DGTL Voices with Ed Marx

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.

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Dr. Hooman Rashidi is Associate Dean of AI in Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and Executive Director of CPACE. Before Pitt, he founded Cleveland Clinic's Center for AI and Data Science and directed AI at UC Davis Medical Center.

Ed asks him whether medical staff are prepared for AI. His answer is that even the ones who feel ready are not, because people bundle every kind of AI together and the newer generative tools don't behave like the predictive models the field has been using for decades.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, he explains what's missing from tumor boards, why he leads with education before deployment, how Pitt runs a hybrid strategy rather than committing to vendors alone, and why his center puts junior contributors on patent filings when most institutions don't.

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Dr. Diane Sliwka is a hospitalist physician, professor, and Chief Physician Experience Officer at UCSF Health. Her work focuses on improving the healthcare experience by helping clinicians communicate more effectively, find greater professional fulfillment, and deliver better care without sacrificing their own well-being.

She believes healthcare leaders must do more than measure burnout. They must listen to the people on the front lines and act on what they hear. That philosophy helped UCSF earn the American Medical Association’s highest Joy in Medicine recognition.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Diane tells Ed how her parents’ immigrant story shaped her resilience, why her guiding mantra is “Don’t rush anywhere ever,” and how aligning our professional lives with our true selves can transform the way we lead, work, and live.

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John Erwin is the CEO and Founder of Carenet Health, a health engagement and virtual care company serving more than 400 healthcare organizations across telehealth, patient access, and clinical navigation.

He describes Carenet's job as walking alongside the patient and making sure they take the next right action. Whether they need the ER or don't. Whether they picked up the prescription. The parts of care that happen outside the clinic, where most of a patient's health actually gets decided.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, John tells Ed about growing a business from 20 people, why he believes the healthcare consumer has more leverage now than at any point in his career, and the two skills he credits for everything that worked.

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Kesava Dinakaran is the CEO and Co-Founder of Luminai, an AI platform that moves manual administrative work at large health systems over to agents. Luminai has raised $60M to date and works with health systems including Cleveland Clinic.

Kesava spent seven years of his childhood solving Rubik's Cubes eight hours a day, broke the world record for most cubes solved in one hour, then cycled from Turkey to China having never ridden a bike before. He skipped college entirely. In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Ed how a family health event in 2023 turned a general interest in automation into a specific obsession with healthcare, why he thinks the point solution era created more admin work than it removed, and what happens when a health system stops treating its fax volume as somebody's full-time job.

He also makes a case most CEOs would not make out loud: that vulnerability is an operating requirement, not a personality trait.

https://bio.marxadvisory.com/