you know, putting all those 3 pieces together, IT, the innovation team, and then the data science component. Um, and then 7 years later, um, I went from that role, similar, similar to my trajectory in Motorola, that, you know, you come in through IT innovation. I ended up picking a strategy along the way, To kind of accelerate the transformation as a pickstop strategy that enabled me to kind of learn the details and idiosyncrasies of healthcare from site of care interaction with the clinicians, payer models, P&L, you name it. You know, I got to pick up knowledge across the board and that allowed me then to kind of move in post-COVID where healthcare was disrupted into the president role.

Yeah, that's, that's a great journey and you're super well-rounded and prepared for that role. I think everyone understands the pristine brand of Ascension. Can you share with us maybe one thing that someone might not know, the average person might not know about Ascension?

Yeah, we're, you know, I think everybody kind of knows our scale, presence that we have on it, our mission and serving everybody. When you think about birth in the US, we probably have one of the highest volumes across all the healthcare system. And I think our clinical team says 1 out of every 50 births is an Ascension birth. And out of those, 53% are Medicaid on it. So it kind of straddles both the mission and then the impact that we can have on the communities that we're in.

Yeah, no, it's a great organization and great mission and vision. You're very blessed to be able to lead that. What would you say, Eduardo, to other individuals mid-career, and maybe they've just been going down a single path? You've described your journey, you went multiple paths. Do you recommend that for individuals, and how might a technology leader diversify their skillset and experience?

That's a good point. I mean, I think you can have 2 ways of kind of growing your career. One of them just going deep on the trade that you read, right?

Yeah.

And rise through the ranks, kind of becoming CIO, which now is CIO, CDO, right?

Yeah.

And then that kind of has the AI component. So I think the role of the technologists are growing within the companies in terms of the importance. But I think on the other side, you can become a generalist. You have a center of gravity, which for me is engineering and kind of being data-driven, but you can expand into other areas where I was in marketing, I was in the tech side, I was in the innovation front, I was in the strategy area. So part of that is not being afraid to kind of learn new muscles.

Yeah.

And if you go deep, you play to your strength, so you develop on it. If you're going to go wide, you got to build on your weaknesses. So that means that you're constantly learning something new. And at some point you become enough of an expert to kind of put everything together and then you become a general manager, right?

Right.

And you have the ability to kind of— and then I would say if you step back, And the Motorola CEO, luckily, I got a chance to work with him for 10 years, and he said, hey, there's 3 things that I do as a CEO, and it's just simplifying it, right? He said, strategy, capital deployment, and talent. Now, if you think about anybody that wants to expand beyond the functional role and go broader, you gotta peel those apart, right? So strategy, what does that mean? And in many cases, it means you gotta question the status quo every day, right?

Yeah.

And especially in healthcare, right? This is a— traditionally, it's been a slow-moving segment, which is starting to move way faster just because of headwinds and tailwinds that we're getting. And then the government kind of accelerating side of care changes. So I think the strategy piece leads you to learn the business, but also take an outside-in perspective, right? You gotta learn the business from the inside, But you gotta be well-versed on what's going on on the outside and kind of say, hey, 3, 5 years out, what's gonna happen? And kind of come up with the point of view. And the point of view more than likely will lead you to question the status quo on it.

Yeah.

And then you gotta kind of dig in deeper to know all the implications. What does that mean? It's not just a portfolio change, but it's also process and tech change in some cases, right?

Yeah.

Then you go in, if you're leading strategy as the CEO, In order to accelerate the change in the strategy, the trajectory that you have, you're gonna have to deploy capital on it.

Right.

Right. So then making sure that you're putting a focus on, for every dollar you deploy has an impact on the strategy, right? And ultimately changing the trajectory. And more than likely, if you're changing strategy, you gotta be constantly developing the talent inside the company to be able to kind of have new muscles as you change your portfolio. Or you're gonna have to be able to kind of bring new talent in to be able to complement your existing team, right? That's kind of like at the highest level. So then I took that to heart. And then when, when you step back and you think about, uh, most industries, the other one that I, I think we gotta view our role at, which I think the CIOs have a strong focus in the area, is simplifying the complex.

Yeah.

Which is, Taking the barriers out and also making sure that we can move at a faster speed, right? So that would be my advice on it. I mean, I think the CIO roles are, like I say, getting bigger and bigger. So you can kind of continue to evolve on the trade, but if you want to move to different functions, you got to kind of start learning the different areas and eventually become a general manager that can take on bigger roles.

Yeah. And what's going to be really interesting to continue to follow you as both current president and future CEO. You're one of the very few that has this sort of background and definitely a tech background. And about 50% of our audience listening have sort of that tech angle. And so how do you think that having that tech background will shape you as CEO? Do you think, when you think about some of your colleagues that may have preceded you or other organizations, You know, are you thinking tech first or is it always in the back of your mind? How does it influence you?

So, you know, not everybody that's in tech is an engineer, but a lot of them are, right?

Yeah.

And if you're not an engineer, you learn it while you're on the job. And then, so part of it, and my background's industrial engineer, right? So it's process redesign and simplification. That's basically what we do. And industrial engineers know all the technologies and we're good at none, right? You don't, you wouldn't want an industrial engineer designing chips, but we can optimize the process all day long. Right. But also as an engineer and as a technologist, you rely on data. So I think that's one of the areas of strength coming from the tech side or engineering side is just being data-driven.

Yeah.

And then being able to simplify the data because there's always going to be noise, right, on it. So you're going to be looking at what are the KPIs that impact on running the business and making sure that just looking at those KPIs, are they the ones that are going to be driving something? They're going to be driving quality or they're going to be driving consumer experience or they're going to drive the P&L. So being data-driven and insights-driven on everything that you do, will educate you on the strategy that you're going to follow. Healthcare is data-rich, right? So, it's not so much the application that we use, it's how do we simplify the architecture over time? And if you can't simplify the architecture, how do you kind of extract the data and put it in a cloud layer?

Yeah.

Now, everybody talks about AI, but AI is driven by the dataset that you provide, right?

Yeah.

On it. So we started doing that a few years ago when I took over the job, was just moving the data into a cloud layer and bringing data engineering to the forefront. If you have good data engineering, your architecture really doesn't matter, right?

Yeah.

You can take your time on simplifying the architecture, but then your data scientists can provide more insights either in quality, operations, you name it. And they can start correlating clinical data with operational data with, consumer data, and then you end up driving operations or clinical based on real-time data on a daily basis, right? You don't want to be able to say at the end of the month, look back what happened. You want to see it on a daily basis and can you actually impact the trajectory? So, kind of long-winded answer to your question, at the end of the day, I think kind of having a technology background or engineering background, Gives you a leg up on the data component. And then coming in from the tech side allows you to know where to use it.

Yeah.

Not just on the technology front, but in terms of facilitating clinical or operational strategies that are there.

Since you've had experience on both sides, Eduardo, both being sort of the engineering tech and also now president and soon-to-be CEO, Any advice for the CIO peer group on how to best connect and serve along with their president? You know, how to make sure that relationship is a good one so everyone prospers?

Yeah. You know, the presidents or anybody that's in operation or clinical, they're trying to solve a problem, right? On it. And I mean problem, it could be positive or negative, right? In terms of both of it. I think the the technologists that can kind of figure out what the issue is and address that issue. All the complexities of the tech, 90% of the operational people don't know what you're talking about.

Right.

Or really don't care at some point because they're going to be lost on it. So if they trust you, they're going to trust the technologists to take care of the complexities in the background, but not necessarily the You're going to see their eyes glass over, right, if you kind of go too deep. So it's this fine balance between the depth of the knowledge that the technologists have, but don't necessarily have to show it.

Right.

And kind of have to focus more on what are the one or two things that people are looking for in terms of uniqueness to solve a problem and then deliver on that.

What's your perspective on the future with tech and digital transformation, things like that? How do you think healthcare will continue to change?

Well, I mean, I think the data component on healthcare is going to continue to grow, right? In terms of facilitating clinical or operational problems. And then how do you make it real-time, right? Everybody wants real-time data. And that allows us to kind of impact a trajectory on it. Once you have the data, then as we're moving more into AI-driven insights, how do you start feathering that in to be able to solve operational or clinical issues? So I think that's going to be huge going forward.

Yeah.

And when I look at the data and the impact that technology has, it's helping us drive our operating model that we have in Ascension. So We get real-time data on the volumes by site of care and the ability for the strategy teams to be able to impact it. Or efficiency teams are seeing real-time in terms of lengths of stay, discharges. So making sure that's visible for each of the teams, then we can kind of influence it. And then you layer AI on top of it just to kind of be able to draw the insights of where to put our eyes on even more. That's going to be critical. So when you think about simplification, is don't give me everything, give me where to look at. And then so I can do something with it, right?

Yeah, I think that's spot on. Eduardo, we covered a lot of different areas in our time together, talking about '80s music, which people can't see me, but I'm actually wearing an '80s band concert tee. And fascinating discussion about Ascension and the great things that Ascension does. Your career, how it evolved and how you got to where you are today, how CIOs, CDOs can best work and partner with presidents and CEOs. And then we talked a little bit about digital and the importance of AI in particular, or data, and the importance of getting the data right in order to get the benefits of the AI and how to better understand the mind of a president and CEO. What did we miss, or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

No, I appreciate all the topics that we cover from, like you said, from A to Z, or should I say from AC/DC to kind of AI. But I would say we're at a good spot right now for CIOs, CDOs, you name it, in terms of all those roles are combining into one, right? It goes down from the architecture, application management, data management, but ultimately, as we kind of go into the AI world, the impact that we can have in the world, both on the clinician and operational. And then, so I would say more and more, go to the edge of that world in terms of the impact that you're having and learn the business itself, because that's what's going to help translate what the technology and the data can do for the teams that are on the ground kind of running the business or on the clinical side.

Yeah.

That will do 2 things, have a huge impact on our outcomes, But also, as you learn more about the impact of the data or the technology on operations or the business, you get to learn the business itself and that allows you to migrate into some other areas if you want to.

Yeah. Yeah. Sage insights, sage advice. Eduardo, thank you so much for being our guest on Digital Voices.

Thank you very much, Ed.

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Thank you.