The Edge of Healthcare: Healthcare Innovators: An Entrepreneurial Odyssey

Martin Cody: Welcome to the Edge of Healthcare, where the pulse of innovation meets the heartbeat of leadership. I’m Martin Cody, your guide through riveting conversations with the trailblazers of healthcare. Tune in to gain exclusive access to strategies, experiences, and groundbreaking solutions from influential payer and health system leaders. This isn’t just a podcast, it’s your VIP ticket to the minds shaping the future of healthcare right now. Buckle up, subscribe, and get ready to ride to the edge of healthcare, where lessons from leaders are ready for you to use today.

Martin Cody: Excellent. Hello again, everyone, and welcome to the Edge of Healthcare lessons from leaders to use today. My name is Martin Cody, SVP of Sales and Marketing at Madaket Health. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by a CEO who is an expert in decision-making and leadership forums, specifically healthcare—ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program, Matt Zubiller from e4health.

Matt Zubiller: Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.

Martin Cody: My pleasure. Matt, I know we had some scheduling conflicts. I’ll say all the airs were on my end. Still, I’m thrilled to finally see you today and looking forward to some enticing education regarding healthcare, decision-making, and career trajectory. And I want to go back before we get to e4health. I want to go back to kind of your early days post-college. You have a very impressive educational curriculum and achievement. Where did you grow up? And tell me about some of the collegiate decisions you made.

Matt Zubiller: Sure. Well, Martin, thanks again for having me. I’m hoping I can share some thoughts about advice and wisdom, and ways to avoid some of my failures as I’ve grown my career. I grew up in New York, in Long Island, a middle-class community. And, you know, I’ve always found an interest in technology. Since I was pretty young. I built a computer from scratch, and my dad was a computer programmer before I even understood what a computer programmer was. I always had a fascination for business and how you grow and build new things. In particular, the entrepreneurial component of building new businesses, I think it takes a lot to be an entrepreneur, and it taps into your innovative mindset,  as well as they don’t take no for an answer attitude and figure out how to get it done. In particular, helping to solve intractable problems and drilling into granite is one of my favorite things to try to figure out. Super hard problems that just simply others can’t fix. I knew I wanted to study business as a place to start. So, what does it mean to actually go build a business? And so I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the University of Pennsylvania Wharton undergraduate program in Philadelphia. What a great program because you got exposure to wonderful kinds of business minds, but you also got exposure to all the other components that come along with university life. Right? And one of my favorite things was to study psychology. And I took some classes in computer science, obviously, to complement the work we did around business. And, you know, a lot of my buddies ended up going to New York and investment banking and consulting, and I ended up in Austin, Texas, in the 90s. And I just wanted to go build a business and figure out how to leverage technology to help solve some of those business problems.

Martin Cody: First of all, building a computer from scratch as a kid, that’s impressive. I couldn’t build one now from five parts, but I still know what a motherboard is, thankfully, and was able to expand memory and a laptop at one point in time. But did you have brothers and sisters?

Matt Zubiller: Yeah, I have a twin brother. He’s an architect. He’s built baseball stadiums, which is pretty awesome. He loves baseball, and my sister is a librarian. Still, she likes to call herself a librarian in many ways because, you know, libraries are so integral to our communities, and they are really many ways and touchpoints. And they’ve evolved and changed over time in many ways to embrace technology and really be a place for learning and knowledge, whether it comes from books or whether comes from the internet or computers or research or community programs.

Martin Cody: And where do you think your love of building stuff came from?

Matt Zubiller: Gosh, you know, I’ve always found myself, and I see it with my children. I have a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. Just this past weekend, I was with my daughter, and she wanted to go to a store. She wanted to go to Michael’s and Home Depot. Merch store and some stores because she wanted to go. Basically, she has an art project. She wanted to go establish, and it wasn’t one for school. She wanted to build a shark. And so, and I want to help her. And I told her, actually, I’ll be her benefactor. Anything that she wants to do from an art perspective, I will drive her and we will go buy the appropriate materials and go run with it. She also loves science, so she started this program called Be Wise here in San Diego that supports the growth of STEM with women and young women. And so that combination and love of exploration is, I think, one that I have helped to kindle, but also my own personal curiosity. And so I think that’s where it really started, is a combination of building a business takes art and science. It takes a left brain and right brain kind of working together in concert to solve some of these hard problems. And I’ve always found that from a kid, it started. And solving the problem. We didn’t have much money and didn’t have money to buy a computer. So, I figured out how to find the parts and make them work together. And I know for sure it probably screwed up as many computers as I actually found actually get them to work. But you learn that way, and you accelerate your learning by doing so.

Martin Cody: Yeah, you probably were a frequent visitor of RadioShack back in the day.

Matt Zubiller: Yes.

Martin Cody: Getting all of those parts. And it’s interesting you mentioned that you built many computers that didn’t work, and you learned so much from that. The irony is, is that you probably. We didn’t consider it a failure like what most people would say: it failed. It didn’t turn on, and nothing was computed. But you learn so much from those stops or those pauses, if you will, let alone quitting. And so you persisted on. Would you call that a hallmark of leadership, the ability to persist in adversity?

Matt Zubiller: 100%. You know, every failure was one step closer to success, right? I knew I needed a computer.  And so there wasn’t an option to not have one. So you just had to figure it out along the way. And when I bought my first home, it was the same thing. You know, we didn’t have this big sprawling place. It was a 100-year-old home that needed a lot of work, and I didn’t want to know how to do it. And so part of that was getting into the details and figuring it out. So it’s not just running from failure to produce success, but in order to really build a business, you need to know how it works. What is the market dynamics? What are your customers’ problems, and how do you solve them? And unless you’re in the details and know what the drivers are, the dynamics are, you’re not going to get to success.

Martin Cody: No. And I would imagine that’s where a lot of that psychology backbone comes in because you get to understand, as you said, the motivating factors, the drivers, some of the inertia inside the organization and different divisions, and understanding that to be able to apply leverage or culture enhancements and working with people individually. What took you to Austin?

Matt Zubiller: There’s a company called Trilogy Software, and there is an enormous number of super successful individuals who have come out of that kind of experience being in Austin. Austin is a great place and still is. But, you know, it was at the time, cheap living, great food, really great technology community from the influences of IBM, Motorola, and Dell who were there at the time. And it has grown ever since. But just that is a weirdness of it, which was an eclectic bringing together of people from different places and different backgrounds to, you know, have a common community. The trilogy represented that. They were a software company, an ERP-based software company that competed with the likes of Oracle and PeopleSoft at the time. But NSAP brought kids from different college campuses all across the country with, again, an entrepreneurial spirit to try to change the world. And we had no business building new businesses, right? We didn’t know what we were doing, but we also didn’t know what the status quo was. Not knowing where barriers were and understanding what limitations were, you know, we actually were able to rethink things differently. And there’s a business that I dealt with a couple of really great folks, Jeff Daniel, Mark Davis, and others who are called a coach hire, which was a spin-off of the trilogy, uses this neat configuration technology that helped to match really great jobs at the time, from startups like Amazon and Google to the McKinsey’s and the Goldman’s of the world with the right talents and people. That requires a mix of both technology and configuration. But on the ground, on the campus, people who work together to solve that problem. So it was a really neat experience, both going to the trilogy and also being able to start a business and understand kind of what worked and what didn’t work.

Martin Cody: Well, it’s funny because there’s a bunch of phrases that echo that sentiment. When people look around, they say, well, if not us, then who can solve this? And if not now, then when? And those two things certainly resonate with entrepreneurs. You hear them say it time and time and time again. It’s like, well, if no one else is doing this, why can’t we do it? And why can’t we do it now? And you’re right; more often than not, they don’t know any better. The established businesses like you guys shouldn’t be doing this. And it’s like, well, why not?

Matt Zubiller: And exactly.

Martin Cody: They just started bucking the trend, which is great. So fast-forward a little bit because I know you had a time with McKesson and have been in the healthcare space for a while now. Walk us up to the point where you joined e4health as CEO.

Matt Zubiller: Yeah, and let me, if I can, just one interlude between where I was with the trilogy and before I was with McKesson; I had an opportunity to live abroad. My wife worked for a company called Schlumberger. It’s a global oilfield services company that had a lot of really smart scientists who knew things like geothermal activity and other things, and their way of giving back to the global community was developing science curricula for secondary schools in developing countries. And so they would take those really smart folks and build science programs. My wife was part of that program where we went to, you know, worldwide in South America, the Middle East, and Europe to help teach science teachers how to teach science better and relevant to those communities. And so I was really interested in that connectivity, that global give back. I ended up going to business school in London. When I was there, I wanted to explore healthcare more because I think it’s one of the literally probably the largest industries on the planet that is the most screwed up industry on the planet. I did some work with Roche in Switzerland and got a little taste of it in terms of what it was like. And I fell in love. And from my perspective, if we can make a dent in that Gordian knot of healthcare, the impact on humanity is tremendous. And that’s what I wanted to dedicate my career to. More importantly, taking technology that has that transformative impact and applying it to healthcare in a way that brings the people component of healthcare and the technology component together was something I saw as really fascinating. And that’s where I started with McKesson. And McKesson was great, actually. It was funny when I was in London business school, I did an international exchange in Berkeley.

Matt Zubiller: I wrote a paper about technology disruption in healthcare because of that interest, and I just dug into the details and understood it better. And why is this a problem that people can’t solve? And I had this great class around disruption at Berkeley, and I ended up writing a paper about McKesson and ended up getting connected to McKesson. And they said, hey, come and build businesses with me. Go build businesses at McKesson to solve this. The oldest company in the New York Stock Exchange, with fortune seven at the time. And they did everything within healthcare, the largest provider of healthcare technology in the world. And that they were susceptible to this notion of disruption. And so interesting, when I was there, I built a business around molecular and genetic testing, which was fascinating. We end up saving Medicare over $1 billion with that approach. Those codes that we created as part of that problem were part of the mid-revenue cycle, which means when doctors are performing care and are selecting a diagnostic test, how do you actually code for that diagnostic test and translate it to the language of the payer? At the time, there were 12 codes for diagnostic tests that represented thousands of tests. And now there are 20 to 30 to 50,000 tests that are out there that can be used. They all kind of fit into this notion of 12 CPT codes. So we said, well, let’s get into the details and solve the problem. And we did. And lo and behold, you know, like I said, the impacts of Medicare were really neat. So, that small dent made a big impact.

Martin Cody: It’s interesting when you talk about the size of McKesson back in the day. Yet, the speed and agility with which this division moved seems to be oxymoronic with how we see a lot of large, specific, healthcare-centric institutions move today. I mean, they do move at a glacial pace. I don’t know if that is leadership at the top, if it’s fiefdom protection, if it’s too many hands and the revenue cookie jar. Looking out for one’s own best interest, I just don’t see the compelling examples that maybe 30 or 40 years ago where people would make decisions, live by them, die by them, iterate on them, and continue to move forward at the speed with which we need it. Today in healthcare, it’s still, I mentioned it all the time, 30-plus years behind whatever sector you want to compare it to, and it has been for the last 30 to 40 years. So how do we know if there is a leadership gap or a leadership vacuum to be able to drive improvement in healthcare forward at the scale with which it is needed?

Matt Zubiller: I think I go back to this as a Gordian knot like so many people have been trying to solve this problem. And I’d say they speak from two points of view. Healthcare needs to move slowly. If it moves too quickly, people get hurt. And with the best intentions, we’re trying to change healthcare to help it move faster. Remember, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And so I think healthcare necessarily has to move at a pace that, like I say, is super fast. Glacial pace. Intentional in terms of the work that’s not being done. That said, you’re surrounded by a camp of people who need to see change and are dedicated and persistent to making that happen. So, as an example, this business that I created, McKesson, ended up actually getting and becoming part of a more process-oriented business called Intercall at the time, and Intercall is it’s now actually becoming part of change healthcare, which eventually became part of Optum. It is the tool that helps to provide medical evidence that supports medical necessity decisions that are used with payers and providers. And so it’s really important to get the evidence right to get the details right. But it was a business that wasn’t growing in the way that it needed to be able to support and adapt.

Matt Zubiller: And it was so using books at the time in a way to be able to translate to technology, to move forward again, to accelerate kind of its impact. In that culture, the Intercall business was more sade versus the culture of this other business that was created, which was much more innovative. And together are the right balance, right? How do you stay focused on solving the particular problems that the customers need and delivering great service while continuing to push the envelope for innovation? And it’s very difficult to do, and I think the gap is constantly finding that right balance. The CEO of McKesson said to me once he was, it’s like, now we have operators. Their job is to remove variants from the system to create consistency or stability and predictability. But that Yang needs to be balanced with the Yin of innovation, whose job is actually to create variation, to exploit that variation, and to be able to drive change. And that leadership needs to have the balance of the two. And it’s very, very difficult to do. And it’s required for healthcare because if you move too quickly, you break things. People get hurt.

Martin Cody: Right? And it’s an outstanding point. It’s very difficult to do consistently and long-term because there are a few healthcare organizations around that have done it. Still, most, either if they’re doing it, get acquired because another company wants that innovation, because they’ve gotten a little bit stale, and if they’re not doing it successfully, they don’t balance it, then they too will get hurt. As you mentioned, there will be harm. The CEO of McKesson certainly imparted some of that wisdom to you. Who else would you look to say, oh, if it hadn’t been for that individual, I don’t know if I’d be here right now?

Matt Zubiller: Oh, there’s a bunch. And honestly, I look at my experience. Mckesson was super formative for me, and it seemed like a trilogy was super formative for me. It’s going to be a trilogy for me. As I said, many of my friends were consulting investment banking, which is great for them. But I chose the other path, which was super different, right? Which is let’s go figure out how to go use technology to go build, you know, businesses. Choosing the cast was similar. It’s funny; I remember talking to a mentor of mine from IBM. His name is Art Albert. I met him in Austin, where he had spent many years at IBM, and he was really a technologist there. I made this decision when I graduated from business school to go in the direction of Skype at the time to join them or to join McKesson. Very, very different organizations, and one where Skype was more used to the entrepreneurial, embracing technology, and doing something different. This was before they were born of Microsoft, and he taught me. He’s like, Matt, you know, you can always do something like Skype. You’re going to get to learn a lot more from being in an organization that is so very different from what you learned, and you’re gonna learn about the details of how McKesson and how healthcare works, and I did. I have experience in pharmacy distribution, pay your business, and provide your business revenue cycle, clinical, and financial.

Matt Zubiller: And there are several individuals there. Emad Rizk was the president of our McKesson Health Solutions Business. He was one of the youngest partners at Deloitte and came to McKesson to run that business. Now he’s a CEO at activity. A great mentor of mine, Pat Blake, who ran our specialty business, eventually ran our technology business again—being able to bring consistency and understanding. And how you focus on producing results is so key and operational. Carolyn Woodcock, who ended up running a key portion of the change healthcare payer business, in particular, the workaround claims extend again, understanding how to deliver and put the customer first. She was the CEO of Nadal Lyric, which had been out of Optum, and it’s a CEO there now. Rod O’Reilly, another gentleman. So people be able to kind of for different perspectives and lenses on that experience, to be able to give me an influence. How to look at particular problems. I came as an innovator. But you also need to balance out with operations, and people like the people I mentioned at McKesson understand operations.

Martin Cody: And that philosophy. Was that something you learned on the street, basically, or was that something maybe dad pulled you aside or mom that said, listen, if you get the opportunity to get exposed to people smarter than you as often as you can, type of thing, where did it come from?

Matt Zubiller: You know, when I was growing up in high school, school was a lot easier. I think, for me, in terms of if I’d worked my butt off, no doubt. The school was a bit easier when I went to college. It was a whole other story. I’m surrounded by people much smarter than me, and I knew that my advantage was that I could work harder than most. Now that gets you part of the way, being able to gain perspective, step back, and say, one, you’ve got this innovative mindset, but two, it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s not going to produce any results. And actually, if you can show good outcomes. And so, for me, it was a balance of innovation and operations. That really was what was instilled in me. And being surrounded by folks who I constantly wanted to be surrounded by, people who were better than me. It reminds me of when my dad was younger. I played soccer, and my brother was really good at baseball, hence his baseball stadiums. But I really like soccer, and we had a team we played on in our local community, and it was great. I felt I played most of the games well, etc., but there was another community 15 miles from us that had a much bigger population of team members to pull from, and I joined that team as well, just to help try to get better.

Matt Zubiller: And they were much better than me. And I was talking with my daughter about this, and I said, you know, by choosing to be part of that soccer team, I knew I would be playing as much. I knew that I was surrounded by people who were better than me. And that hurt because I constantly was going to these games, and I knew that I wanted to play and I wanted to be better, but I wasn’t getting there. And over time, that changed. Over time, I played more. They brought up my skill set. They made me better. What I did, and I said that was transformative. Whether it’s the trilogy or McKesson or now for e4health, I want to be surrounded by people who were much smarter than me, who were much better than me, and the work that they can do so that they can lift up my game. And then in talking with my daughter about it, she’s taking jiu-jitsu right now. This weekend, we were talking about it, and she was in tears, and she said, I mean, in a class with a lot of older folks, and it’s a little scary. I’m like, I get it. It can be. But embracing it and recognizing you’re on your journey and that if you’re surrounded by people you’re better than in your skill set, you’re never going to grow. And so that’s how we grow.

Martin Cody: 100%. And it’s true. I haven’t seen it. That is not true in any aspect. Whether it’s exercise, fitness, work, or education, you rise to the level of your competition, so to speak. And if you surround yourself with folks that have greater skill development than you, more aptitude than you, you will have to level up or to your point earlier, you’re going to get left behind. So it forces you to adjust rather quickly. And it is a painful lesson. But the growth lies just on the other side of the discomfort. So you mentioned e4health. What intractable pounding granite challenges and excites you about e4health to be able to solve?

Matt Zubiller: Well, there are a few, and I’d like to say I’m trying to leverage muscles. I built through all my experiences now as CEO of e4health, and I’m honored that our investors and our board have chosen me to help lead the way. One of those is bringing together three very different businesses together. And the problem that we’re solving at the core of it is what we call the mid-revenue cycle.

Martin Cody: Define that for the audience. I spent quite a bit of time in revenue cycle, pop health, and practice management. When you say mid-revenue cycle, what are you referring to?

Matt Zubiller: Well, the revenue cycle, as you know, again, is all about figuring out what processes can be put in place to help ensure providers can get paid appropriately and fairly for the work that they do so that they can continue to serve their patients. And there’s a front end of the process, which is really about registration, scheduling, and ensuring that the appropriate eligibility is in place for a patient before they see that. There’s a back-end process, which is once all that work is done and payers receive a claim, you know, how are they going to process it and then respond to it? We’re in that middle. And my perspective going back to kind of lessons learned, it’s about going into the details and understanding and the point at which a patient visits with a doctor, documentation of that visit, translating that language of the doctor into the language of the payer is where a lot of dollars are left on the table. It’s also where a lot of quality issues ultimately pop up. And so, in the middle of your revenue cycle, it’s all about being that translator to take what’s been done with the patient and package it up appropriately to the payer to avoid denials and maximize net revenue realization.

Martin Cody: Walk me through. So, the patient is seen by the doctor. The doctor does the agent P does the exam, does everything, puts together a progress note diagnosis, and they’re out the door. And then that is generated in the electronic medical record either in the physician’s office or the hospital system what have you? And then do you grab it from there to put it in an easily understandable language and narrative for the payer? How does it work?

Matt Zubiller: Well, there are three things that we do. And so let me walk you through the flow in terms of what that looks like. Getting back to what are the biggest causes of denials? What are the biggest causes of frustration within the healthcare process? Providers today spend umpteen hours working through documentation and trying to actually just articulate the story of the interaction with their patients.

Martin Cody: Just to generate the note.

Matt Zubiller: And there’s a ton of effort. And you call PJ time or PJ, you know, work time. That’s literally what’s happening is that doctors have either visited right after the patient or it’s late at night. You know, they’ve got a glass of wine or glass of coffee and just are entering in documentation. And it’s a bane of their existence. And there’s a lot of neat technology that’s out there to help make that better, like ambient documentation and AI to help capture that interaction with the patient. But that’s the key part is the charting of the patient interaction, entering information into the EMR, and then translating that into codes. So one of the areas we help out with a doctor is something called clinical documentation integrity. So we have experts who understand the language of the doctor and the language of the payer. They’re both clinicians and financial experts, and they can sit down and help to educate and train the doctor. Still, they also help when the documentation has been created to create the appropriate queries, to make sure that documentation has the most fulsome as possible in order to get paid for the work that was done, and to represent a true interaction that happened between the patient and the provider. We then take it, and then we translate that documentation into the appropriate codes. So how do we code out whether this DRG or another DRG set of CPT-appropriate diagnoses reflect that so that when it gets packaged to the payer, the payer can just pay it? The worst thing that could happen is the payer denies it. And then you see a lot of what’s happening today, where a lot of denials are causing a lot of cash flow problems for health systems. Now, I’d argue a lot of that starts off with getting this revenue cycle wrong.

Martin Cody: I agree, I’m curious, you have experts that speak provider and they also speak payer, which is paramount to the success of this when you’re working with the providers. I mean, I work with the providers as well on a daily basis, and they are exhausted over the last 20 years, let alone the last 4 or 5 with the pandemic or so. How do you paint the picture or sell them on the advantages of listening, just work with us for this type of engagement because they don’t want to fill out another portal? To your point, they want to see patients, they want to get paid for seeing patients, and they’d like to get paid in a timely fashion. So, I would imagine there’s a learning curve or a hurdle there that your team has to overcome to educate them on. It’s almost as if how to speak payer, but in a clinical sense.

Matt Zubiller: Yeah. And you have to show them both. You have to show them how this is going to ensure better quality for their patients, but it’s also going to ensure that they’re getting paid because doctors are so mission-driven, what they really need somebody to do is look out for them to make sure that they’re actually getting paid for the work that they do, right?  The flip side of that is if there’s work that’s being done, that’s not. Improving the patient’s experience or you’re not going to get paid, then what’s going to happen is that’s wasted time, effort, etc. that could be focused on another patient.

Martin Cody: Yeah, and that wasted time, energy, and effort also exacerbates the burnout sensation.

Matt Zubiller: Exactly. And we see that when I was working at EMN, you know, the largest workforce staffing company in the country, being able to see the impact on nurses, on doctors, on clinicians, it’s terrible. And that is a problem that absolutely must be changed. And so we’re trying to solve that Gordian knot. We were influencing doctors again in this show. Why and how, if they changed their behavior, they changed the work that they do in their documentation. It’s going to make it better. It’s going to reduce their burden, and it’s going to have a better outcome for them financially.

Martin Cody: Ultimately better for the patients as well.

Matt Zubiller: Absolutely.

Martin Cody: So, getting back to the component of innovation and operations, if you were to give any advice to someone who is in the early years of their healthcare career, would you tell them to find a path towards an innovator-disruptor or to find the path towards an operational company?

Matt Zubiller: You know, it’s interesting. I would encourage them, if they’re super early in their career, to understand the details first, get to the operations, work for a health system, work for a hospital, and work with somebody who is working very closely with those health systems. Work with a payer, right? Get in and understand it enough to be able to then fully articulate the problem that’s going to give you fuel. It’s going to give you resources as an innovator to solve that problem. And so similar to whether you’re building your first computer and figuring out actually how the computer works, you can’t actually build a better one unless you actually know how it actually works. I think operationally understanding that workflow and what the problems are gives you that fuel.

Martin Cody: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I agree with that. And if you could expose yourself to a health system and learn kind of the intricacies and the ins and outs of healthcare in that capacity. While that health system may be working with some innovators and disruptions, you get the best of both worlds.

Matt Zubiller: I might have related to it. Actually, it’s funny, growing up in New York, there’s a saying everybody should live in New York City for a couple of years just to experience it, but when you’re ready, kind of get out before it hardens you. I’d say there’s something to be said for working for a health system or payer, etc., as get in there and work and understand it operationally to really understand the kind of the details of it. But once you get that sense, then go fix it.

Martin Cody: Yeah, it’s good advice, both in New York and working at one institution for a long period of time. If you could wave a magic wand and have CMS Institute change policy-wise, what would that be?

Matt Zubiller: I think CMS needs to lead the way in fully streamlining its revenue cycle. They represent a huge portion of what’s actually happening through most health systems’ perspectives. And generally, payers will follow CMS. Recently you see some of the authorization automation standards that are happening. I was talking about that with Intercall 15 years ago. And so, CMS needs to move more quickly to clean up its house when it comes to making sure providers can get paid just the right amount for the work that they do because there’s so much waste in the system, and CMS is one of those that contributes to it. So if I were to kind of focus my innovation efforts is to let CMS be the fastest and most accurate payer out there. Leveraging technology and standards. If that’s the case, then it’ll set the mark for what other payers should be. It also forces and influences providers and the health systems to be able to change their systems to make that happen.

Martin Cody: Correct. Good sage advice and wisdom. Hopefully, from your mouth to their ears, so to speak, that sort of thing happens. As you look back at the end of 2024. In eight months or so, how will you know that the year was a success for e4health?

Matt Zubiller: Well, you know, e4health. Our mission is empowering better health. And that means clinical, financial, and operational health systems we work with. You know, we brought our three businesses together, three very different businesses now to one culture. And the core of our culture is our values. They spell out “we grow” in order to be able to grow. They’re a set of values that we need to follow. And at the center of that, that W represents a win-win. And I know it sounds like unicorns and rainbows, but it really is. We are deeply committed to the success of our team members, our customers, and our investors as they are to us, and that win-win relationship is going to help us drive forward. So for me, I think we continue to be able to serve the health systems we are today, but I want us to also be able to tap into technology in a better way than we are today. There’s so much hype around AI, and there’s a recent white paper that we did on this. And as you look at Gartner’s hype cycle, we’re quickly approaching the trough of disillusionment where everybody and their mom is asking for data from health systems so they can train their LMS and their models. What results are you producing? How are you truly understanding the problem and then producing results that make it better clinically, financially, or operationally for that health system? Not just that it makes your technology kind of whiz-bang. And so I’d like to ask you to help embrace automation and AI in a way that actually produces results for our health system over this next year.

Martin Cody: I like it, and it’s funny, I think the win-win strategy, if I could be so bold, harkens back to your early entrepreneurial days because every entrepreneur knows that if I make the customer happy, they will tell ten other customers and they will sell more than me. If they are happy and derive value out of what we provide them. And I don’t think that has changed. There’s no app that replaces that. I don’t know if it was Welch that said it or Buffett. If you don’t take care of the customer, someone else will. So I like the win-win approach. All right. We’re going to move on to the speed round. You survived the early portion.

Matt Zubiller: Thank goodness.

Martin Cody: So word association. And I actually just gave one of the words away because we talked a lot about leadership and entrepreneurial ism and mentors. And so I’m going to say a couple of words and you tell me the first phrase or words that pop into your head. So the first one is Jack Welch.

Matt Zubiller: Embrace change.

Martin Cody: Yeah, that’s a good one because sometimes I don’t think there’s enough change embracing. If there’s one constant in healthcare, it is change.

Matt Zubiller: We look at GE two in particular, how they kind of did and didn’t, and where they are today as a result of that.

Martin Cody: Correct, prior authorizations.

Matt Zubiller: Automate, automate, automate as soon as possible. Real time.

Martin Cody: And then along that same line, interoperability.

Matt Zubiller: Streamline to one standard. There are so many standards that are out there right now. And honestly, unlocking or maybe unraveling that Gordian knot means that the data that sits within a health system versus within a payer or sits within CMS, are all really moving along the various community members and constituents. When you do that, you’re going to create a lot more innovation.

Martin Cody: Well, it is interesting you talked earlier about, you know, we were doing these things at Intercall 15 years ago, and I think that’s where some of the items I see where I think healthcare just moves so slow in some of the redundancies and removal of administrative waste. It’s like people were doing this 15 years ago. Let’s figure out a way to accelerate this. All right, last one. If you could have an adult beverage with anyone inside of healthcare, living or deceased, who is it? And what are you drinking?

Matt Zubiller: Oh my goodness, that’s a great question. Anyone with inside of healthcare? There are so many options to pick from.

Martin Cody: Start with the beverage of choice.

Matt Zubiller: You know, for me, I actually so what I’d love to be able to do is there is a doctor that I spent some time with and he’s a really good friend of mine. His name is Doug Waller. And it would be a beer because he’s a simple guy, but he’s taught me a lot within the space. He’s retired now, and I met him when I was at McKesson. he was an internist because he started as a doctor and wanted to change the world on a mission to be able to help make things better. His pet name is Mueller, and two of his brothers are dentists, as he figured. But he was somebody who, when I was at McKesson when I was trying to figure out this Gordian knot around liquor and genetic testing, I had been calling around, and somebody mentioned I gave him a ring, and he picked up the phone, and I say, hi, Doug, my name is Matt. I’m interested in coding. Does anybody know anything about coding? And his response was, depends who’s asking.

Martin Cody: Fair comment.

Matt Zubiller: But he consistently represented how you thoughtfully challenge the norm. And in the spirit of healthcare moving at a glacial pace, he consistently was right behind that glacier, continuing to push it. And even though it moves slowly, it is moving. And so the way he continued to help instill in me how to look at the problem holistically. How do you break it down into its smaller parts and then don’t give up, keep on pushing? He’s now retired. He actually lives in Fort Wayne, so I’d actually like to have a beer with him.

Martin Cody: That’d be cool. That’d be super cool. I don’t promise it to be the most famous beer summit in the United States ever, but it might rival it. Well, that’s a good one to have. What’s that?

Matt Zubiller: You could join us.

Martin Cody: Oh, that would be outstanding. I would like it. He sounds fascinating, too. And I love the impression that he made on you at such a young age. And again, it harkens back to some of these foundational rules we learned a long time ago. Persistence, persistence, persistence. It may not always be gratifying. It might not be a spotlight shown on you at all times. But boy, the people who persist usually tend to rise above over the long haul.

Matt Zubiller: Indeed.

Martin Cody: Matt. Outstanding. I really appreciate the time. Thank you for teaching us a lot about what e4health is doing. It sounds fascinating and certainly needed, especially in that mid-revenue cycle area, to help the physicians get paid quickly for what they’ve done from the care provision side. That’s outstanding work, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for stopping in.

Matt Zubiller: My pleasure Martin, and we’ll take care. Be good.

Martin Cody: You got it. Cheers.

Martin Cody: Thanks for diving into the Edge of Healthcare with us today. I hope these insights will fuel your journey in healthcare leadership. For more details, show notes, and ways to stay plugged into the conversation, head over to MadaketHealth.com. Until next time, stay ahead of the curve. With the Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are always within reach. Take care of yourselves, and keep pushing the boundaries of healthcare innovation.