Improving Health with Digital Technologies with Neil Gomes, Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President for Technology Innovation and Consumer Experience at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health (transcribed by Sonix)

Welcome to the Outcomes Rocket podcast where we inspire collaborative thinking, improved outcomes, and business success with today’s most successful and inspiring healthcare leaders and influencers. And now your host, Saul Marquez.

Saul Marquez: Welcome back to the podcast. Really appreciate you tuning in again. Today I have a very special guest for you. His name is Neil Gomes. He’s the Chief Digital Officer and Senior Vice President for technology innovation and consumer experience at the Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health system. Neil has worked with Fortune 500 companies like Tata Group of companies where he played a leadership role in building the entrepreneurial startup Tata Interactive Systems from 60 employees to the world’s largest custom e-learning development firm with 650 employees in less than two years. At Jefferson Health, Neil drives digital innovation and healthcare, consumer experience and engagement, training, and education. The teams of application and web developers portal consumer experience specialists, instructional designers, e-learning developers, and I.T. support specialists. As you can see, the level of technical expertise and the groups that Neil works with are really pivotal to making any types of digital impactful changes within a system. They’re key. So he’s working with those as well as helping define the innovation strategy and design innovation development programs via Jefferson’s innovation team. Recently, he helped secure a 15 million dollar donor grant from the Bernie Marcus Foundation to develop a high tech consumer centric, integrative, health center at Jefferson. This translates into better outcomes for patients, better work experience for clinicians and I’m excited to dive into some of these things and experiences that Neil has had. I had the pleasure of meeting him at the TED MED meeting and super excited that you had a opportunity to join us Neil, thanks for being on the podcast.

Neil Gomes: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks man.

Saul Marquez: So did I skip anything in the intro that maybe you want the listeners to know about?

Neil Gomes: A few things. The pattern that I’ve had in my career has been off starting companies inside of companies when I looked at the target group which is the Fortune 500 company about a hundred and eight billion dollars. The total in fact Interactive Systems Group was company inside a company. And at the University of South Florida when I worked there we did another digital learning kind of group there that created similar revenues just for the institutes. And that was also started as a almost a startup company inside a large organization. And what we’re doing at Jefferson is very similar too, be described to some of the methodologies that Clayton Christensen talks about about bringing about disruptive innovation into an organization and a force of a positive B so that we can transform the organization into one that is continuously evolving, innovating, and bringing about consumer focused innovations and new business ideas and new interaction kind of ideas and then executing on them. So that’s explains I think in a nutshell what I like to do and what I’ve done at my previous organizations. I was also recently promoted to Executive Vice President so that’s a slight change. Other than…

Saul Marquez: Congratulations.

Neil Gomes: Thank you.

Saul Marquez: That’s awesome. Congratulations. And so Neil you’ve obviously done this successfully. It’s hard to do right to innovate within a larger organization is not always the easiest things to do so I love to dive into a little bit of that experience. During our discussion but maybe we could start off by talking to the listeners about what you believe needs to be a top line agenda item for today’s healthcare leader.

Neil Gomes: Oh yes. Well I think personally just using… having a consumer focus you know and not just in words you know in actual practice having a consumer focus which is hard because you have to really shed all of the other business focused kind of ideas you might have that it’s all about the business. It really is difficult to just let go of that. But if you look at other industries other than healthcare and you look at the entertainment industry, the car industry, the retail and all these other industries that have transformed banking for example that have transformed in the last 10 or so years not just with technology but most people think that they went through a digital transformation and unite and develop new technologies that enabled them to grow and able to diversify their business and even access new customers. But it’s not just technology. Technology plays a role in that, digital has played a role in that. But the ones that have really succeeded are the ones that focused on the consumer almost…

Saul Marquez: Yes.

Neil Gomes: Divested themselves of their traditional business models right and said no we’re going to start with a business model from the point of view of the consumer. This sudden risk associated with that but as we’ve seen with other industries those that have done that have really prospered. Like for example Netflix in the entertainment industry. Amazon retail industry. Tesla in the automotive industry right. In banking if you look at Capital One there are digital first organization that they call themselves. But really who they are, what they are, is a consumer focused organization in the food industry. If you look at Domino’s and how they’ve become in the last eight years, nine years now into this very very successful organization. The sixth largest restaurant chain in the world and they were nowhere about eight, nine years ago. It’s not just because they’ve done big things on the digital service side but it’s primarily because they focus on the consumer almost religiously and then anticipated what they needed could what they wanted and speed and what they needed and then deliver to that. And sometimes technology was involved in that delivery and I think that is kind importance to anyone especially in healthcare because even if we don’t want to change as provider organizations or failed musicians all these other organizations that have done it in other industries are going to bring that change to us. If wee don’t evolve, they will evolve for us, we might lose. We might lose what we have right now which is very important to patient care.

Saul Marquez: Neil what an insightful set of ideas you’ve shared with us and you know I can’t help but think the other day I was driving down the road and I looked to my left and as seers and they’re close and then I look to my right, it’s Toys R Us they’re closed and the blockbusters like you mentioned the Netflix. It’s definitely happening. Hearing consumers, anticipating their needs is a must. So how can we translate this idea of consumer first into a set of actions maybe one or two actions that the leaders could… listening could take and more and maybe you can answer that question within the frame of sharing something that you guys have done to create results there at Jefferson.

Neil Gomes: There are a whole bunch of things that we need to do. And a lot of leaders know this but unless you completely buy into this and embrace this concept of consumer focused innovation you’re not really going to achieve what you want to achieve because the moment you hit the first hurdle and trust me there’ll be a lot of hurdles in that process, you will bulk and you will give up and then you’re back to where you were. So I think it’s very important to have that resolve and have that belief before you go into doing something because it can be extremely discouraging to the people that need to execute if leaders back off from something that really needs to happen. So simple thing is you know a lot of people ask me this question “What do you do in healthcare that’s different from other industry?” and I say really there isn’t anything that we need to do that’s different examples exist already of how other industries have transformed both from the consumer focus perspective as well as from the digital perspective. Banking is a beautiful example of that and a great parallel with healthcare. Why? Because it was very brick and mortar centric kind of you know and now it was always seen that way no consumer had really started to ask that they wanted to go or tell this industry that they wanted to go digital. There were some people that some of these organizations, bank organizations, that realized that early on and capitalized on it. And now everyone is doing it right. We rarely ever walk into a bank nowadays to do a transaction in fact they kind of penalize us if we did that by charging us. Have you done this a number of such visits. Right. So I think we need to think about that now. So what are the things that things are very simple sometimes. You know we need to stop posting our information in a transparent ways online. If it’s with our providers we need to make available reviews, we need to grab our profiles from from other systems like Google and Yelp and all of that and take charge of that. We need to then as the person is able now to evaluate whether they want to come to our system or not and it’s better that you tell the story than someone else tells you the story right.

Saul Marquez: Amen.

Neil Gomes: We really yeah we need to do that and then we need to enable them to continue within that space because that’s what they’re telling us they want to do right. Even Eighty five year olds now are going and doing online appointments for example. Many people think that oh no they won’t do that. No they do. They want that. And we have to enable that. We cannot keep saying that oh well you know for certain types of things we cannot give an online appointment. We need you to fill out a form or something like that, that should not be the response we have to try and figure out why we need to ask that question really why do we need that. And if we dig deeper we’re going to find scenarios when we don’t know and can be then expose those to our patients and say yeah you go if this type of appointment goes you do and here’s how you get an appointment immediately digitally online and we’ve done some of that here in Jefferson we’ve seen tremendous success for that. Then once you it’s really this 360 kind of journey that you have to reimagine for the patient and many of them are not asking for this. And that’s why I think healthcare is a little bit behind. Is that the patient has not traditionally pushed for this type of thing and there are many reasons for that. When we ask our patients you know they tell us “well you know this is my life you know and I’m not talking about money in a bank or something like that. This is me right. And so I have to wait for a physician or I have to wait for an appointment or if I have to wait on the phone to even get the appointment. I’m okay with that because these reward at the end of that is tremendous. Right. The incentive at the end of that is tremendous. So because of that and because of relationships that you might have with your physician and all of that and that trust mechanism that we have which is very important to healthcare many people are willing to take the discomfort that comes with only the kind of systems all the processes for addressing things that they don’t experience anywhere else. If somebody had to wait that long for something to be delivered via Amazon you know they would stop complaining after day two. Right. But in healthcare we sometimes tell them “hey you’ll get an appointment in three months from now.” So that has to stop. That’s one which is simple I think if we really put our minds to it then you have to look at the journey once not even of once the patient gets in but even when they are getting to us you can be simplified that can we helped them by getting to us. Are there some people that miss appointments because of transportation and those types of issues we have to solve that. And then finally when they do get to us we have to make that a more pleasant experience and we really have to think experiments not solving a problem on the right because I think healthcare has been very good at solving the problems. I mean we have great healthcare in the U.S. in terms of addressing a condition or an issue we have basic research that contributes to its new cures and treatments and all of that. But what we don’t have is a great experience once it gets to us and are going through this journey. So that needs to improve and then finally when you leave most other industries you look at companies like Apple or companies even like Amazon to bring them up again. If you look at Apple they take control of the entire experience for you. They want you if you have a problem to call them and if they’re immediately or walk into any mall that’s close by. You wouldn’t get into the Genius Bar and and solve your problem. Right. So they want to make that whole process easy after you’ve become their client even I think that’s something that we forget and we don’t do so well in health care. I think if we take that global kind of 360 view of the experience the consumer experience then we stay close to the consumer, keep getting feedback, from them finding out where they are feeling then really really start changing this. This entire industry.

Saul Marquez: Some very insightful tips there Neil. And definitely thinking through some of the expectations, the trust relationship, and sort of reasons why hasn’t changed. I think with a shift in health insurance and deductibles going up I feel like the time is coming where yes some deductibles are so high. Patients have to start thinking and demanding more because it’s actually coming out of their own pocket versus in the previous years it wasn’t right.

Neil Gomes: So that is being about some consumer kind of driven change because now there is an incentive right there’s an incentive to the consumer to the point that I’ve even heard of health systems talking about how patients sometimes even though they might have some of these high deductible plans don’t even tell the healthcare organization that they have a plan because if it’s a cost that’s lower than that deductible they feel like they have a better chance of negotiating with the healthcare organization if they didn’t say they… So you can understand the pain to the consumer. Right. Because this is…

Saul Marquez: Absolutely.

Neil Gomes: A lot of money. And we have to figure out ways to address that to turn that equation kind of around where we’re helping out patients to that kind of scenario so that they come up top along with. To get to your point, the point you’re trying to make them that is resulting in a kind of consumer led change requirement. I think that is true to some extent but it’s still not it’s not going to solve it all for us. I don’t know. There’s still a lot of plans that to employers and on all of that and they may not have the high deductibles so we may not see that kind of revolution we may want to see it in a retail kind of scenario something now I don’t think we should wait for that because I believe firmly that the health globalization’s that the healthcare organizations that make the first move or the few healthcare organizations that make that move would benefit tremendously economically as well as in point of in terms of image, in terms of goodwill, in terms of branding, they’ll benefit tremendously I mean if they sincerely make that make that change.

Saul Marquez: I think that’s the key is sincerely and making sure that they are committed to it and in the long term. So you guys have tried a lot of things Neil and nothing in the business of healthcare and digital healthcare let alone goes without a setback. Can you share with us a setback that you had and a major learning or insight that you gained from it?

Neil Gomes: Sure I mean we’ve had a few setbacks and you know it’s important to have some of that you know you learn from failure. The only issue in health care is that you certainly don’t want the failures to affect patient care. So you’ve got to devise processes in even when you’re taking in innovation ideas not just your own but even from other places when you’re evaluating companies and vendors and all of that, health partners as we like to prefer to call folks that we look which you have to have the right chasms to make sure that if there’s a chance of failure that you fail early before it hits a consumer or a patient. So yes we have a process where we test people we work with and it’s very very important that you work with people. Know a lot of this stuff cannot be done on your own. It’s too big a problem to just try and solve on your own. So you need partners, you need expertise partners, you need technology partners, to help you through this process and you need a way of evaluating them and you need low risk projects sometimes right at the outset to make sure that you’re picking the right folks and as committed to the problem and solving it as you want. So those are where some of our failures lie in that sometimes you’ve not been so good at evaluating who we work with and it’s sometimes it’s hard to do that because there’s enthusiasm at the beginning and then as organizations get or teams or groups get distracted by other work many times those priorities change. And so you know you have to kind of work your way through that and that can cause things to take longer to finish. It can cause people to get discouraged by that. And we’ve had that with some partners that we work with sometimes that are large companies many times and you know initially when they start to work with you they say “oh well you’re going to achieve this” and yet he has a roadmap for getting let’s say compliance in certain areas and things like that. And that’s the one failure. As such I would say that we’ve had with one or two of these companies on early projects and that we’ve gone in with the understanding that something’s going to work one way. And they have a road map to it which was achieving some efficiencies that might be in there. And then they didn’t stick to that road map. And so it delayed the launch of solutions and things like that. Other than that, some companies some partners they might fold because you know this is a brand new space right. And you may start developing something that’s someone up to. Yeah. And that company may not find a good business model for themselves to continue into the future and that idea could go away and that’s part of the pain of developing or transforming an industry right. I mean I’m sure the Netflix is after all had those similar kinds of things you’ve seen it with for example movie pass, movie pass came out recently and thought that okay for nine dollars a month so we’d be able to create a good financial model behind people filling out those empty seats that might be there in the theater right and making some money out of it. And that didn’t work out the way that they constructed that financial model initially. So who knows they might evolve and be back but these types of failures are to be expected. You just have to find ways to reduce or take away any risk to your patients when it comes down to implementing them. And that’s what we’ve done I think successfully.

Saul Marquez: That’s great. And that’s a good measure of success you know making sure patient care doesn’t get affected. Yeah inevitably these partnerships we have to develop processes, systems, and and gut checks to shield our organizations from just things not working out. But hey the reality is they’re not going to work out sometimes and it’s great to hear that you and your team have some great things in place to avoid anything bad from happening. How about the other side of this coin Neil, tell us about one of the proudest leadership experiences you’ve had here in healthcare.

Neil Gomes: Oh yeah sure. There’s a bunch of them is like trying to choose between your kids you know what was your favorite project but yeah but. But I can pick a few. So one that’s made near and dear to me and I really like it a lot is in the patient experience kind of space and a few years ago we were asked by our send to city hospitals and their leadership they made a commitment towards the consumer focused experience right. And developing a changing based on consumer feedback. Now in most health system what happens is you get patient feedback especially in hospitals only after the patient is discharged. You use a company like this Gagne or others to do that to collect this data for you. And they do so usually with a three week kind of they can see after the patient’s been discharged and then you get this information from those that do respond. Because not everybody does respond and we issued digital mechanisms for reaching out to people and all that we did that that helped that some the response rate but it’s still the feedback that you get one is highly delayed right but it’s a patient that I remember three weeks later, two it doesn’t have any context. So if a patient says “Oh the room was dirty.” What are you going to tell the people that clean the room? The room is dirty right. So they don’t know what exactly they need to solve. There’s no tangible evidence of that. There’s a… what did the patient really mean? Did they mean it was not as clean as my home? Were the towels out of place? Was something dirty on the floor? Did somebody dropped something with the restroom? Know you don’t get that context then also what you don’t get is you don’t get to satisfy that patient anymore right because they’ve left.

Saul Marquez: Right.

Neil Gomes: So you can’t make them happy and that’s for a lot of people in healthcare who will get into this field which is highly intensive in terms of your career and developing it and all of that, they get in this field because they’re dedicated to seeing people happy and feeling people. And then they don’t have that satisfaction at the end of this. So we thought well how about we make that much smaller. And leadership was really bought into that because that was very important and they committed to going out every week. The leadership in the hospital organization and now it’s spread to all of our hospitals so they all use this process. Those are the application we created that enables it and we create an iPad app that they use. They go out in pairs. They do this every week for two hours two and a half hours or so and they go and meet the patients and employees in pairs one business putting the data in… on the iPad and the other person sitting with the patient and talking to them. And if the patient says something positive about an employee then they go and meet with the employee. And that’s how we give honors to certain employees. So there’s a great incentive to follow the people that come to do this data collection and talking to patients because many times they are trying to bring recognition for people that work with them. This helps them create that mechanism for it. And the app is such that as they’re going around even getting to the patient they can take pictures in the app they can treat those issues directly to our facilities folks to a meaning folks to our food folks to the nursing staff. They can do that right away. And we expect usually any issue to be resolved within 48 hours but many times some of these services are contracted out know like Aramark might do the food service or the cleaning and all of that. They respond in like an hour. Many times you know because now for them this is tangible stuff right. They can instead of going at the end of a month to meeting they are kind of complaining about their services and showing them all the negative comments from patients. Now they can say they can turn the tables a little and say “Look you love it as a hundred and fifty issues this month.” So let’s say right. And you solve X number of them in so-and-so time and we met with the patient and they loved it. And so now the patient is seeing change happen the moment they tell you about it and sometimes even when they don’t tell you about it just you notice the pillow was torn so you took a picture and you send it down to the folks in facilities or the EEOC folks and they come in and they change it and the patient that realized that you said that. So the responses we’re getting from patients for the delayed survey that happens three weeks later are tremendous we move some of our hospitals in Center City from about two stops you know in their readings and more as here. And that’s huge not just from a consumer experience standpoint which is fantastic but also from the reimbursement standpoint you know when you do when you move up that they see a mess. So that’s a big win I feel and it’s near and dear to me because it ties into the experience that I was talking about earlier that now we’re getting data from people that tell us really how we need to improve.

Saul Marquez: I think that’s wonderful and what a great way to conduct it. Live feedback involve the appropriate stakeholders and talk about consumer first. You know they’re being heard and the staff are being heard and now even like the pillow example their needs being anticipated you guys are doing just that. Kudos to you Neil for your leadership there and your team for having been able to put something like this together but not only that executing and deploying it but I feel like oftentimes most of the challenges come in the deployment of those solutions to them. So tell us about an exciting project or focus you’re working on today.

Neil Gomes: Oh yes. So there are a couple of those but I’ll try to focus on one and just to round off the previous one also the folks that it’s not just my teams it’s also the leadership. Leadership is very important and they’re buying is very important. And the good thing is that in healthcare most of people gone to healthcare because they wanted to serve. Right. And so when they’re trying to change the consumer experience or the patient experience, if you tell the story in a way that shows these folks that yes how are we going to improve the experience for the consumer or the care of the consumer or patient to them whatever else might stand in the way it might be effort might be budget. And those types of things as long as you can make a good business case and you can make a good vision statement and you can make a good empathic kind of connection with people it gets done but it does take some effort and you have to tell the story really well. But the leadership was very important and they really rallied together to do this. And maybe you could make the app you could do all of that right but if they didn’t come in every week and they didn’t do this with that passion it wouldn’t happen. So that’s really important and I say you know a lot of folks as he supports us really well. Steve Blasko he’s a big big name in the space of consumer experience as well as digital. And so do the other leaders within the organization. So that’s how that became possible.

Saul Marquez: It’s a really great call out Neil. Thank you.

Neil Gomes: But to talk about an exciting project focused I think in healthcare the two things and they tie in together really well. And I’m sure a lot of other people have spoken to you about this maybe three if you connect them all together. One is machine learning and a I think that has tremendous prospects in healthcare to change how we deliver healthcare and not in ways that should be scary to anyone because that’s not the goal of most companies getting into healthcare with A.I. They are trying to augment decision making. Not trying to replace physicians or things like that I don’t think anyone should be concerned about that. They’re trying to improve the experience of patients make things move faster. So that’s a very important space you know very important technology or kind of development that we have to follow and embrace. The other is Internet of Things. Not many people think about this in healthcare but a lot of our healthcare institutions including our lab seven of our buildings and all of that are really well resourced in terms of IOT. You don’t know this but you know even be thought that you’d be naive and you know we’ve not been doing a lot of this work already but building automation systems exists. Most hospitals already have them the facilities folks manage that they do it really well. You can tie into these building automation systems using their platforms in large companies that have we’ve inherited these platforms from other industries that have really leverage them on the IOT side tremendously over the last 10 15 years. So we’ve got these technology use that we’re not even using efficiency management in hospitals because in order to do a lot of this consumer focused stuff IOT may not directly enable you to do that although that is starting to happen now but IOT will enable you to find the money to do that because you can using IOT technologies effectively you can bring in efficiency you can reduce costs you can do all of these things that then give you funds that you can apply towards innovation projects that are focused on the consumer that may not bring in that much revenue to you sometimes but have to be done in order to make lots of things happen and make the experience better. So IOT is important and now we’re seeing IOT become even more important even from the consumer side. All of these devices that are getting into people’s homes that can help with get care that can help materials to medication that can help it getting feedback from them from patients and keeping them engaged in their own care. You know it’s tremendous. The Alexa’s and the Google owned and all these things security systems and all of that even now playing a part in this mash up kind of the consumer experience that we can create. And then finally the last thing which most organizations also haven’t realized is there’s a tremendous area of innovation, tremendous area for experience and not just for patients but also for the staff themselves and that is voice if you watch Star Trek years and years ago they envision this future really early on right in the 60’s when they had people talking to machines and doing it almost like the machine was a person in the room of the elevator when they were walking up and they’re transmitting a log of the day the captain’s log or whatever. So…

Saul Marquez: What an amazing foresight. Yeah.

Neil Gomes: Yeah yeah. And we still not gotten there but now he’s made some quantum leaps in that space. You know that MLP becoming amazingly accurate and some health systems are doing this. Some E.H.R. systems are doing this really well nuanced and and multiple and all these vendors are developing amazing technologies that enable this but we’ve got to start applying them to non-traditional spaces inside of healthcare you know creating consuming experiences like we just are getting ready to deploy one with all of us in our hospital rooms where patients can speak to the room. It’s really a kind of system that we have in the room which will enable them to change the channels on the TV increase the volume turn it on Turn it off turn a light on which is very important I think just to be able to turn a light on, be a voice may not be so important but a lot of people fall out of their beds because they can’t reach the light. Yes. So if you can just say to the room you know turn the light on. That’s a big deal in healthcare.

Saul Marquez: Yeah I agree with you Neil. And I love the perspective that you put on this is like there’s a lot of technology and a lot of capability that we’ve inherited that’s sitting idle. And if we just get creative and find applications for it, it’s amazing what we could create. That’s pretty cool that you guys did that. Again going back to walking the walk Neil you guys are definitely putting the patient first and creating an experience versus just solving a problem. So getting close to the end here Neil, I really really appreciate the discussion. It’s been a lot of fun. Let’s pretend you and I are building a leadership course on what it takes to be excellent in digital innovation. It’s the one on one of Neil Gomes. So I’ve got five questions for you lightning around style followed by a book that you recommend to the listeners you ready?

Neil Gomes: Okay sure.

Saul Marquez: All right. What’s the best way to improve healthcare outcomes?

Neil Gomes: I mentioned this before. It’s the consumer focused kind of mindset. And then maybe apply some kind of technology transformation or digital transformation on top of that.

Saul Marquez: What’s the biggest mistake or pitfall to avoid?

Neil Gomes: Thinking that you can solve all your problems. I think you need partners and other people to solve them and you need buy in from a lot of people to execute.

Saul Marquez: How do you stay relevant despite constant change?

Neil Gomes: Your strategy has to be about constant change. It has to be continuously fluid and that’s how you can stay relevant. You certainly have to be able to decipher at the outset what might or might not work and use your experience within your own industry to decipher that. But beyond that point you have to be able to execute and that’s extremely important because this talking about is not good enough. You have to be able to execute and create mechanisms with new organization that enable execution.

Saul Marquez: Powerful. What’s one area of focus that drives everything in your organization?

Neil Gomes: Well for us it is the patient that really drives what we do and has always been that that’s the good thing about working at Jefferson is that doesn’t always been a hospital of the patient. That’s just what we’ve done. And most hospitals are that way. But I think that is extremely important. That’s what will carry you through and carry your staff through that mindset.

Saul Marquez: Love that. What is your number one success habit?

Neil Gomes: Yeah for me it’s execution. And I’m always focused on that. When you get into a meeting you certainly do have pleasantries beginning but they’re very focused on representing the consumer and then getting stuff done. I think that’s all.

Saul Marquez: Love it. Neil what book would you recommend to the listeners on the syllabus?

Neil Gomes: Oh well I’m in the process of releasing one of my own books on that point.

Saul Marquez: Exciting.

Neil Gomes: I think it will be my favorite book.

Saul Marquez: So when is it… is it due to be out soon or what’s the timeline on it?

Neil Gomes: Yeah. The timeline is this year. But it will probably be sometime in July.

Saul Marquez: Okay. All right. Fair enough. Well maybe we’ll get you back on when that gets published so that the listeners could get access to it.

Neil Gomes: Sure. Great. Thank you. I’ll keep you updated about it.

Saul Marquez: Now that sounds really great. Appreciate that. And so in lieu of that what would you say a book that you would recommend to the listeners is?

Neil Gomes: Oh well. Yeah so our CEO wrote a book sometime ago a few years ago. It’s a science fiction book about healthcare and it’s really cool and it’s you know you can change healthcare now and you can find out on it’s a great book. That’s the one book I would say and then another for me as always been an old book Beyond the Hype which is written by Nitin Nohria and Bruce Eccles I think… but it’s been some time that I read that in my MBA class years ago and I think I had good taste at that time because that was Dr. Nohria and now is the dean of the Harvard Business School. And he has the book at that time and it’s all about it’s all about you know how there is hype in the world around us and genuine innovation. You have to be very careful about that and how to make good decisions on that Beyond the Hype I appreciate the fact that you know really what your company and your industry. The nuances of your company in the industry and then use that information along with what you’re hearing in terms of hype and it has some constructs for how to do that and then pick the right things to do. And that’s really what those decisions are made.

Saul Marquez: Some great recommendations listeners if you want access to this full transcript along with the show notes in the syllabus that we created here with Mr. Neil Gomes. Just go to outcomesrocket.health and in the search bar type in Neil Gomes or just type in Jefferson. And that show will pop up with all the show notes and everything you want. Links to resources we’ve discussed including the books that he recommended. This has been a ton of fun. Neil I love if you could just leave us with a closing thought and then the best place where the listeners to get in touch with or follow your work.

Neil Gomes: Yeah sure. So I’m on Twitter and you can find me it at the rate Neil Gomes you can certainly connect with me there too and I’m also on Linked I’m the same Neil Gomes. And I always have the same closing thought and that is focus on the consumer, very few of us do that. Embrace that. And when I say that it starts with you having conversations with your consumers, the patients, or students or whoever even though you might be a leader in the C suite, you have to find time to do that. And then also instituted as a practice within your groups.

Saul Marquez: Wise words. Neil really appreciate that. Listeners, the beauty of podcasts is that you could hit rewind. This is one I’ll be hitting rewind on. So please do so. Reach out to Neil with any questions you may have on Twitter and be on the lookout here in the following months for his book. Neil, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Outcomes Rocket podcast. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.outcomesrocket.com for the show notes, resources, inspiration, and so much more.

Sonix is the best online audio transcription software in 2019.

The above audio transcript of “Improving Health with Digital Technologies with Neil Gomes, Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President for Technology Innovation and Consumer Experience at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health” was transcribed by the best audio transcription service called Sonix. If you have to convert audio to text in 2019, then you should try Sonix. Transcribing audio files is painful. Sonix makes it fast, easy, and affordable. I love using Sonix to transcribe my audio files.