Outcomes Rocket Podcast_ Introducing Jim and Chalk Talks: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody. Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket here. I want to welcome you back to our channel and I feel really, really happy and also lucky to be welcoming a new guest and actually a new host to our podcast. His name is Jim Jordan. Jim is an expert in converting consumer demographics, preferences and purchasing habits into products and services for the healthcare and life sciences industry. He’s the president and CEO at StraTactic, where he applies his 25 years of marketing, finance and operational skills to assist businesses and acquisition analysis, market and technology assessment, product development, you name it, all things go to market, he’s doing it in a big way. I was impressed when I first had a chance to meet Jim, at how quickly he could get to the center of a problem, an opportunity, and for companies looking for commercialization assistance and ways to fast track, Jim’s the man. So we got our heads together on what could we do here? And the podcast that we’re going to share with you was the product of that ideation. So without further ado, Jim, I want to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks for joining.
Jim Jordan:
Well, thank you very much.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, it’s such a pleasure to have you here. So, you know, before we dive into the podcast, I love to get your story. You know, like what, what do you want to share about you? What do you want to share to the listeners about what you do and how you do it and why?
Jim Jordan:
So Saul, it comes down to how do we get here, right? Because very few people do life sciences and healthcare together. And so it starts by going backwards to my journey. So I started out in, in finance in the medical device industry, and I had an opportunity to go into operations because everyone makes fun of the finance guy for not having operational experience, right? And third day on the job, the federal marshals came, seized our inventory and closed our factory and went through an eight-year consent decree. And so that brought me through finance and engineering and quality and plant management and ultimately to be a sales rep and a marketing person. And so I learned all those skills, very detailed skills in, in the school of hard knocks. So it was one of those blueblood management training programs. It was we can’t get people, give this guy a shot and if it doesn’t work out, he’s gone. And so I left Bard and I went to Boston Scientific and I had great experience there, and I did a couple of startups along the way and even did a coffee break at a dot-com before the, the market crashed and found myself at Johnson&Johnson which is amazing company as VP of Marketing and I left there and I went to McKesson. And McKesson was really different. I just, I think at any moment in time it’s a Fortune Five and they do distribution and healthcare IT, and pharmaceuticals and everything. And so I had a chance as a senior executive of a three-and-a-half billion-dollar division to sort of get all those optics. And I had a situation, a personal situation that caused me to leave, a family health matter. And I ended up finding my way to Pittsburgh. And I joined an executive in residence program where we had non-profit and a profit venture capital fund. And so for the past 15 years, I was doing the other side of the equation, how do you invest in these companies? And in 2005, I stumbled up to Carnegie Mellon University and I talked to a dean who has since retired, and I gave him a bit of a lecture on healthcare, saying, listen, you know, the manufacturers, there is a phrase, the tail that wags the dog, which means the smaller part controls the bigger. And if you looked at the demographics of the country and you looked at where things were going, manufactures were soon not going to be in charge. It’s going to be the payers and the providers and the healthcare IT people. And so he offered me a job and so I said, well, I have a job, but, you know, let me talk to my boss at the time. And he said, well, if you can get interns and, and get academic stuff going, it would work out for the non-profit side of the fund. And so I joined Carnegie Mellon University around 2007, and I had access to the smartest professors in the world in their subjects, but they didn’t together all agree on their vision of healthcare. So I actually started a Google sites and I started research on it. And next thing you know, I’m starting to teach these courses. And today when Google sites came down, I put up a website called HealthcareData.Center, which people can look at today. And that brings us to our mission is, this entire healthcare system is coming together. And you can see it, right? You can see it with Amazon getting into pharmaceuticals and Walgreens getting into healthcare, And so you see this whole thing changing. And you actually saw it most recently with Oracle getting into healthcare IT and electronic health records. And so the purpose of this podcast is to gather up all the knowledge experts that we have and have a dialogue on this, because all of Us in healthcare or life sciences or medical devices are going to have to go beyond our niche in the future and no more. And there’s a lot of details in this industry, And so together we can learn what those details are.
Saul Marquez:
Wow. Jim, I just got to say, there’s a lot to unpack there. And that, as the host of this new podcast, there’s going to be a lot of opportunities, folks, for you to get to know Jim better. And like, first of all, Jim, I didn’t know about this like, three days on the job thing and then all of a sudden they bust through the doors. Like what?
Jim Jordan:
That was scary. So I was 20, I was 27. It was horrifying.
Saul Marquez:
And so did you lose your job?
Jim Jordan:
No, actually, I ended up working for them for eight years because the situation was they couldn’t hire people to come to the company. So they gave people opportunity to do things that no person in their right mind would do. And if you succeeded, you kept going. And if you failed, they just have to replace you. And so I was lucky enough, you know, one of the things being, my undergraduate is in accounting, my master’s is in marketing and operations, and accounting is very process-oriented no matter what, right? So all of these things are processes. And so I think that’s sort of, the skill that I brought to the party and was able to differentiate myself with that. Just curious about details and whether it’s how the US reimbursement system works, how Medicare works, it’s all the same. I’m talking about finance, but I also talk about it being a product manager mentality, right? A good product manager needs to know everything about their market and all the little toggle switches that are important.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. and thank you for that. And then the other thing you mentioned, which I’m just going crazy over, is, is okay, where does healthcare fit? Healthcare is everywhere. And I heard somebody say once, if you’re a large company and you think health, you’re not in the business of healthcare, you’re wrong, and I.
Jim Jordan:
Agreed, I agree. And I think there’s a big transformation. So, so picture a typical donut with a circle in the middle, right? healthcare is 18% of the economy. The rest of the economy is surrounding it, saying to itself, how do I get in there?
Saul Marquez:
Yeah.
Jim Jordan:
And historically, the, you know, if you look at the history, I published a blog on the history of Amazon, and they’ve been at this for 25 plus years. And they’ve had a lot of failures along the way because of their lack of appreciation of the processes or even the standardization of the processes. But, you know, George Bush the second, was on his way out of the office, actually created the interoperability standards. So everyone sort of thinks of this process maybe started with President Obama, and he certainly made great progress. But every president has, has done a lot with this. And, and even Trump did a lot with it, whether people know it or not in terms of getting interoperability standards going in different programs. But inside the donut is going to open up to be the entire economy when the digitization of healthcare happens. So what people don’t know is ICD 11 is coming along, it’s a national standard of, of how we do coding. There’s a group called SNOMED that sets up the terminology for how we talk. So if a doctor in France says one term and a doctor in German says the other, we can digitize it. It’s all coming in the next few years. And so, the symbolism of, Amazon’s recent success and the symbolism of Oracle’s purchase of Cerner is a sign that those systems are coming because those big corporations need standardization to be able to come in. And that’s when we’re going to be able to take the information off of our Apple Watch and go to our doctor, and it’s going to be in our electronic health record. It’s not today. There’s all sorts of issues associated with it, but that’s where we’re going. And arguably, COVID opened up the door to force some of the barriers to, like telemedicine and some of the coding things to be opened up.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. I love it. And you know, the one that surprised me was BestBuy. Like I had no idea how big of a healthcare presence they had and almost like disturb me. I’m like, why are they in healthcare?
Jim Jordan:
And Costco. I mean, there’s a lot of them in there. There’s also a lot of companies that are self-insurers. So they actually contract the payers. The payers aren’t distributing, they’re being given a fee to distribute the, the funds to be able to pay the doctors. But the payer themselves are some of these big companies like General Electric and some of these other organizations and they’re having more of a voice on the table.
Saul Marquez:
Man, I love talking to you, Jim. And and I think the listeners are going to love your show. So, so let’s tell them about it. What’s the name of the show and what should they expect from it?
Jim Jordan:
This show is Chalk Talk Jim. And how that came to be is when I would be talking about how startups can win in the healthcare industry, I would draw on the whiteboard. And sometimes when I start to explain it, a good friend of mine would throw me the marker and say, get to the board. So the intention of that symbolism is that there’s not one person who can understand all of healthcare. And my goal is to navigate the entire healthcare system, have experts give us individual insights into the components so that we can all learn and be prepared for the future.
Saul Marquez:
I think it’s great.
Jim Jordan:
That’s it. That’s really simply.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah! And it’s, such a great thing. And folks, you know, from our conversation right now, Jim has a depth of knowledge both practical because he’s been there done that, but also the theoretical and where things are going. But the work that he does at Carnegie Mellon and beyond. So to be covered here on this podcast that I’m super excited about. Jim, tell us about your guests. Who are you going to have on and what are you guys going to cover?
Jim Jordan:
So we’re going to cover the entire continuum of healthcare. So where, when you and I talked about targeting, right? A lot of times it’s a pharmaceutical show or medical device or payer, we’re going to go around the whole value system and talk to device people, pharma, people, retailers, payers, insurers, GPOs, and, and get some insights into how they work and how they make their money. Because, you know, as someone who’s participating in the system or trying to design products or services for the system, we always say follow the money, right? And so you need to understand how these things work, how the processes work. And at the end of the day is a marketer, I’d always say to myself, there’s really only three things you do right? You create a new category, you collapse the value chain and delivery of a service or product, or you compete on cost. And so the insight of the different blocks would really help all the people that listen, that make decisions on their businesses. Think about the concept of how this information helps them do one of those three things. And so I have a former student of mine who’s working for a startup. And what the startup does is it actually goes into physician practices and there’s major complication codes and complication codes that are added to get more billing for more complex patients. And this company discovered that a vast majority of the time these physicians don’t put in their codes and money is being left on the table. And so they have actually gone to these physician groups and set up a business model where they gather up the codes, they mine it, and they share on the profit of this. And that’s a revenue model that probably didn’t exist a decade ago, right? So these are the kinds of things that we can talk about during this podcast that aren’t big enough yet that Frost and Sullivan is talking about them or Gardner or any of the major research houses that we talk about. But for our audience, could be really cool places to go and innovate.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a great example, Jim. I really appreciate that. Fantastic love, love, how succinct that is and how you put it, Jim Look, folks, this podcast is going to be available here on the Outcomes Rocket. So it’s available on every single streaming platform, Apple, Spotify, and the rest of them. And, and so make sure you tune in. There’s going to be some, some really great discussions. Right now, it’s just a tip of the iceberg here. but Jim, I’m so excited that you’re joining and, for closing here, give us, a closing thought, things that we should be thinking about so that the next time that we show up to listen, it’s you on the mic as the host.
Jim Jordan:
Well, I think the thing to think about is what’s your mechanism for getting as feedback on what our audience wants to hear, right? So we can start talking about the systems and the integrations. But the whole sort of intent of this is to get out the gems of how things work, right? And so I think having a way for our listeners to talk about things or give us even people that they think we should talk to, I think is, really critical because the whole point is it’s sort of a continuous learning together, that is the intention here and it’s going to go where it’s going to go. I mean, it’s, our guests will take us in directions we never thought of, which will take us into other directions.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah. And so, you know, historically, Jim and listeners, you know, we always invite feedback and the feedback typically comes in when we post something on LinkedIn, usually, and we ask people for feedback. So what do you think of that, Jim? Should we use LinkedIn as the feedback mechanism?
Jim Jordan:
I think it’s certainly one of them. We might find people want to use others, but I think LinkedIn is a great mechanism because of its professional network. And I also think, you know, we’ve lined up our first several guests and we’re, sort of starting on the, manufacturing and the drug discovery side. And I think we’ll continue to move towards the right and then up to the payers. We’ve talked to a couple of payers too that we have in our first guest and I think those will lead to other questions.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Well, look, we’ll use that as a primary mechanism, folks. You’re hearing, Jim, he loves the feedback loop. And so I want to emphasize that. So when we post these, we’re going to be encouraging everybody to start a discussion, start on LinkedIn, and maybe go from there in another, platforms. But we’re very interested in hearing from you and what you think of these episodes. Jim, I am so excited to kick off this amazing new podcast, Chalk Talk Jim. And so with that, I want to say thank you and looking forward to listening to you and on your podcast.
Jim Jordan:
Very good!
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