The Edge of Healthcare: Marketing at the Helm of Healthcare Innovation

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: Hello again, everyone, and welcome to the Edge of Healthcare, where we are talking to healthcare leaders with business tips and things that you can learn to put into use today. My name is Martin Cody, SVP of Sales and Marketing for Madaket Health. When I saw this next person’s name on the schedule, I was ecstatic because there’s no one that I know of who’s more prolific in the area of healthcare and digital marketing than today’s guest on the edge of healthcare, John Lynn. Sir John, welcome to you, and thanks for taking some time today. Thanks for.

John Lynn: Thanks for having me. I think when you say prolific, it just means I’m noisy. I make a lot of noise, but I’ve been doing it a long time.

Martin Cody: Well, if someone hasn’t seen you on any of the social platforms, it’s because they have blinders on or they just aren’t trying. Because you are prolific, the visibility is outstanding. And before we talk a little bit about how you’re able to do what you do in that space, I want to go back and first learn. Why did you get into healthcare?

John Lynn: I don’t think it was purposeful, which I hear that’s a lot true with a lot of people in healthcare. I was working in Hawaii, at BYU Hawaii, and doing system administration. I’m a tech guy by background, so I am a tech guy on Twitter, and I ended up finding a job. We wanted to get off the rock, as we call it and found a job at UNLV in their health and counseling center. But it was a university health and counseling center for the students. So, more ambulatory versus academic research organization. So anyway, I got the job and moved there. And so, a little bit of luck, right? You know that. I will say, though, when I was in Hawaii, and I was about to move to Vegas and start working in my first job in healthcare, I did say to people I was like, how cool would it be if something I did actually save someone’s life or improve their health? There was this feeling of, wow, this could be really cool to work in healthcare versus before working in higher ed, which was useful and valuable because we’re educating students or BYU Hawaii’s mission is to proclaim peace internationally like we were doing some really amazing work there. But to move into healthcare at UNLV was quite eye-opening for me as far as the purpose of what could be done. And certainly, I know some doctors and nurses fawn at the idea that you could actually save a life or improve care. But I think that is true. It’s not direct, it’s indirect, that’s for sure. If I do the things right, I can enable the nurses and doctors to be able to better care for the patients, and that makes an impact. That’s how I got into it: was got the job, moved to Vegas, and definitely learned effectively. I remember when I interviewed for the job, they said, tell me about your healthcare experience. And I’m like, well, I’ve been to the doctor, and I don’t think they thought that was a satisfying answer.

Martin Cody: I like the background in tech, so that was obviously a conscious decision. What prompted you to get into tech and then follow that up with what year you moved from Hawaii to Vegas?

John Lynn: Yeah, so it’s interesting that you say that because, at the end of the day, I’m not a pure healthcare guy for sure. I live, breathe, eat, and sleep in it every day. So I am like purely devoted to it now. But that’s my passion isn’t necessarily healthcare. My passion is what you said, which is tech can improve many processes, including healthcare. And it turns out that in healthcare, there’s a lot of opportunity for technology to improve what we’re doing. And to be fair, that tech isn’t always the answer. I’m not a purist or what everything needs to be technology. And no, you choose the right solution, but tech can enable a lot of solutions that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, and that’s what excites me the most. So I think that’s the most interesting part as far as when I got in. I moved to Vegas 19 years ago, I think. So what does that put us, 23 or something? Four somewhere in there?

Martin Cody: Yes. Okay. So you got into you were a tech person by kind of desire, passion, and then married per se, the ability for tech to improve. Healthcare delivery. Healthcare administration. Healthcare findings. I agree with you. It’s. You aren’t the one holding the scalpel or doing the surgery per se, but boy, there’s a heck of a lot of technology that helps make that procedure more efficient, more successful behind the scenes, and in addition to equipping the surgeon with knowledge. So there’s a definite role for technology in healthcare, and I’m glad a tech person has now found some footing in healthcare, so to speak. So that’s awesome. I think of digital marketing kind of your specialty, if you will, and I always compare and contrast it because I’m old to traditional marketing and what we may have learned in college and the four P’s and those sorts of things that go way back. But what was your philosophy as it relates to bringing technology to healthcare via the marketing discipline?

John Lynn: Yeah, it’s interesting what you said. First, a little anecdotal story about what you said, which is I was interviewing someone about healthcare and the evolution of healthcare and technology, and they said something interesting 20 years ago. If it went down, they were frustrated, they couldn’t get to their email, and they couldn’t get to their whatever, right? And it was problematic. And you’d get in trouble for it in a way. But it didn’t really impact patient care. Now, if health IT goes down, if the EHR goes down, that’s a dramatic impact on the care that patients are receiving, let alone lab results and pharmacy orders and all of those other things and the integrated nature of it. So I think that’s the interesting thing that’s happened is that tech before, wasn’t making a clinical impact the way it is now. So I think that’s an interesting evolution. And what’s also interesting in that same evolution is if you look at most of the IT systems out there, a lot of them and a lot of aspects of them are that they have become like big marketing engines. Think about value-based care. What do I have to do in value-based care to make sure that this thing is working properly, or even if a revenue cycle management approach, or even your digital front door? All of these aspects at the core of what they are is a marketing engine.

John Lynn: They have to market to the patient to convince them to show up to their appointment that they forgot about, or that they don’t want to go to or to schedule an appointment for a follow-up visit that they forgot to do. That’s a marketing problem, right? Getting someone to take their medication that’s a marketing problem. And if you look at a lot of the evolution of IT, there’s some back-end systems that document the visit and make sure billing happens and things like that. But so many of the problems in healthcare are really marketing problems. I will say it’s interesting that you see me as a marketing person. I’m a tech guy by back and stumbled upon rolling out a media organization and healthcare IT to date, we’ve published 17,000 articles I’ve written, half of them. We’ve done 700 video and audio podcasts. It’s a media company, for sure. But then we also launched Swaay Health, which is our marketing community. So it’s funny that you see me as a marketer and to be fair, the reason I’ve been successful as a media company and with our marketing conference and community is because of my marketing skills. I don’t self-identify as a marketer, although I certainly leverage it.

Martin Cody: I would say you leverage it better than most, and I want to anecdotally go back to a couple of things you mentioned. And first of all, I completely agree with you. The evolution in the last 20 years of IT in terms of healthcare, where you’re right, it was just an email communication platform 20-some-odd years ago. There’s not a nursing home, sniff, ambulatory surgery center, health system, hospital where it’s not mission-critical, where things don’t stop if the IT solution is not working properly. What I find interesting juxtaposed to that is just how far we still have to go to have something even remotely close to a digital front door, even remotely close to interoperability. Case in point: anecdotally, today, I was told by a physician’s office that they couldn’t put the order that I need for a procedure into the portal. They were going to have to mail me snail mail me the order. So I’m scratching my head with that capacity and just frustrated by how much further we have to go. This leads me to that you may not identify as a marketing guy; you may identify as a tech guy that who just happens to have a really impressive side gig at a marketing media company. But what do you think are the top 2 or 3 issues facing healthcare today from a marketing perspective? And I want to look at it from the lens of a health system and then from the lens as a payer; what type of communication do they have to get to their patient members?

John Lynn: I do self-identify as an entrepreneur, so my entrepreneur method of entrepreneurship is marketing and in written word and media.

Martin Cody: It’s impressive.

John Lynn: Thank you, it’s an interesting question. What are the challenges? And I think you highlighted the biggest challenge facing marketers in the industry. And that, to me, is that the info and the innovations are not equally distributed. And you highlighted it perfectly in your example; the fact that they want to snail mail you the order illustrates not that it’s not possible to do it another way, but it’s that they haven’t adapted it because we know that there are hundreds of companies that could solve that exact problem with an electronic solution. And for whatever reason, politics, they didn’t need to. They haven’t adapted it. And so it’s not because it’s not possible. That’s what we see a lot in healthcare, is that there’s a lot of people that are just doing it the way that they’ve always done it because they can, and they’re getting paid well to do it in this old archaic way, and they don’t need to optimize it because they’re fine.

John Lynn: They’re making the money that they want to make, and they can burden you. And in a lot of cases, you don’t have an option. There are not seven providers like that in your area, and they’re probably not covered by your insurance or whatever else. And so they can’t get away with having a terrible experience. And so to me, that is the biggest number one problem that we have in healthcare IT. And is a marketing problem, right? If you want a solution to the problem, there probably is a technology out there to solve it, and someone has probably implemented it and proven that it’s better. But many organizations either don’t know about it or they don’t want to implement it, or they aren’t motivated to implement it, and there’s nothing forcing them to. I’d say that’s the number one problem; there are great solutions out there, but there just hasn’t been the motivation, the need, or even a lot of them are just busy seeing patients, so they don’t realize that there is a better way. And so because they’re not focused on it, they haven’t implemented it.

Martin Cody: Yeah. And it’s interesting because. I look at this not as a provider issue. I think we, as an organization or as an industry, have put a lot of burden on providers over the last 25 years from the standpoint, and you mentioned it earlier, electronic medical records, and we were both around the time when they were initiated and introduced and then mandated. And then there was CCHIT and meaningful use one, two, three, and all of the different things that we’ve now put on to providers, and you’re absolutely correct.

Martin Cody: These solutions exist today. They’re tried. They’re tested. They’re proven. They’re successful. What do you think? You mentioned politics being potential, a reason why more and more organizations are not adopting these? I have a theory on this, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the number one reason why these solutions aren’t being adapted could be part marketing, but what do you think it is?

John Lynn: I think the biggest problem is bandwidth. And then also looking at strategic priorities of what they need to do. And so, when you look at it, I was just thinking last night about a friend who implemented a big EHR. Let’s just say it was a very epic implementation, and they were implementing it. And afterward, he told me, and this was shortly after they go live. He said “John, I have 5000 tickets of things I need to work on to help improve.”And some of them are hour or two-hour fixes, easy. Some of them are six-month projects. He’s like, how do I prioritize which ones of those I’m going to do and how I’m going to approach this? That’s like a microcosm, the EHR, which actually has a massive impact on any healthcare organization. When you have 5000 tickets or complaints from your customers, and many IT organizations see their users as customers now and that they’re providing a service to those customers, like how to do that, let alone how do I go and see that next shiny object?

John Lynn: And that next latest AI tool that I built on. And do I want to go through that contracting process? So to me, it really goes down to the number of opportunities is more than the bandwidth of the organizations to be able to implement. And so yeah, they would love to. And as much as any health IT organization says, oh, it’s a turnkey solution that can just do it and minimal effort with you. It just is not the reality in healthcare. You still have to go through the security review. You have to go through the clinical review. You have to make sure that the privacy and data are proper, right? And let alone does this actually work right. It works with our flow and our system and integration. It’s much bigger; there’s no turnkey in healthcare as much as we want it to be. There’s easier and harder. That’s fair. You can’t just casually implement it. And so I think that is one of the big problems.

Martin Cody: And I think it would be interesting to those 5000 tickets, what percentage of them have surfaced in the 500 prior implementations of said software that currently are still not being resolved? That’s my own pet peeve, as it relates to the bandwidth issue, my theory on this is it’s a leadership issue. If you’re not availing yourself of the solutions that are out there to help your customers, help your members, help your patients, and you are having people receive mail orders via the US postal system, that’s a leadership issue. Again, my opinion, and to your point, it might be right that the leaders just don’t have the bandwidth to address the 500 items that they have, from compliance to prior auth to no surprises. Not to mention, they’ve got to do physician recruitment and retention. So it’s a very difficult job. And I’d be curious as it relates to you as a media; I’m going to just throw the word mogul, a media mogul out there with a slant in healthcare, for people that are interested in potentially getting into healthcare-related media. What are some of the challenges you have had to overcome that have led you through your progression in organizations? And I then will talk a little bit more about Swaay Health. But if you could think back on the boy, I wish someone would have told me this. It would have saved me weeks, months, and years of aggravation that you would like to impart and share now with someone considering a career in media with a focus on healthcare.

John Lynn: Yeah, well, it turns out that the famous movie that said, if you build it, they will come Field of Dreams, right? It turns out that’s not true. You can write the best content you can create the best podcast episodes, videos, whatever. And guess what? They’re probably not going to come.

Martin Cody: The tickets will come. The problems will come; they will come.

John Lynn: There’s been one exception for that. That’s Doctor Glaucomflecken, who is like amazingly humorous and has done amazing work; he created something that was just so outstanding that they did. That’s the only exception I can even think of in this space that got close to that. Maybe a ZDoggMD a little bit with his music videos and his parodies, right? But otherwise, other than humor, nothing resonates enough to just drive a community of people to listen and hear what you’re doing. So, what I always tell people is, hey, when you’re starting with media and when you’re building something, you can create the best content in the world and it doesn’t matter. Sure, the quality of content may retain them more and may cause them to come back again and trust you more, so it needs to be at a certain level. Otherwise, you lose credibility, and they’ll never read you again. But once you reach that level, it doesn’t drive more traffic. And so, you need to spend at the beginning 25% or less of your time creating content, and 75% of your time marketing the content. And people don’t think about, hey, I need to market the content. It’s such a foreign idea to them. But essentially, as a media company, your product is the content, and you have to spend a lot of time and effort marketing the content the way you would any other product because your product is the content.

Martin Cody: Give me an example of marketing content as opposed to marketing like a physical, tangible product.

John Lynn: Yeah, it turns out it’s actually very similar. It’s just easier because the bar to read a piece of content is lower than to buy a $100 million EHR system. So, in that way, the methods are the same. So, an example, you want to build your social following. How are you going to build followers? Just sharing it on social doesn’t build followers. You have to go and engage people. You have to follow people. You have to refollow you have to interact with them, invite on the episode, etc. Search engine optimization doesn’t just happen automatically. You have to do on-site search engine optimization SEO. You have to build links. You have to get links from other sites. You got to do internal linking, you got to you have to build all of these things as part of your marketing, email marketing. Okay. You want an email newsletter; how are you going to build your list? How are you going to grow the number of people on it? How are you going to build? Get everyone to subscribe so that you can send them the email that then links to the podcast, video article, or whatever you’re doing. That’s another example. YouTube, you want to grow your YouTube following. How are you going to do that? How are you going to get subscribers? What are you going to push? Are you going to do partnerships? Are you going to do deals like that? So all of these things are marketing efforts to be able to market your content, and you need to spend a ton of time, especially in the beginning, doing that. Once you create the machine, it gets better and it’s easier. But even then, you were 18 years in, and I still continue to work to grow that side of it, because that’s the key to, as I said, if you build it, they won’t unless you tell them to.

Martin Cody: Would you believe that’s probably one of the top 1 or 2 areas that organizations completely underestimate with regards to ROI on the investment? that they think it’s just going to happen much faster than it does?

John Lynn: Yeah, we see that a lot. But we’ll just roll out a blog if you write a blog post in the wilderness and nobody reads it. Does it matter? The answer is no. It’s been an interesting shift. In the beginning, you had to go to media organizations and have them publish it, and hope that they write some sort of editorial coverage for you, and you’d get some good distribution, or you’d go to the HIMSS conference, and you’d get distribution there because, at the time, that was the only way for those people to discover new solutions. They would go to the HIMSS conference, they’d walk around and be like, oh, wow, look at all these amazing solutions. The internet and blogging, which essentially is just easy publishing online podcast videos, have become so much easier that’s flattened the world, right? Let alone Google searches and all that. It’s made it. I probably have discovered it before any event. Right. And so I can discover all of that information before, now the problem is different. Before, it was actually a little easier. You go to AMS, they’re all there and you see who’s there and you got to make your decision. Now CIOs, the directors of IT, and everyone who’s dealing with IT are being inundated by messaging from companies, from thought leaders, from spammers, from everyone else. And so they have to come through, and interesting. How do you do that as a vendor? And then we see the growth of influencers, and why are influencers becoming so valuable? It’s because the noise is so loud that many people are saying, I can’t listen to all the noise. I’m going to listen to the influencer who listens to all the noise and cuts through it for you so that you don’t have to.

Martin Cody: Interesting. And you mentioned HIMSS. HIMSS, by the way, is not a paid sponsor of the show, not yet. And you attend a great many number of conferences around the country and do a wonderful job of interviews and promotion of the conference and takeaways and top three things discussed; given that this is actually being recorded a couple of weeks after the HIMSS in 2024, what have you heard from either healthcare organizations or attendees of healthcare organizations, so to speak? And what is top of mind to them? What are they most interested in solving?

John Lynn: It’s a broad question, right? When you have 30,000 people or whatever it was this year at HIMSS, and you have a lot of people who have a lot of different problems depending on what their focus is, and you see that with it, right? So if it’s a CIO, their problem may be retention and maybe workforce and maybe burnout and maybe managing the epic in a lot of the infrastructure elements and what should be our AI strategy and some of these high-level things that they have to deal with. Whereas if you’re the director of telehealth, your question is, how am I going to do telehealth in this weird environment with weird reimbursement and policies and some acceptance and demand from patients, but the doctors don’t necessarily like it as much? And if you’re a director of IT infrastructure, you’re like, oh, wait, am I supposed to be hosting the cloud? Am I a data center guy? Am I a cloud guy? What does the multi-cloud look like? How do I approach this? What is the right approach to this, and how do I navigate all of this? And are cloud costs going to grow? And you’re hearing all of those things. If you’re a security person, you don’t sleep at night. It’s like you’re saying, where are some drugs for me to sleep at night? But not a bad strategy, but they’re suffering through, like, man, I don’t have enough resources.

John Lynn: Or, even if they come with me as resources, can I achieve the goal of securing my organization in a way that a breach doesn’t happen? Many are coming around to the fact that a breach is going to happen. And so okay, that’s fine. What do I do then? What’s my path for? How do I deal with a breach if it happens? What is my plan to be? How do I do business continuity and disaster recovery amidst a breach, and how does that work? We see this wide swath of things. I would say one thing that, ironically, is overarching is AI; every one of them that I was going to mention to you could say AI. And how are we going to use AI in all of these solutions? And I think that’s the most beautiful part of AI, especially generative AI, which has captured the imagination of the industry. Blockchain came right. Cryptocurrencies and people are like, wow, that’s pretty exciting. And then you talk to everyone, and they’re like, I don’t know how to use that. AI is the opposite. Everyone’s. Wow. That’s exciting. I can think of about 15 ways this could help me. And that’s the coolest part of AI.

Martin Cody: Correct. I think the implementation of it and full-scale adoption of it is still a ways off, but if you can find little pieces or challenges to slice off and use, it could have amazing success. I mentioned earlier Swaay Health. So, I would like you to bring the audience up to speed on Swaay Health on what it is, and what it does.

John Lynn: So Swaay.Health is and that’s sway with two A’s if they want to check it out. It’s our healthcare marketing community. So originally, it started as a healthcare B2B marketing community. So how do these health IT companies market to doctors, hospitals, and CIO executives in that B2B kind of realm? And we say it Swaay Health. We’re like, we need you to be successful because we need your solutions in the market, solving the problems that are annoying patients and doctors and nurses. Our goal in Swaay Health, our mission is to help them be more successful so that we can improve the environment of healthcare. Like I literally tell them, if your solution doesn’t improve something in healthcare, then you shouldn’t be here. We don’t want you here, right? Marketing snake oil. But the reality is, that most of them do have solutions that do solve real problems. And so we need them to be successful. Now, we did expand. It used to be called Hypnic. Swaay health was formerly called Hypnic, which was when it was focused on just health IT marketing. But now we’ve really expanded it to the healthcare marketing and provider organizations, hospital health systems that have real challenges. And how do they market their organizations, especially in this world where they’re getting their hands slapped for things like the Facebook Pixel and tracking it, and them saying, if you’re doing that’s a violation of privacy. That’s a whole complicated discussion that’s happening right now. But they’re also like they have a lot of other problems communication-wise.

John Lynn: How do they communicate, even internally or externally, with their staff? We deal with a lot of those healthcare marketers and providers, hospitals, and health systems being able to maximize their marketing efforts. Or think about this: the hospital website, you’re like, well, it’s just a website. What do you mean? Do you realize that most of these hospital websites are like 30,000 pages? And so you’re like, what does that mean? And how do we make sure it’s updated? And how do we make sure it’s optimized for search engines and that patients are getting the information they need? These are complicated problems that have a real impact on patients. So that’s the Swaay Health community. It’s a community of health IT marketers, healthcare marketers,  and PR communication professionals at hospitals and health systems. And we bring them together to talk about these challenging problems because healthcare is a little different, right? Sure, we can pull in stuff from other industries, but there are lots of privacy implications. There are lots of things that you don’t want to say because they come off wrong. When you’re talking about patients and the impact on patients, that’s it’s really a special community. We do an annual conference in May this year in Atlanta that brings all those people together. But I’d like to say on the Health IT side, there are all the people who were standing next to each other at HIMSS for three days and never talked because they were too busy doing their work. So now they come together in Atlanta and get to commiserate, share, support each other, and improve healthcare marketing.

Martin Cody: Given the state of the healthcare industry via marketing, what is one thing that absolutely drives you nuts?

John Lynn: I don’t know; I guess I don’t get driven nuts too much. I would say maybe it’s the lack of effort, and I think it goes back to what we talked about before at many healthcare organizations: they have a monopoly, they have enough patients if you have a six-month waitlist. Why do you care? You don’t. Other than you might care about your patients, right? It’s from a business perspective. In many cases, they don’t have that motivation. So that’s probably the thing that drives me the most nuts is that you could do better. There are opportunities to do better, to make a better patient experience, to make a better employee experience, and to improve not just your bottom line but improve the wellness of your community and your population. There’s lots of opportunities to be able to do that. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a follow-the-money kind of guy, right? I think there are ways to do it and to improve your bottom line as well.

Martin Cody: People completely agree.

John Lynn: They’re fine. They’re doing all right.

Martin Cody: You see a lot of that, especially where it plays with the no surprises act provider data accuracy. And until CMS starts to reenact the fines that they originally started levying, you just don’t see folks, acting organizations, payer’s health systems; what have you taken the initiative to do this? They’re fine right now. They’re okay. But until it starts becoming painful, then they’ll start moving.

John Lynn: You’re highlighting a worse issue, though, and this definitely bothers me. And that is that so many are profiting from the dysfunction. Like that’s what you think. And I’ve said this about big tech. Big tech’s coming in. They’re going to transform healthcare. And you’re like, that is not true. First of all, they don’t care enough, they don’t know it, etc. If Apple was to create an EHR, which everyone was like, why an Apple create an EHR? It would be so much better. I was like, no, they’d still be replicating the same government policies and reimbursement regulations, and it would still be awful, right? But the bigger issue is that if Big Tech wanted to come in and disrupt, they could, but they’d create what, $1 billion, $100 million benefit by disrupting. Right? But if they profit from the dysfunction, they create a $5 billion industry. And that is the fundamental core problem with healthcare today is that there are so many people profiting from the dysfunction of healthcare that not even the politicians want to touch it, because that’s many of their constituents that are benefiting from this dysfunction. And so that is actually, I would say, the biggest fundamental problem you highlighted so perfectly. And the No Surprises Act is trying to address that, right? That, hey, this is a dysfunction, and we need to improve it.

Martin Cody: Let’s get on to a lighter note because we could spend some time on that last segment there. But you’ve been in this industry now for a little over 20 years. You’ve come across hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals that you’ve interviewed. If you could sit down with someone, mentor, guide, someone that you look up to in the space, dead or alive, and want to sit down with them and have an adult beverage or a cup of coffee, who would that person be, and what are you drinking?

John Lynn: I don’t drink adult beverages or coffee, so I’d probably go for a root beer or something like that. But a nice orange soda from Italy would be nice.

Martin Cody: That works.

John Lynn: Or ice cream always works. Go for a chocolate shake; I’ll take that. But it’s interesting. I was thinking about this as we were as I was preparing for our discussion. And what’s interesting for me, the real answer is I’d love to do it with friends. My friend Sara Benoit, who works at Excel. Ironically, when I go to HIMSS, I go to that’s what I get to do. And I’m so blessed and lucky to hang out with some of the most caring and compassionate people who want to improve healthcare. I think that’s what I said, coming out of HIMSS as I was on the plane flying home; I said, Man, I am so blessed to work with so many people who really want to do good. They really want to improve patients’ lives. So I would say that I get to live that, and it’s beautiful. One that I would do that I haven’t done fully. I’ve met her a few times, but one that I would love to just break some bread with, you know, and have a long conversation with is actually Judy Faulkner from Epic. She is the most curious individual. And I did do this once. I was at a Chinese conference, and I was sitting there having breakfast, and she came and sat by me, and I was like, whoa, this is crazy.

John Lynn: You know, she just sat down by me. And by the way, I learned she wasn’t sitting by me. She was sitting by the CIO next to her and the CIO next to her. She was talking to him and doing it. And then the guy left, and she said, you know why? She’s like, I needed to sit by him. She told us why, which was really interesting. I went to visit their site and I had a flight delay. And so I made it late, and I needed to apologize to her. And I felt so bad that I delayed it and whatever. And I saw that, and I was like, wow. This is why Judy has been so successful at Epic. She cares about her customers more than anyone. That’s like, certainly, I don’t think she knew what she was getting into sitting next to me as a media guy. And she was actually super kind, and she’s always been generous with me and whatnot. But it was interesting to see that interaction and I would love to hear more about her story and hear her perspectives. From what I hear, she’s getting up there in age. She should be retiring, but she loves what she does. She’s still in the office doing the grind of running Epic because I think she feels it makes a difference. And so, like hearing from someone as passionate as she is with this, I would love.

Martin Cody: Well, she too may have an inbox of 5000 tickets of people wondering, how are we going to fix this? So that would keep you. That would certainly keep you busy. But no, I think that’s a great one. And I want to close with kind of the speed round. So word association is like we used to play as kids. And I’m going to mention a couple of things. And it’s the first thing that pops into your head. Could be a sentence, could be a phrase, could just be a reaction. Ready. The healthcare initiative of Quintuple Aim.

John Lynn: It’ll be Googleplex Aim, soon enough.

Martin Cody: I share your sentiments. The statement when people say social has no ROI.

John Lynn: If you do it wrong, you’re right. But if you do it right, It’s a connection to people.

Martin Cody: And last one, the first thing that pops into your mind when I say fax machines.

John Lynn: The first thing is the most interoperable part of healthcare. And how sad is that?

Martin Cody: Amen. Couldn’t agree more. And it frustrates me to know when someone says, can we fax that to you? I’m like, no, you cannot. You’d have better luck with a carrier pigeon. I don’t have a fax machine. John, I can’t thank you enough. It has been outstanding, and I do some of the lessons that you provided with regard to the media side of things and the content creation, the time you have to invest, and any other wisdom you want to share with people who might be thinking about a career in healthcare, specifically in the tech side of healthcare that you’ve learned from over the last 20 some odd years.

John Lynn: I think it’s a simple concept that I see over, everyone that I talk to and everyone I meet with, and this is true on the health IT side. It’s true on the media side; it’s true on the marketing side. And it’s all about the people. It’s about the people that you interact with, the friendships you make, the connections you make. The network that you build is the key to success. It’s the key to success in your career. It’s key to happiness in your career. In doing that, I take a unique approach, and we do it at Swaay Health. We talk about it as a community principle. I call it give before you get. And I think that’s true for people. Find how many people you can help, whether you’re at a conference or whether it’s online, see how many people you can help, and then you’ll be shocked about how much you receive in return and not in a transactional. I’m going to help you use it, you help me help as many people as you can, and it will transform your career, your success, and your happiness, and you’ll just enjoy those relationships so much more. So that’s what I my biggest suggestion is to find ways to give to as many people as possible, and you’ll be astounded on by how you are blessed and how you benefit from it.

Martin Cody: I completely agree, and one of the things you said in that philosophy is that it can’t be transactional. You’re not doing it to get something from the other person; you’re doing it to do it. And by the way, this isn’t quick. It’s not. We suffer from immediate gratification these days and wanting to get something in a second. This is a lot of work, media and marketing. Healthcare media is a lot of work, but if you’re continually giving value to people, that work will be rewarded. And it’s amazing how often it happens, both professionally and to your point about it’s going to help you psychologically and you’ll be amazed and blessed with the results. I think that’s outstanding wisdom, and thank you for sharing that.

John Lynn: Yeah. Thank you. I look at it, what we build in healthcare IT today is our Health IT community and Swaay Health is our healthcare marketing community. And we use the word community in a real way. It’s a community of people that want to help each other. I use this example when you go across the street and say, can I borrow an egg? That’s not a transactional relationship, right? That’s I needed something. Yeah, I have it. I’m happy to give it to you. And that’s what happens in communities of people, is if you give to all these people with no expectation of return, then you receive so much in return, you’re just not sure who from or how. And that’s the beauty of a community.

Martin Cody: Awesome. I appreciate the thoughts, the wisdom, the sentiment, and certainly your time invested. Thank you so much, John Lynn. I wish you the best of success going forward, and I’m sure we’re going to cross paths at a conference soon.

John Lynn: I’m sure we will. Thanks for having me on. This is a lot of fun.

Martin Cody: All right. Cheers. Talk to you soon.

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.