DGTL Voices with Ed Marx

Xinan Rahman founded a company that matches incoming payments against payer contracts, catching underpayments as they happen rather than months later.

His father named him with an X instead of the usual Z, because his kids were going to be different. He did the same with Xinan's sister.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Xinan tells Edward Marx about growing up in Bangladesh, why he studied computer science as a practical decision rather than a passion, and how reading his own hospital bill in college made him curious about what health systems actually get paid. He also explains why revenue cycle staff are not the problem and what he thinks comes after underpayments.

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A week in the hospital used to be standard after heart bypass surgery. Dr. Gianluca Torregrossa sends his patients home in a day or two, and they are back at work within a week. One of them played 36 holes of golf two weeks out and sent a photo.

He does the operation robotically, without cutting the chest open. Surgeons tried this in the early 2000s and abandoned it as too difficult and too expensive. He picked it up anyway and has now done more than 100, including the first ever performed on a pregnant patient.

Gianluca is Director of the Robotic Coronary Artery Surgery Program at Cleveland Clinic. Before that he trained in Italy and spent nine months in Sudan operating with the humanitarian organization EMERGENCY.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Edward Marx why he thinks technology's job is to simplify technique rather than replace the surgeon, what Sudan taught him that medical school could not, and why he believes healthcare is running out of time to fix its leadership problem.

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Sabré Cook is a professional racing driver and a mechanical engineer. She was the first woman to compete in the Porsche Carrera Cup North America, won a world karting championship at 13, and worked as a suspension composite design engineer for the Renault F1 team while racing in W Series.

Edward Marx steps outside healthcare for this one. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Sabré tells him about growing up at a go-kart track in Grand Junction, winning that first championship with her dad as her mechanic, and why the engineer in her runs on gut once she's in the car.

She also talks about the season she raced injured, what she agreed to that she shouldn't have, and the lesson it took a year of surgery and rehab to learn.

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Dr. Joel Selanikio is a practicing pediatrician, a former CDC epidemiologist, and a TED speaker who keynotes for health system boards and C-suites.

Twenty years ago you needed a physician's judgment to get ibuprofen. Joel points out that the entire purpose of over-the-counter drugs was to eliminate a doctor visit, and that in thousands of conversations nobody has ever asked him whether Advil is going to replace doctors. Everyone asks about AI.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, he tells Ed why he thinks healthcare has a blind spot about its own shrinking, what the data does and doesn't show about physician shortages, and what the food industry is doing about GLP-1s that healthcare isn't.

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Gil Peri is the CEO of Children's Wisconsin, the only children's health system in the state. It is independent, so he reports directly to the board, and he is the third CEO it has had in 45 years.

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Gil tells Edward Marx about the CEO swap he runs every month, where he takes over a frontline manager's job for the day and hands her the health system. He explains why he went into pediatrics after what happened to his younger brother in college, what a CEO once told him that he still repeats 25 years later, and why 800 of his 8,000 team members never set foot in a hospital building. Plus: the parameters he put in place after nearly burning out, and what he thinks makes the CEO and CIO relationship work.

Connect with Marx Advisory at https://bio.marxadvisory.com/