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Welcome to This Week Health Conference. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health, a set of channels and events dedicated to leveraging the power of community to propel healthcare forward. Today we have an interview in action from the Fall Conferences on the West Coast.

Here we go.

Hi, here we are again at the Timefall Forum for another interview in action. My name is Sue Shane, I'm a Principal at Starbridge Advisors, and I am joined today by two wonderful colleagues.

Nasser Nazami, who is the new CIO at ExactSciences. And Cheryl Goswami, who is the Chief Digital Officer at University of Wisconsin UW Health. So welcome guys, and don't make me laugh too much here, but we've been laughing as we got ready for this. Let's start with you, Nassar, and you're in a new position Exact Sciences.

I'm gonna guess that our listeners don't know what Exact Sciences is, and I know that you are gonna easily tell us.

Absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me. Xact Sciences is a clinical research company. We develop products to eradicate cancers. Most of your listeners are going to know us by our flagship product called ColoGuard.

So Xact Sciences is a maker of ColoGuard, but we have a number of other products in precision oncology, essentially cancer detection, screening, and so forth. So that's, we are based out of Wisconsin.

Okay, so my two Madison colleagues, and did you know ColoGuard?

Yes, we do. And again, thank you for having us on the show.

And as I'm thinking through this is what healthcare needs. We're an academic provider meets a life sciences creator out here. This is the new form of interoperability that we should be all working towards. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Okay. You want to comment at all on UW Health? What's going on there? So UW Health is,

again, as much as we are University of Wisconsin Health, we actually operate in Wisconsin and Illinois.

I am.

Okay. Any key strategies in terms of workforce workforce, workforce?

Absolutely. So, again, in many ways it starts by redefining the work, because the workforce is not coming back the workforce that we were used to. So, wherever we are looking at, wherever automation... can help in producing some of the mundane tasks.

We're deploying it. We're also changing, or exploring, different care models where home-based care is now coming in, so that not only do we provide the care at the place closest to the customer, but also at an affordable price point and with the least disruption to the current provider shortages. So, those are just some of the strategies that we're looking at in defining different care models.

Okay,

great. What's some of your biggest challenges? And I know, how many months you've been there?

Two months now. Okay. I've been with the organization for two months. It's, it's, amazing group of people. So we are in the business of eradicating cancer, as I mentioned, right? So we have labs. We have amazing research happening.

We world class labs where we process the samples that come to us. The focus are, for me, are really integration. We have acquired a number of labs. So we are standardizing a technology platform throughout the university, which I think most people don't. I think no, but is a differentiator for our tasks, the technology platform that exact sciences is developing.

Like Shero said, our spent is people. There's a huge focus on talent retention talent attraction and just growing our pipelines. The more tests we have, the sooner we can screen, the better we can help eradicate cancer test basically. Okay. Well, we.

We all like to hear that you are trying to eradicate cancer, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So anything at the conference so far that's of particular, excitement or inspiration? Why don't you go first, especially since you're coming now from, you're considered life sciences.

That's right. Okay. Um, Your Life Sciences chime is a special place and I get to meet my colleagues from healthcare provider space.

It's lots of fun. There are, of course, I think that I would say the top most. AI, which exact sciences is also very much, we believe the future of cancer detection. AI is going to play a pretty significant role in, in many ways. So it's one of the themes that's clearly, emerging at the conference is AI and the focus on AI.

I'm looking forward to the keynote. Yes. On AI. Yeah. I bet the room will be full. Absolutely. If people haven't gone to the airport yet, yes,

it'll be full. Absolutely. Now, it'll be full. So. And there are a number of other, you know, on leadership, interoperability again. You spoke about innovation just in the previous panel.

So far, excellent conference. Good. Good.

So, I would say, same thing, I don't do a lot of conferences. CHIME is the one I try to do for all the reasons that Nasser mentioned. But this one in particular, I'll tell you, what I really have enjoyed so far is the discussion on the people aspect beyond the technology aspect.

So, Sue, you and I were on the DEI panel the other day. Thank you. That was very important. Later today, we are talking about just talent. How do you groom talent and retain talent which typically doesn't get talked about in a technology conference. And so we are practicing what we tell others, but the people before the technology, which makes this one a little extra special.

We've already achieved that goal and we've exceeded that goal by 5, 000, so we're up over 55, 000 for the year. We want to blow through that number. We ask you to join us. Hit our website in the top right hand column. You're going to see a logo for the lemonade stand. Go ahead and click on that to give today.

We believe in the generosity of our community and we thank you in advance. Now back to our show. 📍   📍

 That's

great. I went to a track session that was a multi generation workforce and just learning and working with,

Jen. That was amazing. That was a really good session. Yeah, you were there? Yep, I was there.

Yeah, so we were very proud to be the first in the country to use large language models in dealing with some of our in basket fatigue issues that the whole industry is suffering from. Thanks to the partnership with Microsoft and Epic. And I always say that is the start, that is not the end. So, so now that we've got that one behind us, we are leveraging AI in some meaningful ways, not just for the sake of using technology.

Again, I've said this before, I think ambient... And listening from a technology standpoint is really ready for prime time. That also, hopefully in my lifetime, our lifetime, allows us to think of data entry beyond a keyboard. And reduces the stress on our providers. So those are the two areas that, that I am really interested in as the technology, on the technology

front as we go into

2024.

Okay, and the large language models, that was what you were getting a lot of press on, right? That, yep. I talked to you earlier this year and you're like, oh my god, all the, yeah, okay. So. Alright, but

that's good. It was

much needed good press because beyond the technology, at least the points I try to make out, is where is the ethical governance, where is the moral governance, where is the legal clarifications, and the clinical, and the technology comes the last of the five pillars when we talk about it.

That's where the conversations are to take place.

so, look I've been there two months, so there's not much I can comment at for exact... It's an amazing, growing company. But future is really bright and what I'm most excited about, so my healthcare provider background, coming into Life Sciences company and knowing that our customers are really providers and healthcare systems.

So, 50 million people in the United States who are not screened for colon cancers. Right, who are not getting screening? Yeah, they're not getting screened. So one of my goals is how do we increase that percentage point? And I believe we can play a role there. There are a couple of things that are from a technology perspective that I'm really excited about.

One almost 40 percent of our orders are easily coming via faxes or portal. So, Shiro and I already discussed Faxes or portal? That's right. Okay. And we all know, like, from living in a provider world, we know that the best thing we can do for our provider is to allow them to work within their operating system.

Which is whatever the EMR they're using, right? Right, right. So, electronic interfaces with other healthcare systems that will allow electronic ordering and resulting back. To speed data faster around time, so on and so forth that we have, we all know the benefits. That's I would say top of mind for me.

And the second thing, which is internal is just bringing all our technologies, which came to exact sciences through this amazing acquisitions on a single platform so we can truly leverage all our assets, especially data assets, to further enhance our r and d across. And also bring that single platform to our partners by way of data insights better prior authorization, faster turnaround times, and so forth.

Okay, so you started by telling us that XactScience is Kologuard, and we know that, we see the commercials. What are the others?

So

precision oncology, absolutely so. We are, one of our product is the standard of care when it comes to breast cancer infections on Dx. We have a number of other products in a pretty robust pipeline.

MRD, MSED is some of the areas where we are doing significant research and really I think leading

by way of research. Excellent. Now you're both in Madison. You both know each other already. Because you were at Jefferson Health, probably knew each other then, right? Is Exact Sciences working with UW Health yet?

Yes. Already? Yes. Already. Yes. So I would say since we are doing this on the video for this week. Nasser and I actually did a 229 together too, only this year. So, Bill gets all the credit for bringing the two of us together in many ways. No, I think it was like, in the first week Nasser was in Madison, he and I got together, we started talking about how do you take this from a tactical or a transactional partnership to a more strategic partnership because the community in which we live are both our patients.

So why wouldn't we do it for our own

communities? So,

so, and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Is there potential for your integration and partnership to be in any way a model?

Absolutely, that's the goal. So we already have a basic integration, but we are going to be talking, and Ciro and I of course with our other leaders in the organization, we can take it to the next level from data sharing perspective from especially our precision oncology line of business.

And I know that our leadership, quality leaders, physician leaders, are also uh, So we just are trying to bring everyone together. Good

good. Okay. This is great. Thank you so much. And I look forward to hearing more about this partnership and what you're both doing. So thanks for stopping by.

Thanks for having me.

  📍 Another great interview. I want to thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines. It is phenomenal that you shared your wisdom and experience with the community and we greatly appreciate it. We also want to thank our channel sponsors who are investing in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

They are CDW, Rubrik, 📍 Sectra, and Trellix. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.