Leadership and Innovation in Healthcare (ft. Michael Alkire)

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening. I know you have a lot of choices, a lot of great content out there. I listen to a lot myself, but you've taken some time to listen and/or watch us, and I really appreciate it. And you won't be disappointed because we have an amazing guest as always, Mike Alkire. He is the president and CEO of Premier Inc. Mike, welcome to Digital Voices.

Ed, thanks for having me.

And congratulations. At the time of this recording, which is late 2025, you made the most influential list again with Modern Healthcare.

Yeah, I will tell you, it's a testament to my team, all the work that that they do to support the health systems in terms of reducing costs, improving quality, and great marketing group. And quite frankly, it's a testament to the organizations we work with as well that allow for us to innovate alongside of them and transform healthcare.

Yeah, that's really cool. And we're going to jump into that a little bit deeper in a couple more minutes. We first met, we couldn't get the exact year, but it's been a long time, Mike. You and I— met quite some time ago when I was at Texas Health. I was an executive there, big premier adopters, users, beneficiaries, partners. And so we were in meetings together and of course at your large conference and things like that. So we go back, I don't know, I hate to admit it, but it could be maybe 20 years.

For sure. And I could kind of remember we would do the big quarterly business reviews in the, in the boardroom. And back then it was with Doug and Barkley was in the room actually. And, uh, Anyway, I remember you being there as well.

Yeah, it was really cool. And so this is a real treat for me. And the most important question though, Mike, that we have for our entire time together are what songs are on your playlist? Like what kind of music do you like to listen to?

Oh my gosh, this is going to sound horrible, but right now my playlist is littered with Christmas carols. So I'm a big fan of, you know, from basically Thanksgiving onward, having Christmas carols playing out all throughout the house and in my car and those kinds of things. When I'm not listening to musics of the season, I'm typically listening to, you know, uh, I got really interested in Kaleo, which is a band from Iceland. And because I saw a concert, um, a concert last summer, man, I'm into every genre. I listen to everything. I got kids, so, you know, I've got I've got stuff from hip-hop, rap. I love classical rock. So I listen to just about everything.

Yeah, that's good. I think most people are sort of wired that way these days. And then whenever those artists come out with Christmas albums, that's like a double whammy. It's like a double bonus.

Yeah, for sure. One last thing. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I do listen to more musicals and operas and those kinds of things. And I always wondered if that was a taste thing or if that's an age thing. And I think as you get a little bit older, your tastes change a little bit.

Yeah, no, mine tastes have certainly changed over the years. I haven't made the leap into opera yet. I tried it once, but you know, there's still plenty of time. So we'll see. So Mike, we kind of try to demystify CEOs a little bit. And, you know, one of the questions I always ask everyone is, who are you? What's your story? What's your life growing up?

Yeah, I grew up in Akron, Ohio. My dad was a civil servant. I had a family of 6, so I had 2 older brothers and a younger sister. And of course my parents, we didn't grow up with a great deal. My dad was one of the first in his family to have a college education and same with my mom. You know, my grandparents were blue-collar workers on both sides of the family. So hard work was really all part of who we were growing up. And I can remember we were mowing lawns, painting houses, resurfacing driveways, delivering newspapers, man, since I was probably 9 or 10. Right. So that was always really part of it, you know, hard work being out. You were always outside doing stuff. So you might as well, you know, if you weren't out playing, you, you were out actually earning money.

Yeah.

So that was one thing. And then the second thing is, uh, we got into swimming at very young ages and I played foot— peewee football and I did all that kind of stuff as well. But we were pretty serious swimmers. And then we all, the 2 brothers, myself and my sister, we all eventually earned college scholarships swimming. So it was one of those motivations that my folks said, look, I can, I'll never forget this. When we were in junior high school, they said, you all are going to go to college and you're going to go to Akron U, which is a fine school. Akron's a great school. You're all going to go to Akron U unless you earn scholarships. And All of us fortunately were able to do that and, uh, were able to experience different parts of the country.

Yeah. And you were like an All-American swimmer. Tell us a little bit about that. Was it at Indiana?

No, I was an All-American in high school and we had a very, very good program. One year I think we were ranked, uh, uh, the 2nd best, uh, team in the country. Wow. So we had a very, very, very strong program between 7 or 8 All-Americans a year came out of the high school program. Then I went and I swam obviously in college. One thing we did do at college is we did set a world record. There were 20 of us that swam 100 miles in under 24 hours. So, it was the straight swim through. Anyway, it was a Guinness Book of World Records citation for that period in time. But no, I still get in the water 4 or 5 times, 3 or 4 times a day, a week.

That's great.

And I For me, it's just a nice respite from just the busyness of life.

Yeah. You can't be distracted. If you get on a treadmill, which is a good thing to do too, but you could still have your phone and be a little distracted. When you're swimming, it's all you.

I always say it's sensory deprivation and you go into deep thought. I know this isn't true, but you kind of feel this way. You can't really see because you're Goggles are typically fogged up a little bit. You can't hear anything. You can't really taste or smell anything other than the water. And you're focused on, you kind of do this, this diagnostic of how's my heart, how are my lungs, you know, all that during your sets and your swims. But the second thing you're doing is, you know, you're thinking about issues of the day. I mean, there's big things you're thinking about that you get the opportunity really just to be to yourself and think about. You know, issues, like I said, family could be family stuff, could be work stuff. But anyway, I find it unbelievably, I was going to say refreshing, but not from a, not from a coldness standpoint, but just getting your mind really sort of organized. And, and when you leave the pool, you're in a much different state than you were before you came into the pool.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Highly recommend it. And plus, as we all know, that it's one of the best forms of exercise just because it's not so hard on your joints and things like that. But yeah, there's a whole mental aspect like you're bringing out. Mike, what was there a pivotal moment in life that fundamentally changed your trajectory?

You know, I think there were a couple of different moments in my life that especially from a business profession standpoint changed who I was. So one, I was a computer science undergrad guy and then I got my master's. And, you know, I did a lot of work when I was at Deloitte in different industries.

Yeah.

For the most part, we were doing a lot of technology implementation and change management associated with that implementation way back when. So this would've been in the '90s and happened to come across a project called the Arizona Healthcare Cost Containment System, which is AHCCCS, which is the state of Arizona's Medicaid system. And I I probably guess that there are still remnants of that today down in Phoenix. And anyway, I became quite intrigued with healthcare, you know, during that time. And even though my next stop was Capgemini, we did work with a whole bunch of different industries. I always had this interest from a healthcare standpoint back then. And then again, as I was mentioning Capgemini, I ran our high-tech manufacturing segment. For the group. So back then we were working with organizations like Starbucks when they were very, very small, Compaq, which became HP, Western Digital, ReadWrite, which made heads for disks. But we did a whole bunch of stuff from a high-tech standpoint. So I've always sort of, so healthcare from my Deloitte days, high-tech technology enablement from my Capgemini days, those are 2 pivotal moments. And then the third was obviously, you know, going through COVID and really the transformation of sort of our thinking around what needed to occur as a result of what was actually happening with COVID Yeah.

I can only imagine. So Mike, you end up at Premier and you've been there a long time now. What, what has made you stay with Premier?

Yeah, it's an interesting story. I came, my predecessor, Susan DeVore, uh, had just come and She, I was working on a project at Capgemini Ernst& Young. She said, I really need some help doing some stuff. And would you come? And I was like, yeah, I think, you know, I'll, I'll do it. And I'll do it as like an independent advisor and help you kind of through this. But my idea would be that it was at most a couple of years, maybe 18 months. I, you know, because there were some things we needed to do to sort of transform the organization. And 20, 20, 22 years later, I'm still here. So, you know, I didn't, I thought of this as being short-term and I think that's probably one of the reasons why I've been here so long. I've always thought of this as couple-year increments. Like how much value could I really provide to the organization in couple-year kind of timeframes? Because I do think, you know, we have to constantly challenge ourselves to look for things to actually make wherever we are more successful, be that relationships, family, whatever. But I do think there's that ongoing need to actually sort of look at things in a shorter-term lens as well as an obviously longer-term lens. But anyway, and it was not something that was planned. It was just something that actually occurred. And, you know, you kind of look back and you're like, wow, I've been there 22 years. So anyway, it's been fantastic. And I will tell you the next, you know, number of years at this organization are going to be absolutely incredible given the partnership that just occurred with PatientSquare and them helping Premier go private. And man, I just think the opportunities are going to be limitless for this organization in terms of the opportunity to get access to capital. PatientSquare's real interest in driving change and driving technology, their focus Obviously on healthcare and the patient. But anyway, very, very excited about, you know, my history, but just as excited about the future for this organization.

Yeah, I'd love to talk about it more because I know not everyone is going to be super familiar with Premier. So can you give us a high-level point of view on Premier? And then I want to dig down into some of the other products and services that people may not be familiar with for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. So for sure. So 2 segments to our business. We have a supply chain segment and we have a performance improvement segment. I'll just hit supply chain because that's what we've historically been known as. There's a group purchasing organization, obviously within that organization. And we've really differentiated our group purchasing organization through the technology enablement. That won't surprise you given I was a computer science guy. But we always have believed that there's this really strong functionality associated with the GPO, but how do you take Some of the highlights and some of the performance improvement things that are related to a GPO and get it implemented, get it into the workflow, get it into your ERP, get it into your electronic medical record and those kinds of things. So that whole focus, that whole area of taking advantage of a group purchasing function, the technology enablement of supply chain. And then we also have a very, very robust advisory business where we do co-management and those kinds of things with health systems from a supply chain standpoint. So that makes up for the most part supply chain. Performance services has just really taken off this last year. We brought in some new leadership with Dave Zito leading that. So Dave was at Navigant for a number of years and Dave's focus really has been to look at the way that we're actually providing services and capabilities and that It's not just enough to identify where there's opportunities and to drive that sort of change, but how do we hardwire that into the systems? How do we put that into the EMRs? And I think you got that from both Guidehouse and Navigant, but those are things we've been doing. And that side of our business is the fastest, quite frankly, the fastest growing part of the business. And people have this idea that you have to be in the GPO To actually utilize our services. And that's not true at all. As a matter of fact, our fastest growing opportunities are outside of a lot of our current customer base into customers that we're not doing work with on the GPO where he's doing huge cost transformation opportunities for those guys as well. So anyway, that's big. It's got advisory, it's got all of our tech Technology. So think of technologies that do things in the workflow around labor, labor management, physicians to get access to more patients, quality, safety, you know, all the technologies that healthcare systems— you're a CIO— all the technologies that healthcare systems need to utilize to be as efficient and as effective as possible.

Yeah. And I'm glad you raised up that point. Because I think that's an area where sometimes, uh, members of C-suite don't really understand the full capabilities of Premier and that, and you don't have to be on the supply chain side to be on, you know, take advantage of some of the other cost containment type of transformation that you'll do. I know, 'cause I'm also exposed to, uh, Premier, uh, via my board service at Summa, speaking of Akron.

Oh, that's right.

And, uh, so no, great, great partnership. And that's what I wanna talk about is guide us through a typical journey and maybe there's not a typical journey. So maybe you have to guide us through one or two journeys, but What's it like to be a customer? What do you think from the point of view of a hospital? What's it like to be a customer with Premier?

Yeah, I think that the first thing you're going to see is this strong focus on really change, change management. So most of us came from sort of the advisory side of the business. I had years at Deloitte, years at Capgemini, same with a number of our leaders, a lot of, you know, folks that grew up in performance improvement consulting and advisory. So you're gonna see very first the ability for us to articulate what the opportunities look like and the change that's gonna be required to drive any level of that improvement. So that's gonna be first. Second, you're gonna realize the opportunities and the differentiation that we've created through the acquisitions of a number of technologies that we've had over the years, this whole focus on technology enablement of providing healthcare. So people that don't get exposed to us often don't really appreciate how much capital we have invested in technology over the years since we've been, obviously since we were public and sort of the differentiation that we have from a technology standpoint. It's so interesting. Some of our most innovative customers are not part of the GPO. They're organizations that we're doing work with on, you know, some of our clinical decision support, which utilize AI and machine learning like Baylor Scott& White. Like CoreWell, Community Health Network. Those are organizations that are not part of our GPO, but we do a ton of that work with. So the point is, you're going to notice this focus on change management, this focus on technology. One of the things we've really been focused on passionately over the last couple of years is it's not enough about identifying opportunities for improvement. It's not enough On, you know, we call these things realized savings as well. We believe you fundamentally have to get the change that we talk about from a performance improvement standpoint embedded into the budgets, into the numbers, into the P&L. You have to actually live the results. And so that's one of the things that we've made a significant investment in, Ed, in that we want to make sure that the change gets implemented in the workflow. And just as importantly, we want to make sure we've left the measurement standards and the measurement management capability that systems can measure the ongoing benefits that we've, we've built out for them.

I love that. It's not like a one and done. We come in and we like take out costs here, take out costs there, and then it, then it inflates again. But you're actually teaching them and advising them how to continue this process and perpetuate itself and allow them to have True cost transformation long-term.

Exactly. Yeah, that's cool.

Well, tell us about being a CEO. I mean, like, what is that like? Well, give us a typical week. What are, what are some of the functions that you have?

You know, it's interesting. I've been the CEO now for close to 5 years. I think being the CEO is really not that significantly different than a lot of the roles within the organization in that, you know, you're still somebody that's very focused on the operations and improving the operations. You're still an executive that's focused on Working business development and those kinds of things. I think the higher level stuff that CEOs focus on, and I think are absolutely critical, are things like culture. You know, how are you actually building a culture for growth and a culture for really caring for one another and those kinds of things? And so it's building the culture. You do things that are much more focused on the investor side. You know, so even when I was, we were in the public markets, you spent a great deal of time making sure the investors knew the value that you could deliver long-term.

Yeah.

To be a good investment for those organizations. So, you know, there's that side of the equation. And then I think, you know, one of the things that kind of gets, always kind of gets lost in the wash is strategy, right? It's how are you building out strategies that are actually implementable for the foreseeable future, but that you're also creating opportunities to listen for what's going to be transformational in the business. How can you transform your business over the next couple, 3 years to take advantage of things? And I will tell you, given I am a technology person, we are not, we are in an incredibly unusual time with this advanced technology that we have at our fingertips to truly transform businesses. And I will tell you, the Premier in 2 years is going to be far different looking than the Premier today is. I mean, we already have chatbots that do work of point and click.

Yeah.

We already have large language models that do the work of analysts that we had teams of folks doing, combing through the data. As you know, we have Unbelievable datasets. So I just think this ongoing transition to leveraging these advanced technologies are truly going to continue to transform the way that we work with customers. It's really interesting. When I grew up outside of healthcare in the '90s and did a lot of work for the McCalls at, back then it was the precursor to AT&T Wireless out in Seattle. We used to have this kind of this notion of customer care and customer care was how do you get to know your customer? And this is when the cell phone industry was just starting.

Right.

And it was like making sure you knew how they utilized the product and making sure you knew how they did their payments and all that kind of stuff. And I do think that this interconnectivity of customer care and patient care is gonna start to really come together because now we have the data. To integrate those 2 aspects of what's happening with a patient in your community. And so I do think that's going to be this next iteration of how people see, how executives at healthcare systems see their, their basically their customers/patients. They're going to be using some of these older models, using these advanced technologies that heretofore you couldn't really pull that data together to look at people and customers in the same lens.

Yeah, no, I love that. I think, I think you're spot on. So Mike, before we head into my favorite topic, talking about leadership, is there one client success story you might mention that sort of motivates you or motivates the team? Like, wow, we brought the full capabilities of Premier to bear and we really helped out this system.

Yeah, it's so hard for me to like pick one. I mean, we're in the middle of so many of these Broad-scale transformations. I could think of the integration of Logan Health and Billings Clinic and the work that we're doing to integrate, you know, 2 very large systems. I can think of the work that we're doing at Oregon Health Sciences and the work that needs to occur there and how they have to continue to drive transformation, you know, because of the pressures on their— on the academic institution.

Yeah.

I could think of the work that we're doing at McLaren Health where they're going through broad-scale transformation. It's so hard for me to like, Ed, just to kind of nail down. I know you wanted me to pick one, but there's, I could probably pick 25 where we are making an incredible impact by leveraging technology, leveraging our services, leveraging group purchasing organization to really drive transformational change for some of these organizations.

Yeah.

Anyway, suffice it to say, I've named a few that I'm really, really proud of the work that we're doing.

Yeah, I should have said, give me one that starts with a letter and then pick a random letter.

I probably could have.

I'm sure you could do it. Wait, what are one or two key skills? I mean, obviously your career has been amazing, Mike. What are one or two skills that you look back on and it's like, wow, these two skills really shaped me and helped me succeed because we have a lot of people tuning in right now that want to be like Mike, they want to be a CEO, they want to be a better leader. What are one or two things that were really helpful to you?

Well, it's first of all, this idea that you have this aspiration to be a CEO, it's kind of a multi-billion dollar company. I always tell people, because I get asked these questions when we have interns in and from very, very, very top-notch schools, and they're always like, What can I do to become the CEO and how can you help provide me guidance? I think if you enter into this thinking that being a CEO is the end-all, you might be disappointed just because there's so few CEO— I was in a public company, now I'm in a private company, but so few opportunities unless you're obviously creating your own business and growing it and become, and go public and those kinds of things. But It's very hard to become the CEO. So I've always said, aspire to be a very significant leader where your talents can be utilized and your voice heard in terms of driving change and those kinds of things. So that's number one. But number two, to answer your question, I've always got sort of 3 or 4 premises that I've kind of lived my life by. One is always be curious.

Yeah.

And I, you know, you hear people talk about it, but What does that mean? It means that I like to always learn. I'm, I, you know, and it's a terrible habit of mine, but I was one of the very first adopters of ChatGPT because my youngest was like, Dad, are you aware of this, this, and this? I remember when ChatGPT rolled out, it was like October, it was in the fall. And he said, yeah, I'm Mike Alkire and I've got a 30-minute speech I want to deliver. Help me with what the topics are. So he built it. He, he, that's what he asked it to do. And then, you know, he was having fun with it and then we did it, you know, in December and it came out totally different just because of obviously the data that it had access to. But I use ChatGPT now. I'm on the most advanced versions, but I'm very curious and I'm always interested in learning and hearing new ideas and new thoughts. And, you know, having a mechanism like that is really interesting to leverage that. But more importantly, I have to tell you, And you know this because it's who we are as an organization, being out with our customers, right? Hearing what's going on. I mean, I'm out, you know, 2 or 3 times a week with various customers and hearing what's working, what's not working, the pressures that they're feeling. But I think this idea of being curious, always learning, understanding what the plight of your customers are. And the last couple more, but Be humble. Listen, sometimes people shut down when they start to hear you don't do this as well, or you've got a shortness there or weakness there. And I will tell you, for the younger folks, just be humble and be open that you're going to be constantly learning throughout your entire life. And that's a good thing. So it's okay that you make mistakes and you're hearing about issues and those kinds of things. You want to You know, we really, really want to ask for more. And the final thing is I've always had a passion for innovation given my focus on technology, always, always. And so, you know, my focus really is how not to just come up with a whole bunch of innovations, but how do you sort of whittle down the innovations that you can really focus on both in the near term and some of those that are on the longer term and not get distracted because that's the balance of all that.

Yeah, that's a great way to wrap up our time. You know, we talked about music and we're gonna add, cuz this'll be a new one to add to our Digital Voices Spotify playlist, Kallio, right out of Iceland.

Yep.

And, and then we talked about who you are, like growing up in the Midwest, Akron, just the family values, and then swimming and all the benefits of, but exercise, but also a time to really think. We talked a lot about your career and specifically around Premier and all the great things that you do, both on the supply chain side and cost transformation, went through a lot of detail on that, talked a lot about your responsibilities as CEO. And then we ended up with, you know, what are the keys to success? I think they're right on, both for not just become a CEO or a great, better leader, but in life in general, right? Humility, curiosity, time with customers, and a bent towards innovation. So, Mike, what did I miss? Or is there anything you wanna double down on? I'll give you the last word.

No, Ed, I just wanna say thank you for having me and, and thanks everybody for listening to this. But the last thing I, I will just say is, Incredibly excited about the future of this organization with the investment with PatientSquare. Again, we're going to have incredible access to capital that we wouldn't necessarily have had in the public markets and doing it with a little bit longer-term view of investment return. But Ed, thank you so much for the time and thank you everybody for listening.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, Reflection and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.