From CIO to CEO (ft. Sandy Saggar)

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.

Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I really appreciate you listening. I know you have a lot of choices of different podcasts to listen to like I do, and you've chosen us and we're going to make it Worth your while. We have no commercials, no sponsors, just pure content. And with me today is, you know, it's so funny, Sandy, because I want to say Sammy Hagar, but it's Sandy Sagar.

You might get more hits.

Yeah.

I know.

No, I don't know. Sandy, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thanks, Ed.

I know we were talking off screen and, you know, the whole concept of Sammy Hagar came up. And so now I've got Sammy Hagar. on my mind, but that leads us to our first question. And that is, what kind of music do you like to listen to?

Well, Sammy Hagar and Sandy Sagar, they're interchangeable, but I am not a musician like the other. I can say that our names might be similar, but Ed, a great question. I love that it's first. I listen to a wide variety of music. So, you know, things on my playlist as I grew up, I'd listen to hip-hop, rap music, and alternative, alternative rock, that type of thing. As time went on, I really liked bands like Coldplay. Later in life, you know, I've grown to like classical music because all my family plays musical instruments. So, you know, it's something that we all love music in the family and a wide variety of it.

That's cool. Coldplay has come up a lot recently. recently, and we have a Spotify playlist for Digital Voices, and I think that one might get the most hits as well. And maybe that this may have been the first call out also to Sammy Hagar. So, uh, we'll probably have to throw Sammy Hagar tune or when he was with Van Halen or as a solo act up there. What about life messages or mantra? Are there words that sort of guide how you live?

Definitely. There's, there's a few usual suspects. You know, the things like work hard, play hard, perfection is the enemy of progress, which I find especially relevant in healthcare sometimes. You know, the glass is half full is one of my general philosophies in trying to stay positive. One of the ones over the last few years that I think has grown up to the top of the heap is, you know, one that the psychologist Susan David sort of coined, discomfort's the price of admission to a meaningful life.

Yeah, yeah.

It's definitely one of the things that, you know, I think about personally and professionally, and I say it to my kids very often and I get the eye roll from them, but that won't stop me from saying it to them and reminding them.

Yeah. No, that's, I like that a lot. That's a real good one. In fact, we're putting together a, I don't know what you can't, don't call it a playlist, but for lack of a better word, a playlist of everyone's mantras. And so we're going to be publishing that pretty soon because I think there's so much wisdom that comes through all of guests like yourself and we want to share it with the world. So let's jump right into who you are because I skipped it completely because I got so discombobulated there with Sammy Hagar. You know, you are the CEO of ConnectsAll, but that's not really who you are. So tell us first a little bit about who you are as a person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's, thanks, Ed. I, so, You know, grew up in, born in Canada. My parents immigrated in the '70s. My brother and I were born there. They were hardworking and supportive parents and they instilled obviously important values for us around having a good education, financial things like not living above your means. You know, nothing in life is free, Ed.

Okay.

And of course, other things like, you know, important things like respect for others. You know, I think watching My parents move here from India and taking these grand leaps of faith to create a better life for us, you know, and and then doing things like my my father going into real estate and and trying his hand in multiple businesses, and then my mother being part of the tech revolution back then, if you can call it that, mainframes and all. She was like the equivalent of a cybersecurity officer in the mainframe world, which is something. you know, we didn't take it seriously back then. But really, their migrations and actions, you know, to take those leaps of faith and do things for the greater good. And so, you know, that's how I grew up. And professionally, I've lived in the US and Canada during my career and worked across many different industries, retail, automotive, you know, financial insurance, and of course, healthcare, which is my passion. Now, and in the healthcare realm, you know, worked in various hospital systems and worked my way up to being a CIO and now CEO at Connexall. And currently, I'm, you know, married to my beautiful wife and have 3 kids, Karina, Aravind, and Naban, who are growing up quickly. And we, you know, we're just going through change ourselves, Ed. We dropped off my daughter at college for her first first year and we're, we're just adapting as we all need to do as parents. So that's kind of hot off the press.

Oh, that's a tough— I remember that with our first one. That was tough emotionally for me. How are, how are you, Dad, holding up with that?

Yeah, I'm, uh, I keep telling my daughter, I'm like, where are we going to have the cry fest so we can all cry together? Should it be in the dorm? Should it be at the local coffee shop? But It's slowly hitting home. Her bedroom's empty. She's not there. So, we're in the midst of the transition.

Yeah. Sandy, what about your wife? What's her name?

Shivani. So, Shivani is a dentist. And so, she's also in the healthcare field. We talk a lot about being patient-centered and other things that overlap with the medical side. So, she's We just coming off 20 years yesterday. So it's our 20-year anniversary.

Wow. Congratulations.

Thank you.

You know, Sandy, I would have, haven't guessed that you were from India. No, no, that's, that's a little bit surprising. What part of India are your parents from? Because I'm going to guess, I'm going to take a guess here. One of two parts, either North India or what's the section? Is it Goa where it's part Portuguese influence.

Um, yes.

Blue eyes. Yeah. So am I right on one of those two?

Well, I thought maybe you were going to say that because you thought Sammy Hagar wasn't from India, but you're right. It's, it's northern actually, northern India, the state of Punjab. Yeah. Both, both my parents, different, different towns in, in Punjab, but that's where they both grew up in separate towns. And then they got married and obviously moved here.

Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. We'll talk later because My wife is from that same area, and that's kind of why I had that had that guess. So you mentioned the CEO of Connexall. Now I am now affiliated with Connexall, and that's how you and I met. I'm part of the advisory board, and Connexall, and I mean this as a compliment, but in from a business perspective, may not be interpreted that way. But I think is is one of those company names that not. enough people have heard about because despite being dominant in— and we'll unpack this here in a second— despite being dominant in what you do.

Yeah, no, it's definitely, I think, you know, one of the things we're working on as a company is just building that awareness in terms of what we can do, how we can help, how we help enable the work that all the clinicians and staff do every day in healthcare. So it's definitely something I'm excited about with you, Ed, joining our advisory board and definitely helping us in our trajectory and, and how we support our mission and vision moving forward.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit. So if the audience was like me or how I'm interpreting Connexall, super dominant in what you do, which you're going to talk about, and then a great company, amazing product, service, and support, but not enough people probably are aware of the name itself. So tell us a little bit about the sort of founding story and mission and vision.

Yeah, for sure. So we actually started our connected care journey over 25 years ago. And so this is what we've been doing, and it only for 25 years. And it actually started, you know, where we started to connect nurse call systems to phones in the '90s, and hospitals started to realize the value of those, you know, integrations at that time. And that evolved over time. Those integrations evolved to solutions. And now we're truly a connected hospital platform. And so when we look at all the medical devices, clinical systems, facility-based systems, non-clinical systems, and others, all of that, those systems, devices, and services within the healthcare environment, we help to connect all of them. And create that connected care environment. And then again, what do we do with that? We help improve the workflows of those nurses and staff and clinicians. We enhance the communication ultimately to improve patient outcomes. So, you know, not only do we focus on enabling that for patient care, but when we make it easier for nurses, doctors, staff to do their day-to-day work, it also helps improve their own satisfaction. And we know that, you know, Clinical burnout is still one of the key issues that we're dealing with every day in the healthcare industry. The other thing I would share is since the beginning, the mission of the organization was always with the customer in the center. So we're really customer obsessed at ConnexAll, and our founder truly believed in this mantra. And myself being in a unique position of previously being a hospital system customer of ConnectSols, it was very easy for me to move into the role and carry forward that mantra around being customer obsessed and focused that's so ingrained in our culture. So that's really some background about what we do and what we believe in.

Yeah, I can tell you, and I say this from a perspective of a former CIO, I was shocked. And I'm not going to mention the name of the organization that I was with when I had this epiphany and this realization how disconnected we were. So here we are, pretty well established, pretty well known healthcare organization. I work in the OR one day a week and found that half of the equipment was not connected. I was like, Wow. I was so disheartened because I was in charge. I mean, There's no one to blame and get mad at. It's like, I'm responsible. And I remember I took it as a mission. I was like, how can this happen that we have these disconnected systems and someone's got to manually take it from this system to that system? And we know all the errors that can happen as a result of that. And then in other parts, we had, we didn't have a platform. So we had like one box that took care of some interfaces and a different company box. But Connexall, and again, this is not a commercial. I just believe this. I've always been a believer in the platform, whether you're talking electronic health record or this kind of connectivity, but provides those connections to all these disparate other applications or other pieces of hardware. And to your point, Sandy, then it makes the experience better for the clinician. And then, and I know I'm sounding like a salesperson, but I'm just going to keep going with it from a CIO, right? It makes our jobs easier because now we've got a single platform. We have less opportunity for breakdown. Our costs are reduced. And so I think it's just amazing. So that's what it was so fun for me being part of Connexial now on the advisory board is like, this is what we've needed and wanted. And it's been there for a while. And it was, you know, I just didn't have that awareness. Sandy, tell us something now that I've given, you and I have given sort of the bigger picture. Tell us something about ConnexAll that most people would not know.

You know, just building on what you said, one of the things that we've built out is this platform, right, to connect to connected hospital, connected care. And so one of the things that, you know, might not be well known is the fact that we're on the verge, as you know, when we look across different industries, We need to connect our cities, we need to connect our buildings, we need to connect up home care. And so, you know, one of the things that probably is not much well known about Connexal is, you know, we have the ability— we've done healthcare, still our passion first and foremost, but we have ventured outside of healthcare. And, you know, our platform's robust enough to move into other industries such as that. So we're excited about the future.

Yeah, that is really cool. All right, let's move on to leadership because you already mentioned it, Sandy. You are one of the few examples of a CIO that's gone on to become a CEO. Did you always plan like long-term, like I want to be a CEO someday, or how did it happen?

So it was a debate, an internal debate for a while, being interested in the CEO role. And, you know, ultimately I did, Ed, but it was one of the things I tinkered with. And I went back and forth. And one of the biggest things I did when I was thinking about it was, oh, what are the things I need to do to plan and prep for if I became a CEO? And, you know, the traditional CIO where, you know, you were viewed as sort of someone who just focused on technology. or the original CIOs where, you know, they were just like technology back office focused, not front-facing roles.

Yeah.

Is something that, you know, I know you're familiar with and others who've been in that type of position. But I really wanted to make sure that I broke through that and whatever I was in, whether it's the business of healthcare or anything, just understand what it means to be, to make that impact and understand the business of that. So, in this case, the business of healthcare, you know, how do you treat patients? How do you focus on the patient at the center? So I spent a lot of time outside of my role doing that. And that helped me in my CIO role ultimately, right? It's something. So it's something that grew on me over time. As I did more and more of that, I realized that it's something I wanted to pursue.

What are maybe one or two CIO skills that are helpful to you now having those As a CEO?

Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. I think one is the CIO is fortunate enough to have a view or a vantage point of the organization they're in. So, you kind of have a view into the workflows, the handoffs, what the departments do. And so, when you move into CEO role and you're making decisions, you're a little bit more armed and dangerous when it comes to saying, thinking about what those impacts would be, you know, the ripple effects in the organization because you have this sort of foundation that you sprung off of in the CIO role. So, I think that's something that's helped me a lot, having that foundation. And then, the other one goes without saying. I think being in the CIO role, you're just, you know, it's crisis management. I mean, anything can happen at any time. And it's just, it's the day-to-day. You're going to wake up in the middle of the night or you're going to wake up in the morning, something's going to change. And it's something that a good CIO has to be good at, essentially, for lack of a better— and so moving into the CEO role, the crisis management skills that were developed during my CIO tenure certainly have come in very handy.

So now that you've been in both roles and now from a CEO perspective, And a good portion of our audience for Digital Voices are CIOs or people who report to them. What would you say to your former self? So this is basically now you've got this, this new experience as a CEO, and now you look back at CIO. Would there be some words of advice that you would give yourself?

So I do actually, for the record, I do tell my kids many a time that if, you know, if I could talk to my younger self, even though I'm talking to them, and again, Ed, I get the eye roll from them. Yeah.

So I might need, I might need some new parenting strategies.

But if I were to talk to my former CIO self, I would, I would actually spend more time observing CEO that I worked with in action. So you know, how do they make their decisions? You know, with minimal information and visibility, what perspectives do they have when they would do that? And even compare some of your decision making to them, especially if you have a high level respect for that CEO. And I think just thinking that through and even having those conversations about it with the CEO that you work with, I think that's something that I would share with my former self.

That is, I try not to say that's a good answer or anything like that for people because when you don't say that, what does that imply? So that's something I was coached on earlier in my career. But that's really keen insight. I think that's really good. And I just recall myself, Sandy, observing not just our CEOs, but some of the other, maybe they were peers, but they were more mature than I. And their ability, what I always noticed and tried to emulate, but never quite got there, the ability for them to listen to a problem and articulate it in one sentence.

Right.

You know, the ability to, take these multiple inputs and I would be in their office like helter skelter, like, you know, 10 different things. And they, they would say, you mean XYZ? I was like, how did they do that? And I think—

It's a superpower.

I, I think you can learn it by observing them like you're suggesting. That's why I think that answer is so keen. A lot of focus for Digital Voices is really on leadership because we love to learn about you, uh, the person and music and all that kind of stuff. And whatever organization that person comes from, in this case, ConnectsAll, but at the end of the day, it comes down to leadership. And so we spend a lot of time sort of digging in. What are one or two key leadership traits that help you remain successful? Because Sandy, you got a great track record, right, of all the success. So what are one or two traits that help you?

Yeah, definitely respect. You know, it's one of the most important things a leader can give to his team and vice versa, easing those tensions, conflict, fostering trust, improving effectiveness. And so, that's definitely one. Adaptability, right? Today's changing world. Things can change on a whim. You can make all this decision-making around strategic directions and then the world turns. So, you have to be able to be nimble, change your approach, adjust. And I think I couldn't, I couldn't answer this question without saying, you know, I truly believe in empowering others and the team around me.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And Sandy, we talked about some related questions to this, you know, and the eye rolls that you get from your kids. And I know one of them is at that age now in college, freshman year in college, but what were, what would be 2 things you wish they would teach aspiring young people, maybe in college?

Yeah, you know, leadership is, as you know, leadership's challenging. It's difficult. And I remember a time when I was aspiring to be a leader in college. And what I didn't learn at the time is the other side of it, right? There's a lot of focus on positive attributes, outcomes, but Knowing that that there's challenges and difficulties with leadership, just a focus on that. So what are those difficult scenarios? You know, whether it's performance conversations or or terminating an employee. You know, we know that that affects a person's livelihood, their income, their family. But you know, if you've supported them, guided them, worked with them, and and things are not a fit, how do you work through? Those difficult conversations and decisions. And it comes in a variety of different ways. So, we always say as leaders, we're only as good as the team around us. But I see so many leaders still try to skirt around those difficult scenarios and conversations and that decision-making. So, that would be something that I think is really important to teach early into our next generation of leaders.

Yeah, that's, that's key as well. And I know that's, if I had to look back my career to date, that's probably been my biggest weakness is just what you're talking about there. And I wish I would have had, I probably did have someone teach me that when I was a youngster, but maybe I wish they would have drilled it into me even more. So how do you balance the needs, especially as from a CEO point of view, and you've got a board to deal with and And so forth, and the realities of profit and loss. How do you balance the needs of the customer with business realities? You know, you obviously need to make sure the business is profitable. And so you sometimes have to balance that versus, you know, what else you could do for a customer. So how do you go about doing that?

We always, we always want to start with a customer-first mindset. But we do know, as you said, there's times that there's a gap or an issue that rises up. In my mind, during those times, it's really important to do a deep dive on understanding what that specific issue is and the impacts to the customer, especially as they relate to, you know, versus option B and sort of the path to resolution. So I certainly find that the big picture view and going with transparent communications, once you have that specific background on that on that issue is key. And so when you're transparent upfront in your communications with your customers, ultimately, you know, I think that works favorably. And then how do you make it so it's fair to all parties involved, especially when it's a complex scenario? And more times than not, I feel like those— that type of approach has generally worked well.

That makes a lot of sense. What would you say is your single most proud work accomplishment? So it could be your first job. It could be your current job. What's— tell us one. I'm sure you have many, but tell us one.

I'd have to say the one, one of the ones at the top of the list, at least, was when I was a hospital CIO and we opened up new hospitals at our health system to better serve our communities. Never had there been a time where you know, from, you know, a scenario where there was a spotlight in terms of we need to build smart digital hospitals for our communities, and we need to move in patients safely, and we need to make sure everything's up and running. Was there such a large risk-taking endeavor, I would say. So it taught me a lot about prioritization, collaboration, communication, and of course, what I just mentioned, risk management. And, you know, I'm just proud that our team and organization was able to open up those new hospitals safely for our patients.

Sandy, we all know an executive role is really challenging. What do you do to sort of incorporate rest in yourself as a person?

Well, Ed, I've, it's taken me a while, but over time I've learned that there's No such thing as, for me, work-life balance. I think each and every day will be different. And although we all have routines as human beings and we balance attempts, my growth has been just to become more self-aware about each day, each situation, and balance accordingly. So, I know it might seem like a lot of overhead, but the breakthrough for me in terms of getting rest and balancing all the moving parts and in my life is just to know when something's coming. If I'm going to have a few heavy weeks at work, you know, spend more time with the family before and after, find times in between and just balance it accordingly. And that serves me a lot better than trying to get to the summit of work-life balance. I've achieved it. I don't think there's the I've achieved it scenario. It's something you work on every day with and ingrain it into your day-to-day. And I found that aligning that self-awareness with You know, changing some small habits here and there. And I guess that's my pitch to read the book Atomic Habits if you haven't. It's just, I really think that that tipped the scales for me and has provided me with more, you know, R&R and rest and balancing act in the world we live in.

Makes a tremendous amount of sense. Look, Sammy, we covered a lot of area, all from music back to Sammy Hagar to Coldplay. And then we learned a little bit about you and sort of your upbringing. It's very interesting. Immigrant story, how often I hear that from leaders. We'll have to maybe do a deeper dive someday in that. I think it's really interesting. Like, how can you, if you don't have an immigrant story, how can you take the learnings from that and apply it to your own life? We talked a lot about Connexall and we switched to your career and things that you learned as a CIO that helped make you successful to be CEO. We talked a lot about leadership. What did we miss or what would you like to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Dangerous gave me the last word, but I think the only thing I would add is that life's too short. Learn to be, if you aren't already, learn to be more direct, whether it's with your family, your wife, your kids, your colleagues, whoever you're engaging with, especially for those difficult discussions and conversations. I used to have someone I worked with who used to call them unsafe conversations. And it's true, it breaks down For me, it's broke down barriers. It allows us to be ourselves and avoid sort of that political overhead. And I think more times than not, it will help you flourish in your professional and of course personal life and thrive in those very important relationships that we all have.

That's a good word. I think that's a great word to end on. Sandy, thank you so much for being our guest on Digital Voices.

Thank you so much, Ed.

Hey, that wraps up another edition. Thanks for listening.

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