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I'm Bill Russell, creator of this week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare one connection at a time. Welcome to Newsday, breaking Down the Health it headlines that matter most. Let's jump into the news.

Bill Russell: It's Newsday and we are uh, some of us are coming to you live from Silicon Valley following the JP Morgan conference and have some things going on here. And we're joined by the z the senior partner formerly with HealthLink Advisors.

Zahid Rathore: Thanks, Phil. It's

You.

Bill Russell: people are probably wondering why I call you the commish. Why are we calling you the commish?

Zahid Rathore: Well, in addition to my full-time career I wanted to give back to my community. I've lived in Washington, DC for 24 years and got really good at complaining about everything. And a fellow parent said, you know, you need to run for the advisory neighborhood commission. So I did foolishly and, had a three-way campaign and I sent out mailers and had yard signs. It's a unpaid job. So, it's my way of trying to give back to the community and effect change with mainly things like hyper-local politics, like zoning, pedestrian safety, street safety. You know, as a young father, now, I'm not young, but I have young kids, you know, I want them to be safe and it's important that they see that can do more than just complain about things.

You can actually do something about it.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Local politics are important and it's amazing how passionate people can be about things like one way streets, right?

Speed bump.

Sarah Richardson: Well, and it, the thing I like about what you've done though, and I remember when you were running your initial campaign about a year and a half ago, is that we always talk about healthcare being local as well, and we can talk about broad topics all the time. But if we're really gonna make those changes, it has to start with the grassroots efforts in our local communities. Even with national healthcare chains, your experience as a patient is still akin to what is experienced in your local hospital. That may be one of 40.

Zahid Rathore: You're exactly right and one bad interaction with technology or you feeling rushed by your PCP and maybe you'll never go back. So it really is like utilization and our perception is at the elbow bed bedside or elbow interaction. So you're right.

I don't, I, am I whining here direction, Sarah, or.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: So when I checked in so this is gonna turn into a big complaint thing now about citizen, but when I checked in, I felt like I, so I have a camper that I towed behind my truck. I felt like I checked into my camper. It's about that same size.

Bill Russell: they've compressed, just so you get the idea. They compress the rooms to just the width of the bed, and then they put in a shower complex if you've ever been on a cruise ship or a camper for that matter. It feels like that. I mean, everything's just like they couldn't fit another thing in there.

Bill Russell: The lesson for healthcare is before we roll software and stuff out to the end user, I dunno, consultant and maybe even patients for that matter. Go figure out heresy. That is well, we're coming off the JP Morgan conference. We, and a bunch of stuff happened.

You know, you had the anthropic, claude for Healthcare Launch you had just prior to that, I don't know if chat GPT got the memo that they were gonna release that at JPM, but they released their chat, GPT for Health and then their chat, GPT-4 Healthcare, where their two releases. by the way, this is a conference that is really spread out.

So that's primarily what it's organized around, but then the entire ecosystem of health, tech and innovation. But by the way, farmers here as well life sciences here as well. We're not gonna focus on all the announcements because there's a million of them. But I will say this, that, in the majority of the announcements, AI was the central theme.

and focus. And as you would imagine it, it was all over the board. But a lot of it within the healthcare provider space is focused on efficiency, workflow optimization rev cycle. a lot of talk about, changing the operating model with with technology and AI really is the foundation for that.

Davos is coming up as an example. What is the impact to you after a major conference in terms of what people start to reach out and need and want most from you both strategically and how to operationalize those ideas?

Zahid Rathore: Yeah, I think it's on the spectrum of like where the client fits into the ecosystem. Are they big and at the front edge? You know, I can think of some of my bigger clients and they'd probably look into what are the trends that are coming out. Maybe they even participated. JP Morgan health, and then I have my other clients that are smaller and their margins are much tighter.

Maybe not the bleeding edge, but it, I think it depends on the client that we're talking to, but we see clients across the spectrum, I think depending on how they're doing financially, that'll influence their receptivity to what comes out of these big conferences.

Bill Russell: Sarah I'm curious from from your perspective, you know, you, when you were sitting in the CIO chair. You saw these announcements from hims, from vi, from whatever, because they tee 'em all up and they're, a lot of 'em happen in the next three months. Right. So JPM as well, there's just an awful lot of announcements, you know.

Did that, Did that impact your day-to-day or were you already set and on a road?

The things that do work, and this isn't personal credit, it's credit for your [00:09:00] team so they feel safe enough that psychological safety and implementing advanced technology is a very delicate balance.

Bill Russell: You know what's interesting on that is the, different types of conferences. So the ones in the beginning of the year absolutely are more broad and you're, you know, doing your big product announcements, but like the egms and the gosh, I don't even know all the names of 'em, but the Workday conference and the whatever they're releasing stuff for tools that you already own.

That is a list, right? It's like, Hey, we're giving you these things. What are you going to do tho? Those are a little different. Those, you come back, you sit down with your team, you're going, all right our vendor just turned these things on. Are we gonna do 'em or not? These are more trends, right?

You could look at the trends of what's going on, what's being talked about, how are people viewing healthcare and where it's gonna go. And by the way, they have been wrong before. There have been whole seasons where people focused on the wrong thing. The tracks is smiling. Yeah. I mean, we've been in it at this long enough that you just remember, you know, seasons where we were talking about stuff and you look back down and go, yeah, that,

Bill Russell: yeah, That's the big blockchain joke. Right.

Zahid Rathore: What was the vibe on the changing reimbursement in one big, beautiful Bill and what are they saying about, you know, the, well, I guess, let me, before I ask the question, you know, what we're seeing our clients is a lot of uncertainty. So is there some belt tightening going on? Yes. Is there some delaying of. Innovation deployment. Yes. So did they talk a little bit or allude to the circumstance or the temperature at the

Bill Russell: Well, it, it's important to note it's not one conference, right? So there's things going on all over the city. And yes that was a major theme at the event. I'm laughing because it was like it was on the surface. And to their credit you know, CMS and others they got up on stage, you know, with people sort of like ready to strangle 'em.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: UNC.

Bill Russell: We still don't know, like, what is our number gonna be for this year?

It's like, it's gonna be between this and this, and it's probably wider than any projection they've ever given. because it's just like, it could be really bad or it could be really good and like, and we don't, we like here are the factors, but it's a wide range.

Zahid Rathore: what do my clients perceive as they see these headlines? And I think it's protect the core. And if I adopt a new technology, what is the bankable ROI that I can incur from tool that has been used and proven to bring return.

. Has the timeline changed? Like it scrunched last year? Well, actually it scrunched over the last three years and I remember we were saying, Hey, you gotta have a, it used to be a three year ROI, then it was a two year ROI and last year people were saying no, it's a one year ROI, is it still a one year ROI that we're looking at?

So then the question is, well, what benefits can I quickly derive from like, and to your point, it's like what can we go achieve in the next year? So I think it's all the above. I think there's so much pent up because of there's so much pent up uncertainty. people are [00:13:00] eager to start seeing return and so. Advice to all the new entrant vendors out there, or the long-term vendors that have a product. You better show bankable ROI, because I think that's what's gonna rule the sales cycle is it proven?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: And sooner rather than later, right? I mean, it does change behavior. The uncertainty in the market the what used to feel very predictable. I know this is gonna happen this year at about this time, and so I can plan for that. All of that has just been dumped out onto the floor, and unpredictability has kind of replaced it.

So for new folks coming into the market and for folks who need advice and guidance, they're so busy. Focused on the work on a daily basis inside of operations that they often don't have time to sort of step back and think and plan and do the strategy because strategy is hard in this environment.

Zahid Rathore: One thing that we help our clients with that are, they're looking to adopt a technology, and it could be like a new EHR or a new bolt-on, or a new eer p what have you, like an enterprise system or a niche system is. What are the benefits that can be derived? So we establish the baseline, we establish the target goal, the stretch goal.

You're never gonna realize that ROI get that benefit. So we try to call out. I feel like that's gonna be an emerging thing in 2026 is all about you're spending money, there are a lot of eyes on the spend, so how are we gonna bank the return? And the only way to do that is to assign accountability.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: The plan, do, check, act cycle. a lot of ways in healthcare, we've not been great at sort of like finishing that circle. We plan and we do, but we don't necessarily come back and check and make sure that we got what we invested in. We got the ROI. Yeah, I guess I'm seeing that same thing, but it's interesting to see you're being asked for that in all the things that you're helping plan.

Bill Russell: I wanna bring up something that came up a couple times. It's the healthcare providers. Needing to be able to operationalize across not only their four walls, but also across partners in their community for care, in order to receive full reimbursement and those kinds of things.

because all those things d ding, the reimbursement. I'm gonna throw this to you guys and say, what's the complexity of this? I mean, on a scale of like one to 10 and, you know. Five being just coordinating your care within your health system. I mean, how complex is this to coordinate care across these other entities that you don't necessarily, they're not your employees, they're not your, you know how, I mean, how challenging is this and how do you approach it?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: Z It feels like four dimensional chest to me in a lot of ways because, if you had one model in a health system and that's the way that you provided care for all your patients, there's a thing you could put into place. The analytics, the teams, the, all the stuff that you need for that model.

Zahid Rathore: as you were all both asking this question, what came into my head was often the patient doesn't know like what their role and responsibility is, and if you're passive, you'll lose and you'll just get. from, From venue of care to venue of care. And you know, the only way we learn is like you go through it either yourself or through a family member.

And probably a lot of it is, you know, you need to self-advocate, but I think drex hit it outta the park with four dimensional chest. But wouldn't it be helpful if we knew that it was four dimensional chest as a patient or as a consumer? Maybe a modicum of understanding how to play four dimensional chess. But yeah, it's super complicated and you know, even just the portability of your data. you know, I have a family member who's currently trying to navigate healthcare and. You know, it's my family member is young. He's in his twenties, and he has really no understanding of the complexity of this. And I think he assumes given his experiences with other technologies and under in other industries, that everyone should know everything. And that is way not the case. That absolutely not the case.

This person's like, it's a job,

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: People do it.

Sarah Richardson: job

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: People deal with their family members too. When their family members get sick they leave the workforce so they can help them. You know, when you're sick, it's the last thing you wanna do is to try to figure out this complicated system. E even a healthy person who's well connected into healthcare like we are, struggle with the other problems of like, well. You know that internist doesn't have my information yet from my general practitioner, and since they don't, they won't make the appointment, and so my care is being delayed and I'm getting more and more sick. It frustrating to

In a lot of cases, that's not even available to you in this world. So you do have to figure out, okay, how are we going to create that data layer and how are we gonna create that workflow layer? And then how are we gonna if you did the data layer and the workflow LA layer correctly, you're going to be able to do the analytics, which are gonna be required in order to get that reimbursement, which is no small feat either.

Zahid Rathore: the,

The horse has been beaten to death in, in healthcare that it's, you know, you've heard the expression, it's not a matter of, of if, but when in terms of, of a healthcare provider organization getting disrupted from a cyber attack.

Bill Russell: Okay.

And what are the, like effective use cases, perhaps there's. The lightning rod in 2026 is AI can be helpful to accelerate downtime, resiliency, or your cybersecurity posture. Those are two great use cases.

Bill Russell: Well, I'm getting tired of drex writing about how AI is going to you know, take my health system down.

Zahid Rathore: You know, Drex, I think it goes back to my earlier comment about it. Depends on the maturity of the organization. You know, how sophisticated is the experience of the CISO to lean into those emerging things versus a whole, you know, is the IT function. More just trying to [00:25:00] focus to keep the lights on.

The other thing, I, as you were all talking. You know, is the commoditization of it and the outsourcing of it to third parties, and the extra layer of complexity that would bring. So if a bad actor comes in, if If you had it in your shop, you could go down the hall and chat with your colleague, but now your colleague is across the ocean, different time zone.

You don't know actually who you're talking to. and could the threat be from there? know, this the period of where there's the smoke before the fire is declared that there could be some serious damage. And we're seeing more and more clients thinking about outsourcing bits and pieces or the whole.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: it's really almost for all of the third parties that are involved, right? So when you talk about resiliency, you think about this resilience path a big. Painful thing that we learned with change Healthcare, but we've learned it over and over again since, is that there's some hidden party in our third party supply chain that if that. Organization breaks, and maybe it's because they're using AI and they have a problem, but no matter what it is, if they break, we go down, we we can't provide great care. And so third party risk management has become much more than just like, are my third parties secure? Are they doing a good job of securing themselves?

Bill Russell: You remember the show? That's incredible. Some of us who are old enough can remember the show. That's incredible. It's where people did like crazy things and whatever, and there was this guy who caught a bullet in his teeth.

Okay. And that was the shtick. Somebody shot a bullet, he caught it in his teeth. I don't know how you practice for that. You know, somebody like throws you one soft toss and then all of a sudden it's like, okay, but the line is, you know, how do you practice for that soft toss? And then you go, okay, this one's gonna be coming a little faster.

It's gonna be, it's gonna be a [00:28:00] wild 2026. Hey, Drex, what does that say behind you?

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: It says, you don't need to Google to know which way the wind blows. I think that's probably really appropriate for the conversation today. Right? It's, we know which way the wind's blowing. It's blowing in all directions at the same time right now.

Bill Russell: I've been there. I, you know, living in southwest Florida, you know, I've been there when the wind's blowing in every direction and you're like, I'm not gonna go outside today. I think it's.

Drex DeFord | This Week Health: how it feels. Yeah.

Zahid Rathore: I wanna end on something, bill. I just wanna say that I appreciate what you all have built and what you're building for our industry. You know, the power of your convening the power of bringing the conversation locally, and having these types of conversations and your city tours and all that. I just encourage you, it is awesome. It's so great.

Sarah Richardson: It's always like, just when we get to spend time with you, we are so grateful for what our partners bring to the table too. And, it's fun to catch up on our lives as much as it is what we provide to others professionally. So

Bill Russell: All right. Well, Z, we expect the same thing from you in on the DC streets.

We appreciate you being here and thanks. Uh, Thanks team. Look forward to uh, meeting you with you in the next five minutes. Take care.

Zahid Rathore: All right guys. Have fun.

Sarah Richardson: Be well,

Zahid Rathore: We'll see ya. Bye now.

That's Newsday. Stay informed between episodes with our Daily Insights email. And remember, every healthcare leader needs a community they can lean on and learn from. Subscribe at this week, health.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.