The Creative Edge in Healthcare Solutions (ft. Anatoly Postilnik)

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 Digital Voices. Hey, it's Ed, and we are number 13 on Apple Podcasts for technology because of you. Thank you for listening and being loyal. And also we have the greatest guests like my friend Anatoly Poselnik. Anatoly, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you, very happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And we first met really virtually, so we never had a chance to meet in person, but we saw each other on LinkedIn and we knew each other from other people who introduced us. And I I found your story quite fascinating and your organization quite fascinating, some of the things that you do as the managing director of Clinovera. And so I thought, wow, this would be a really interesting conversation. But before we get too far, the most important question we always ask, Anatoly, what's on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Classic rock. And I'm also a big fan of bluegrass, you know, Banjo is my favorite instrument. I get really excited when I hear banjo.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that we've had too many guests talk about bluegrass, so that'll be something we will add to our Spotify Digital Voices list. When it comes to classic rock, like name one or two bands or songs that, that particularly you're fond of.

Queen.

Pink Floyd. Yeah. 10cc, you know, great, great bands of the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

Yeah, I like a lot of that same music. Did you ever see Queen in concert by chance?

Not in, in, in person, but, uh, yeah, um, phenomenal, phenomenal music. Kind of never, never, never old.

I—

it was exciting to find out that my own son, who is obviously a lot younger than me, loves the same music. We, we Drive and we'll listen to the same radio station.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's one regret I have. I never did see Queen when they were together as the original band, and because I always loved them. In fact, I had two albums of I had two copies of each of their albums because I used one just for display and then one that I played. So that's how much of a Queen fan I was. So yeah, it's still great music. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you live by that sort of guide who you are?

Attention, someone. Yeah, I, uh, I'm a very different person than I used to be years ago. My driver is that I feel that what differentiates us from animals is creativity. And I think it's our responsibility as humans to be creative, um, and our role in the society and life to produce something new. And that's our destiny. That's how I look at it.

Yeah. No, I like that. Anatoly, tell us a little bit about who you are. Obviously you have an accent, you know, where did you come from? What sort of life did you have growing up that made you who you are today?

Do I have an accent? You know, non-native speakers think that they have perfect English. Um, so I grew up in a place in a country that doesn't exist anymore. And I was born in Kazakhstan. And the funny story about it is that I was once talking to a woman and told her that I'm from Kazakhstan. She had no idea what Kazakhstan is and where it is.

And I said, do you know Borat? And she said, oh yeah, of course I know Borat. And I said, do you know that Borat was my neighbor?

And she said, I can't believe it. And she took a selfie with me. She thought that I'm not kidding.

Yeah, so I grew up in Kazakhstan.

I went to school in Moscow, and then I came to the United States about 40 years ago. My education is in structural engineering and applied mathematics. And I started working initially in computer-aided design for structural engineering and mechanical engineering, and then eventually worked through different places and jobs, moving from industry to industry because different things interested me in different, different time. And I ended up in healthcare. And Healthcare became a very fascinating place and I've been in healthcare for over 20 years.

Yeah.

What was, was there a catalyst or anything in your youth that made you think you might ever get into healthcare or when it happened when you were older, what was the switch that made you go to healthcare?

It was completely accidental. I worked for a very long time, worked as a consultant for different consulting companies, major consulting organizations, which consulting job is very exciting overall because you work on one type of problem, one type of organization, suddenly you switch to another completely different. It's kind of very dynamic, it's very stressful, but it's very interesting. And then in the times of, I had my own consulting company in the times of dot-com bust, we fell on hard times because many of our clients were young startups that disappeared overnight. And I went to work as a consultant for former Partners Healthcare, former MGB. Healthcare is fascinating because unlike in construction industry or in structural engineering, you build houses, you design complex structures, and it takes many, many years before they appear.

Yeah.

When you work in financial industry, you deal with money, and money is a complex topic. We need them, but They're not, they're not very exciting topics.

True.

In healthcare, you deal with human life and the impact of technology is nearly instantaneous. You build something, software by nature is very kind of quick turnaround with the results. You develop something and you see the results very quickly compared to, for example, mechanical engineering or Or structural engineering where it takes many, many months, if not years, to actually see the results. But most important is that you help people. You kind of help your own friends. You help your own relatives. My dad had an unfortunate, terrible car accident, and I spent 2 months sitting in his room helping nurses using the software that the team that I worked with and me personally developed. What can be more rewarding?

Yeah, that's pretty intense. And I'm sorry about the accident, but what an impact I'm sure that had on you and what you do today. So now you're managing director, as I mentioned, of Clinovera. Tell us a little bit about the history of Clinovera and the company.

Sure. So Clinovera is a dedicated healthcare analytics sciences organization, part of a larger organization called FirstLine Software. Uh, and FirstLine Software, uh, used to have a healthcare practice, uh, and Clunavera kind of emerged as an evolution of this healthcare practice with one of the reasons we wanted to conceptually decouple Clunavera from FirstLine Software is to emphasize this focus. So it's kind of when you go to a, to a surgeon and ask him to do a knee replacement, he says, well, I also can do your taxes. So that's that kind of impact impression that we had when we created the healthcare, we had to create healthcare practice, that kind of sense of lack of focus. And that's why Clinivera became very focused healthcare and life sciences organizations much easier.

I get it. First line software already had a practice with healthcare, but you decided to hyperfocus, hyperspecialize, created Clinivera. Tell us about the team. What's the makeup of the team?

We are at the core an engineering company, but we, when I joined, my kind of vision and desire was to be not just a technology company, but a problem solver on a, at the end of the day, technology is just a tool people face with complex business problems. And the goal is to use technology to solve these business problems. And that means that we have to be experts in this business. We basically build a team around subject matter expertise. So there are lots of engineers in the team. Firstline is about 500, 600 employees, and Clinivera is about 50 people exclusively focused on healthcare and life sciences. So there is a significant engineering force who has substantial experience in healthcare. Then there is a group of analysts and medical informaticians that brought in or trained within the organization. And there are also clinicians on the team. So this is a comprehensive organization. The structure of the team also reflects the approach that we're taking. So it is when you come in and say, I'm going to solve your problem, I'm not just going to be your engineering partner, which is very often just the case. People just want us to extend their own teams and just need engineers. But in majority of cases, people focused on specific problems. And that means that the team has to be dynamic. It means that one day we need more of an engineering side, more on the business side, on analytical side, which means that we have to have a team that is multi-skilled. It's a lot easier to operate when the team consists of people who can do multiple things. Analysts are often project managers and testers. At the same time, we're trying to have full-stack developers instead of separating front-end developers from backend developers, database engineers. And that kind of reflects our dynamic structure of the project. Bring resources dynamically based on what we need. So that's essentially the philosophy that we have within the team.

Yeah, I love that. I love the fact that you mix the clinicians with the engineers and It makes for a good mix to help clients. So I know you have a couple, more than a couple of high-profile clients. Tell us one or two examples of how you're helping customers today in healthcare.

I mentioned that I started working with Partners Healthcare many years ago as a consultant myself, and Partners Healthcare, currently now Mass General Brigham, continues to be a client for years, a phenomenal, extremely innovative organization with great visionaries. Who are also friends, but we also work with other institutions, with Columbia, a number of academic medical centers, but there are major device manufacturers, major clinical research organizations who are clients. We work very closely with InterSystems. We love the company. We work very closely with, with the organization. You can find press releases where we work together to expand InterSystems' reach in life sciences space.

InterSystems, great company. Certainly have worked with them a lot over my career. Can you give us one example of a client that you're doing work with that's doing maybe something somewhat transformative?

I think majority of our work is transformative. So it's pretty much 90% of, or even 100% of what we do now today, one way or another, relates to relates to artificial intelligence. One of the major academic medical centers, we work with a team of geneticists who have difficulty diagnosing hypermobility. It takes a very long time for patients to be diagnosed with hypermobility or not being diagnosed. So we built a tool for this organization where hypermobility can be detected. from just videos from patient movements. They kind of move their arms around, the fingers, and you can capture position of their fingers and detect a Beighton score, which is a criteria for hypermobility. We worked with another organization that is focused on improving efficiencies in admitting patients to long-term care facilities. It's a very important topic because whether the patient is a good fit for a long-term care facility is a very important question. It might be too expensive, or the facility may not provide adequate services for the patient. At the same time, facility doesn't have a lot of time to make a decision whether they need to admit patient or not. And automating this process— right now it's purely manual labor— automating these processes and making these decisions, making these decisions quick And correct is an ultimate challenge for them. So they're very interested in solving this problem. And what we are working on is an interactive way of doing that, where we extract structured information from unstructured notes and allow admission organizations to interact with the patient data, essentially ask important questions about admission without actually even seeing the data itself. It's all automatically done. So it's all automated through generative AI. We have a motto that if you dream it, we can make it. And that's basically the attitude that we have.

Yeah, no, I love that. That's a good mantra on the business side. If you can make, if you can dream it, we can make it. I love that. So let's talk, let's pivot a little bit here and let's talk about leadership because clearly, you know, given your career and In your current role, you're a great leader. Did anything early in life help prepare you in your current role?

Absolutely. Evolved from being an engineer, an architect, a technologist to become a business leader. This is a great kind of evolution. And actually, I'm very thankful to a lot of people who gave me lots of inspiration. that brought me where I am right now. Being a leader, and I'm a very hands-on leader, so I actually can go and write some code. I'm not sure that anybody wants to see it, but that's a different topic. I'm involved in every project, especially in the beginning.

Yeah.

But I'm not a micromanager. I think that letting people do their own thing and sometimes letting them fail, understand their challenges and overcome them is the best way for them to become leaders themselves.

Yeah. What about anything that you've learned the hard way? No matter how long you've been in the business or living, you know, you encounter an obstacle or two. Tell us about one that you encountered and what you did about it.

I think if I say one thing about it is managing expectations. Essentially, the challenge is every client wants everything done yesterday and For twice less than it actually cost. And there is, there is no surprise to that. I think we all, all kind of see this in the same way. You know, you, you do your, you do your remodeling project and then you're surprised that your bill came up so much and you go to your contractor and give him a hard time and he's challenged to explain why it happened. So we learned that we have to manage expectations proactively. We learned from our mistakes, and the mistake was in the past is that we work hard, and at the end of the month we produce a bill. We're very specific what we bill for, but the client comes back and says, "Well, explain to me this bill," and explaining a explaining what we have done takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work for engineers to go back sometimes months back and see look in Jira and all of the tickets that they worked on and all of the dependencies and. back and explain to the client. So to avoid those challenges, we basically trying to do it on a very kind of micro level. So every week we send the client a status report with everything that we have done, with all of the challenges that we have been facing, how we resolve them, and what we're gonna do in the next week. And that works really well because clients love that. They know what to expect. That's one kind of learning experience that I can talk about.

I know you are fond of pickleball. How is pickleball like leadership?

So I am a pickleball fanatic. I am a coach and very experienced player. I taught people who are now playing at nationals. And essentially there are types of— 2 types of coaches in pickleball. Social coaches and people and other types of coaches. And a social coach, essentially a person who wants their students to feel good about themselves. The other type of coach is the one who wants them to be better. And I'm the second type. I don't like to work with people who just want to feel good. I want to work with people who want to be better. And I'm lucky. I, I've been— I've had really great players to play with and great students who evolved into much better players than I am. And that's my lesson in pickleball, or lesson for myself.

Well, I would love to play someday. So the next time we're together in person, it'd be fun, and I'd love to learn from you. That's kind of— that's the kind of coach I want also, right? It's like, I don't want a coach that makes me feel good. I've had those before, right? Because I'm I'm a big triathlete and some other sports, and there's some leaders, right, who'll just say things to make you feel good, but they don't help you improve. And, and so that's not healthy. So I appreciate your approach. It reminded me of a quote from someone else that said something to the effect of, don't try to motivate the worker, work with the motivated.

Mm-hmm.

That's when you get stuff done. When you already have that player that wants you to coach them so they could learn and get better and not just kind of, uh, make them feel good. So. Yeah.

And I, and I look at, I do it for myself as well. So when I play, I'm not so much concerned about winning. Of course, winning is great, but I'm more concerned about improving and doing better.

Yeah.

So I, I'd rather play with, uh, stronger players and the best game, game I, I could and lose than Play against weak players and have an easy win, and that propagates to everything in my life and everything I do. So when I ski, I do the same thing. When I hike, I do the same thing. Just I don't have have anything to prove to anyone except to myself.

Yeah, you and I we're we're wired very similarly. How do you recharge your batteries and just remain fresh? Right, because you general manager, you're super busy. Sometimes can be a high stress environment because. You know, everything that's at stake, but you've gotta take time, right? And maybe it's just pickleball, but is there anything else that you do to just sort of relax and recharge?

So I play banjo, I play ukulele, I ski, I hike, I kayak, I bike, I play pickleball. I'm very interested in longevity and spend a lot of time listening and viewing videos by Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman, a number of other folks. It's also tied up to my work side because we work with a couple of organizations that are helping people to achieve their life goals through, through wellness and kind of constructing their own bodies to the challenges that they are facing. And you are very familiar, being a climber yourself, how important is what you eat. I, I am on keto diet and intermittent fasting myself, and I see the results, and I'm a proponent of that. I don't just coach pickleball. I also help people to eat better.

Yeah, no, I, I could see that. Like, it all makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate where you're coming from. We talked about a lot of different things, everything from bluegrass and your interesting life story out of Kazakhstan. And then we talked a lot about your career and then how you got into healthcare and the different things you've been doing, Clinovera specifically, or how you help your clients with digital transformation and sort of your approach to the way that you help them. And then a lot about leadership and pickleball, of course, and just healthy living, which I love is one of my favorite topics. What did we miss? Or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Clinavera and Firstline Software are global organizations. We work across the world, I travel across the world. And that's a phenomenal opportunity to see, to see the world, but also understand challenges and opportunities in healthcare and life sciences and work with organizations that have completely different frameworks, completely different form of funding. So I'm blessed to have this opportunity and I'm grateful, grateful to the organization, grateful to life for being able to do that.

That's awesome. Thanks so much for being our guest on Digital Voices.

Thank you. I'm very happy to be here and Great conversation. I appreciate, appreciate this great question that forced me to think about, about life and about work.

Yeah. And pickleball.

And pickleball, of course.

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.