The Voice of our Very Own CEO (ft. Ricky Caplin)

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.

Today on Digital Voices, I get to talk with my boss, my manager, Ricky Kaplan, president of Tech Mahindra Health and Life Sciences. And we're going to talk a little bit about digital transformation and making that transformation yourself as an organization. So we talk a lot about digital voices. We cover everything from pharma to provider to payer to retail, everything in between, and but most importantly, the patient. But, you know, we talk a lot about this concept of digital transformation. What does it mean? It's such a nebulous term, but it means a lot of things to different organizations and different people. What I always say is, whatever it is for your organization, define it and agree on it and move forward with it, because we'll never have a universal agreement on exactly what that is. I thought it was interesting, I recently took part in a study with Oxford University on the changing roles that digital transformation has brought in with chief digital officers and such. Very, very interesting insights, but it's really about, you know, this villain's vision for digital transformation that's balanced by practice excellence and cross-industry knowledge and subject matter expertise. And what I always say, the bottom line really is if you wanna be a digital leader, a chief digital officer, you have to be digital yourself. So with that, I just wanna bring in Ricky Kaplan now, longtime friend, and as I may mentioned earlier, CEO who made the transition when we talk about digital transformation from a legacy company to a digital company. So we're going to talk a lot about that. But Ricky, welcome. And the first question I always ask, your favorite music?

Thanks for having me, Ed. It's a pleasure. You know, my kids may see me singing songs like oldies and things like that, but probably my favorite is just worship music.

Yeah, that's cool. And what is your life passion or mantra? Do you have some sort of North Star that sort of guides everything that you do?

Yeah, I know you know me, and for those who don't know me, I'm really grounded in my faith in Christianity and the Bible. And really everything I do, I at least try to make sure that God is my North Star and I'm focused on glorifying Him with everything I've got.

Yeah, that's cool. So, Ricky, tell us a little about your story because people always wonder, you know, a leader, a CEO, of a company. You know, how did you get there? What's your story, both personally and professionally?

Yeah, thanks. So, I have an awesome wife, Danielle, and we have 3 children, Callie, Ryland, and Brooks. Callie is 8, Ryland is 6, and Brooks is 3. He's about to turn 4. And Dani has really been a rock for me. She married me right when I was about to start the HCI Group. And we obviously went through a rough patch at the very beginning like many entrepreneurs do when we were figuring out how we were going to scale this thing. And as you know, we started in a townhome in Atlanta with my brother-in-law and best friend, Greg Jones, in a friend's kitchen of all places.

Mm-hmm.

And we didn't know much at the time, but we knew we were going to just give it all we got. And we've been truly blessed. We built from a 2-person company in a townhome, the HCI Group. And it would, you know, we are— our initial legacy company, as you referred to earlier, was doing strategy, implementation, and training in support of electronic health records. And so, we became one of the big players in the Epic and Cerner and Meditech space, a lot of time on the clinical applications. We realized we needed to change. And part of the realization came when my co-founder and brother-in-law, Greg Jones, came to me and shared that he was feeling called to go into the ministry and he wanted to go to seminary. And we're like, Greg, we built this company. We're almost 1,000 employees now, and we've got all these contractors that work with us in addition. What are we going to do with this thing? And so, we were fortunate to have had significant growth and had a number of acquirers that were interested and ran our process. But we wound up, as most people know, selling to Tech Mahindra. And a big part of that equation was the ability to transform our business from something that was primarily a time and expense business doing strategy and implementation work to a company that did managed services and had great digital transformation capabilities. And, you know, I'm sure we'll have an opportunity to talk about it, but we— I'd like to say we've successfully done that. And, you know, at the end of last year, I think we were ranked by Forrester, ISG, and Black Book, all from things from, you know, top in digital transformation and innovation. And it's really come together nicely. And we've had significant growth, and our business model has shifted from project-based work and staff augmentation to large-scale digital transformation efforts and managed service engagements.

I obviously have a strong bias, but I almost think it'd make a great Harvard Business Review case study, you know, because it's a difficult transition for a company to go from sort of some legacy services to truly a digitally transformative company that not only is transforming digitally itself internally, but as you just described, externally as well. Is there a different requirement for leadership? Like, how were you able to do that? Because that's a pretty major feat, you know, making that transition and now being seen as a leader in digital transformation. So from a leadership perspective, was there anything, you know, as you look back, Ricky, was there anything that sort of enable that success or was it just grit like when you first started out?

Oh, man. Probably a combination of several factors and a lot of God's grace. But I like the idea on the Harvard Business Review case study. Interesting enough, Anand Mahindra, our chairman, he's on the board of Harvard Business School. And I think he was the very first corporation ever to do executive education there. And so, I have a feeling this might make its way to become a Harvard Business Review case, especially if we continue to execute. But, yeah. So, what catalyzed this and what changes did we have to make? I would say there was a lot of pain at the beginning. And we knew what we wanted to become, but we didn't— how we planned to do it, just like many times, especially being an entrepreneur or really in anything, It doesn't go the way you draw it up. And we had significant growth just from our core business as we acquired the company. We were on like QuickBooks and really basic accounting systems, and we had to transform the way we did things internally first. And so, there were some pains in moving to new accounting systems and HR systems and investing in HR. and really bringing in a key leadership team that understood digital transformation, you being one of those key hires, Ed, as our Chief Digital Officer. And so we really invested in talent. We really took the time to study and understand the capabilities of Tech Mahindra and had to reskill our workforce, not just our consultants, but really our sales teams. They had been selling, you know, implementation services. And frankly, we didn't even know what digital transformation was. Hopefully, we'll get to talk about it. So, you know, I think that the reskilling and persevering through the storms, hiring key talent, but also I think COVID had a little bit to do with that. You know, I like to share the story that we preached one thing, but we didn't necessarily do it as a company, and COVID forced us to do that. So, an example was when we went to become a completely virtual company overnight at the beginning of COVID I think you shared with me some ways you were doing things at Cleveland Clinic with these daily huddle meetings. And I'm like, you know what? We're going to go to that. We're going to be all virtual. Everyone's going to use the same platform. We're going to put metrics in place. And we went virtual literally over a weekend, and that shined a lot of light.

Yeah.

on inefficiencies. I was probably the biggest naysayer of, you know, we've got a lot of young employees. Are they going to be productive or are they just going to go watch Netflix or goof around? And I'm happy to say that I was wrong and the teams just executed. And I made the comment, I don't think we ever need to go back to the office space. We'll probably have, you know, continue to have some hoteling and certain things that need to be there. We'll have some innovation space. But I think it's going to be a new future. So, we made some changes, hired some talent, went through kind of that grinding and storm. But then also, we lucked out that COVID shined a light for us that we had to become a virtual company first. And it's much easier to preach when you're doing it yourself.

Yeah. No, that's definitely a key learning, I think. And as I mentioned earlier in that Oxford study as well, It's to be digital, you have to be digital, so yourself as a company, as a leader, and that's really cool how you pulled it off and those 3 or 4 tangible ways in which you did it and we did it as an organization. So now you're president of— originally you just really focused on the provider side, but now you have a very broad focus for all of health and life sciences and digital transformation in these other sectors like pharma and payer side. Can you speak to anything that's exciting that you might be doing in some of these other areas other than the provider side? Because obviously on the provider side, you're doing digital front door and things like that. But what about these other spaces? Where do you see opportunity? What sort of things are you focused on?

Thanks. So it's interesting, you know, as I've learned more about the payer and life sciences, which are pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies, I've realized that they're a little bit more mature in their adoption of technology and managed services and automation and things like that. However, we're all in the same business. We're all taking care of a patient in different capacities and there's overlap. And so, you know, we've tried to focus on What is the overlap? What is our story? And how does that relate across healthcare verticals? And so we decided earlier when we brought you on back in February of last year that we were going to make a big bet in all things virtual health. And we started down the path of creating what the vision would be for a fully enterprise virtual health platform. And so we did that. COVID happened. Everyone went from, you know, 5 telehealth visits to 5,000 telehealth visits overnight. And we started building out and investing in a platform, which is now a new company called HealthNext. And HealthNext is a all things virtual health, fully integrated platform on one platform using some of our best-in-class digital transformation capabilities and human-centered design principles. And so we've built that now. We have our first enterprise customers. We've— it's a consortium of various health systems and health organizations that are co-investing in it. And it's really, really exciting. Clearly a leader, like you mentioned, in the provider space and digital front door. But what I see is this is actually a platform that's going to cross into the payer space and the life science spaces. Payers are already needing remote patient monitoring and things like that. We've already had success with payers. And if you think about life science, is there's tremendous opportunities around things like medical adherence and how they make— get patients to adapt their drugs and use them in the proper manner. And they're making significant investments in things like health cloud. And so, I see an opportunity to lap our virtual health platform directly into the payer and life sciences space. And as you know, we already have plenty of very interesting conversations. So, that's our kind of cross-border, how we're going to leverage the provider story into it. I also think when you look in the industry specifically, there's a lot of opportunity to find different things. For instance, some of the software companies that we work with, like Epic, are having tremendous success in the payer space now. That's a natural segue for us to do some of the things we've always done. So there's a few examples of how it's changed. I'm certainly still learning and getting some good advisors to teach me and help us continue to make our bets.

Yeah, so you've made a couple statements, Ricky, already that I'm sure that our audience has picked up on, you know, primarily chief digital officers across all of health and life sciences, and a couple key things on leadership. And one you just mentioned is that you're listening to other people, you're listening to advisors, So it requires a lot of humility to be a leader. And so my question is, what are some of your expectations of leaders and digital leaders? So you already mentioned one, again, you know, just you've got to be humble and realize what you don't know, and so you listen to others. But I'm sure you have a couple other items that might be of interest for our audience. So when you think about leadership, digital era, Are there some other attributes that jump out?

Yeah. And I don't even know if I could be considered a digital leader. Most of the chief digital officers that I know are just brilliant minds that really understand so much more than I do. I guess one of the advantages is I know I don't. You know, I'm a CPA by training turned entrepreneur that's learned healthcare and technology, but I certainly can't practice any of it. And to a degree, Because I don't think I have the answers, that's an advantage for me. Like I was saying, I have to be humble because I can't do it. And so, I really depend upon some of the advisors and relationships I have. And my job is really to facilitate and enable and hopefully create the solutions that are needed. I can tell you, I think that most chief digital officers that I've met with are pretty innovative, are willing, and are either coming from outside industry or are looking from other industries that have had more digital transformation. And I think just being a constant learner or listener, something that I think is going to be successful and that I'm seeing be done successfully is what I call carve-outs or joint ventures, where a chief digital officer wants to create something, but instead of solving the problem just for their health system, how do you create a company about it that can bring in outside expertise that can solve the problem for your organization, maybe bring in a couple of other organizations that are having the same problem? And then you kind of have something where you can not only solve the problem, but something that can scale, and continually innovate. And I think that's an opportunity for chief digital officers to think about. Instead of me solving all the problems, how do I have an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship that can solve the problems? And not only do you get to solve your problem, you may very well create a revenue stream for your organization.

Yeah, that's really strong perspective and ideas there. It really is about that collaboration and partnering more than we ever have before. And that's what I like too, Ricky, what you were saying when you were talking about all of health and life sciences, how some of the same solutions definitely go across all those silos. So in the past, what has held us back from transformation is really the silo thinking, and now there's this new era, I think, with the digital era and certainly the way that you've positioned your company in that we are cross-collaborators and taking the best that we can learn from these other areas, these other verticals, and bringing them together. and eliminating the redundancies, the inefficiencies, and so forth. So really good stuff. Look, we are almost at the end of our time. I wanted to leave the final comment to you, Ricky. Anything that perhaps we touched on you wanted to double down on, or maybe something we didn't touch on that you might think would be interesting for our audience, whether it's about leadership, digital transformation, the future, where we're headed, uh, the platform's all yours.

Thanks. You know, one thing that, that has been on my mind recently is just how hard the country of India is getting hit with COVID You know, we've had a few members on my team that, frankly, I didn't even know pass away. You know, there's a, there's a gentleman who was 30 years old who worked out all the time and, you know, had a young family. And I think I bring that up because we need to pray for India. We're not out of this pandemic yet. And with that said, I also want to just commend and thank all the chief digital officers and people that may be listening to this call because I've seen tremendous innovation in healthcare. And I'm so grateful for what you have done. And a lot of times it goes unrecognized. 'Cause we're not necessarily on the front lines. But, you know, thank you, and we need to continue to innovate. One of the things that is exciting to me is this virtual health platform that we put together. We were able to bring to an organization in India called Good Shepherd India, which has access to tribal and rural places throughout India, as well as a lot of the slums. And they're launching virtual health company in some of these areas. And it's just encouraging to see what we do being applied to be able to save lives. And so, you know, I'm grateful for the opportunity to have gotten to know a lot of the chief digital officers in our industry and look forward to hopefully getting to know more of them. Thank you so much for having me, Ed.

Yeah, Ricky, very insightful. We appreciate your time and thank you to our audience. Thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon. Thank you.

Hi, this is John Lynn from the Healthcare IT Today podcast. If you like the latest rumors, insights, and happenings in healthcare IT, you'll enjoy hearing my colleague Colin Hung and myself debate and share the latest happenings from the world of healthcare IT. Find the latest episodes or dig into our archive at healthcareittoday.com, or search for Healthcare IT Today on your favorite podcast application or YouTube. When it comes to healthcare technology, we love this stuff, and we can't wait to have you join in on the discussion of everything health IT.

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