Show Notes
Alan Portela is the CEO and Co-Founder of DEPTH Health. Before this he spent 12 years running AirStrip, deployed in 750 US hospitals, and has advised Masimo, Bain Capital, and Apollo Hospitals. Touring hospitals after the pandemic, a Vanderbilt physician took him past the emergency department waiting room and into the hallway where admitted patients board. Portela treated it like a traffic jam and asked where the accident was. It was triage. Most boarding patients score ESI 3, and roughly half are stable enough for a bed they aren't waiting for. In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Ed why pilots don't work, why he spent a year with St. Luke's University Health Network defining what to measure before claiming anything, and how he started this company the same week he started treatment for recurrent prostate cancer. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/
More from DGTL Voices with Ed Marx
Umar Ansari leads clinical AI solutions globally for a major healthcare company, a role he pitched to leadership himself during COVID. He has worked in more than 60 countries and has lived in Dubai for 21 years, after moving there with Cerner for what was supposed to be two. He almost became a doctor. His sister, a physician, told him that if even 1% of him doubted medical school, he shouldn’t go. He took the MCAT and got in anyway, then chose computer science instead. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Umar tells Edward Marx why he believes character outlasts achievement, why he stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room, why humans will never be fully out of the loop in clinical AI, and what his father taught him about leaving things better than you found them. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/
Dr. Patrick McGill is the CEO of Community Health Network in Indianapolis, a $4 billion system with 17,000 employees and five hospitals. He is the fifth CEO in its 70-year history, and four months into the job when this was recorded. He still sees patients on Mondays. His path there is unusual. Family medicine, then informatics after Epic went in, then transformation, then the corner office. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Patrick tells Edward Marx why he wants people to stop asking about AI strategy, what he asks them instead, and what he thinks everyone gets wrong when they chase patient experience scores. Plus: the practice he took over after its physician was killed in a plane crash, and what he tells emerging leaders about titles. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/
Xinan Rahman founded a company that matches incoming payments against payer contracts, catching underpayments as they happen rather than months later. His father named him with an X instead of the usual Z, because his kids were going to be different. He did the same with Xinan's sister. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Xinan tells Edward Marx about growing up in Bangladesh, why he studied computer science as a practical decision rather than a passion, and how reading his own hospital bill in college made him curious about what health systems actually get paid. He also explains why revenue cycle staff are not the problem and what he thinks comes after underpayments. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/
A week in the hospital used to be standard after heart bypass surgery. Dr. Gianluca Torregrossa sends his patients home in a day or two, and they are back at work within a week. One of them played 36 holes of golf two weeks out and sent a photo. He does the operation robotically, without cutting the chest open. Surgeons tried this in the early 2000s and abandoned it as too difficult and too expensive. He picked it up anyway and has now done more than 100, including the first ever performed on a pregnant patient. Gianluca is Director of the Robotic Coronary Artery Surgery Program at Cleveland Clinic. Before that he trained in Italy and spent nine months in Sudan operating with the humanitarian organization EMERGENCY. In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Edward Marx why he thinks technology's job is to simplify technique rather than replace the surgeon, what Sudan taught him that medical school could not, and why he believes healthcare is running out of time to fix its leadership problem. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/
Sabré Cook is a professional racing driver and a mechanical engineer. She was the first woman to compete in the Porsche Carrera Cup North America, won a world karting championship at 13, and worked as a suspension composite design engineer for the Renault F1 team while racing in W Series. Edward Marx steps outside healthcare for this one. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Sabré tells him about growing up at a go-kart track in Grand Junction, winning that first championship with her dad as her mechanic, and why the engineer in her runs on gut once she's in the car. She also talks about the season she raced injured, what she agreed to that she shouldn't have, and the lesson it took a year of surgery and rehab to learn. Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/