Interview Series, Episode 10: Sherri Douville

Tom :25 Our guest today is Sherri Douville, CEO and board member at Medigram and a serial published author and speaker in mobile medical technology, healthcare, digital transformation, and leadership. Sherri is the co-chair of the IEEE trust technical standard project for clinical IoT and medical industry technology. Previously, Sherri worked with the medical device and pharma industry, both as a consultant and for many years with Johnson & Johnson. Today, in addition to being the CEO at Medigram, Sherri advises startups and serves on a series of boards, including as a member of the Board of fellows for Santa Clara University, where she went to school, and an advisor to the Santa Clara University, Leavey School of Business corporate board education. She’s also a member of the advisory board for women’s corporate board readiness program, for which she co-designed and lead co-delivery of the privacy and security curriculum. Sherri, thanks for joining us today.

Sherri 1:21 It’s my honor to be here, Tom, thanks for having me.

Tom  1:25 No, we’re really excited for this, I’ve been looking forward. So, Sherri, you and I met several years ago, some of the some of the things that we share in common is really helping technology have a greater impact in healthcare and for the patient. You recently had a new book come out, called Mobile Medicine: Overcoming People, Culture and Governance, where you’re the lead author and editor of the book. It was recently recognized and ranked number one by book authority as the best new healthcare e-book to read in 2021. And it was also featured on the American Association for physician leadership website in September. Congratulations on that. And one of the things that I wanted, my first question for you really is about, in addition to the book being amazing, the participants who contributed into the book is equally as impressive. Can, you share a little bit about how you listed the involvement of so many thought leaders into this book?

Sherri  2:18 That’s very kind. And I’m also super excited that it’s the only book that was also featured by IEEE, and the American Association for physician leadership. So that combination, is really what we’re both passionate about driving, which is why I’m super excited to be here. So where are we now in terms of technology and healthcare? And it doesn’t seem like everyone just kind of gets bogged down by so much noise.  And so, I think a lot of that ties back to just you know, we have a lot of lack of logical application of the technology, you know, relevant medicine, lack of clear priorities, there’s untold numbers of vendors vying for the space and this is you know, regardless of their expertise and intelligence for medicine, but everybody wants to take a bite of the $3 trillion healthcare market. The meaningful contribution is also often lacking despite activity. Everyone also knows that both higher education and medicine need to digitally transform, right? Absolutely. Where Tom?  I can I put it back on you and asked you to characterize for us?

Tom  3:31 Yeah, well, I’ll say it this way. Let’s let’s stay in healthcare, right for the moment cuz that’s, that’s where the book is focused. You know, a lot of it has to do on two things. One is shortening the time from innovation to impact the patient, number one, and two, and this is why I love the title you chose for the book overcoming people, culture and governance. It’s so much not about technology most of the time. It’s really about managing the change that comes along with the introduction of the technology.

Sherri 4:00 But thank you so much. And you’re getting right to the heart of why we did the book. It’s all about, I’ve been a CEO and board member of Medigram really working to build our talent ecosystem, because there’s not a lot of plug and play talent ready to really transform healthcare with technology. And so, it’s about identifying those diamonds in the rough. And also helping them develop and connecting them with other diamonds in the rough to help each other polish. And that’s really what the, the seed of the focus of the book is about. So, what I’ve been super passionate about is just fostering talent that allows them to be competitive in the market, and also allows the market to be a competitive place for them. And we want to make that fun. And we want to drive action that drives wins, which is why a book is a great vehicle for that, because it’s something very tangible, that you can, you know, drive towards results from. And it’s critical. So a third of our book has coverage of clients privacy and security, because that is a largest area of mistrust for health systems, According to Forrester. And so we really need to fix that. And it’s really an extreme team sport. So it’s not just security staff that can fix that by themselves. And so I believe that we really need to build a team of teams to solve health care’s biggest tech challenges. And the book Mobile Medicine brings that to life, both in its message and the way it was put together. So medical technology, I also believe, has to come from insiders, because what you need is you’ve got to build in resilience, got to build in security, and you have to understand the culture and the dynamics of medicine. And we also, you know, not just insiders by themselves, we have to invite in and onboard diverse views that reflect the patients and the clinician populations. I’m also co-chair like you said, the trust project for clinical IoT for IEEE and the team we built there has also informed a portion of the books focus. So a good portion of the majority of our professional collaborators that we’ve had over the years are part of the book team. So we didn’t just, you know, we didn’t cold call that the most amazing thought leaders that we could find either to be part of the book, we we’ve been engaged with them for some years. And then it was kind of a natural outgrowth of that relationship. So the contributors have been collaborating informally in a variety of configurations. For some years before the book. A few years ago, we put together like a collaborative, a small group of CIOs and Chief Information Security officers. And then in parallel, we had like a Venn diagram overlap of some really deeply technical people learning through IEEE, and because the kind of work I do mobility and medicine, it’s full stack. It’s multiple technologies. And then as it transitions into clinical IoT, that’s lots of technology domains. And so you really need to have a good network of lots of different areas of expertise. It just goes far beyond consumer tech, you know, and web apps. And so we have some really passionate communities, from both the collaborative as well as from IEEE, and we mash that up together to the book.

Tom 7:08 Oh, that that’s a great story. I understand you’ve started working on the next book, can you tell us a little bit about what the focus of that will be?

Sherri 7:17 Absolutely. Um, so a huge theme, like I was saying over a third of the coverage of Mobile Medicine is risk compliance and security. And so we were taking the concept of risk. And, and some of this also comes out of my work on the women’s corporate board readiness program at Santa Clara Executive Education Center. And but what I, what I do with the women is help them understand that no one really owns there’s not a lot of status quo ownership of privacy and security. And so it’s really a place where they can differentiate themselves where they can develop themselves into a leader, because it’s not like it’s a field that’s out, you know, like, some domains in medicine, you know, there’s successive generations of owners of those fields, right? And if you’re a female physician, you just kind of want to be aware and wise to, like, Do I really have a chance to become preeminent in this field? What kind of mentor what I mean? Or is it just too much blockage, right? It’s so what’s great technology is that we have while it’s not great that we have so many risks and challenges, what is great is that we don’t have that ossification that a lot of domains have. And so the field is open, for new talent to come in. And the flip side of that is that just the scope and scale of challenge is, is really unlike anything that we’ve seen. And so that’s why there was such a positive response to our focus on risk that we’ve really been encouraged to, to really double down on that and make that really the primary focus. And so our book team for the second book is even more unbelievably impressive. And I hope I get to talk to you about that another time. But we’re going beyond really what traditional audit committees typically focus on, who are the ones that look at risk, an area specific to innovation and research and development. And your key audience. Right. And, and, and areas like security, trust, clinical risk, technical risk, and talent issues. And then so far, our most developed areas of this book are related to building and running cross functional teams and making them as productive as possible. And we’re also exploring and solving with some of the real leaders in the field, about the challenge of physicians learning about and using advanced technology is, and at the same time, it’s not just putting it on physicians, but also highlighting the subject of hubris and technology. And just other key areas like misinformation, specific to technology, which is in general as an issue. Gaps in logic, when you look at putting advanced technology in medicine. And an interest you and I both share is making sure we can retain people who want different and new things from their institutions, like ethics. They’re asking leadership, what’s the moral thing to do? And then we’re also covering things like how Agile and Scrum workflows supports a servant leadership model. And really the drive to make organizations more flexible for people, more competitive. And we really want to attract people to our fields, and leverage really ambitious people to make a huge contribution soon in our lifetimes.

Tom 10:21 Yeah. You know, I think that’s great. And I’ll tell you why. Because I see from my vantage point so many lanes, and that’s the word I’m going to pick so many lanes in which this tension between innovation and risk come into play, just to name a couple in the healthcare. I could, we could do a whole other podcast talking about the higher education part of my role here, but you know, business innovation, has those tensions built in around launching new services as we think about getting out of the hospital and doing things and other settings, the clinical practice and the outcomes and the risk and liabilities… There’s all sorts of kind of that that risk compliance and security aspect of what you’re, what you’re doing. This whole data strategy, how do we think about using data as an asset, and as a way to create new collaborations and better outcomes, is wrought with those types of challenges and tensions. And then the last one I’ll mentioned, because you kind of mentioned it, but the term we’ve put around in here at the University of California, is just ethical AI. I mean, you know, there’s a whole body of subject matter experts starting to come together talking about the ethical uses of AI, what’s appropriate, what brings equity, you know, in terms of already dealing with a tremendous health disparities issue in our country here, because that’s what I focus most on but you know, now you talk about this issues of advanced technologies, analytical techniques, and is it going to be done in a way that is going to provide better equity rather then exacerbate current health inequities that we have within the system? So, you’re going to have so many different avenues in which to take that topic to talk about the challenges that are facing healthcare as we move forward. I think that’s fantastic.

Tom 12:03 Well, let’s so let’s say on the topic of, you know, health care, and the changes that we’re all trying to enact to hopefully create a better world and the world that we want to live in. You have a passion for the topic of transformational leadership, I’m very well invested into that topic as well, and one of the things I’ve done here at the University of California is develop a Leadership Academy to really build a cadre of transformational leaders. We started thinking about helping IT professionals become transformational leaders, what we found is we have now a good number of non-IT professionals who have now joined the Academy because the content that they get, which is done in partnership with the Haas School of Business up at Berkeley, is generic, it’s not unique to IT professionals. It’s really about people who are trying to enact change in the organizations that are part of so we have functional executives, and even medically trained professionals who have now joined the cohorts of our academies. Tell me a little bit about your view on transformational leadership, and as you see it working in healthcare today. What are we doing right? Where is there still missed opportunities for us to do it in a way that actually brings the type of changes that we’re looking for?

Sherri 13:15 I love the topic, and if you have a super long conversation about I’d love to talk to you about the new Sci Fi series Foundation sometime. And then we can really get into talking about change and demographics and the things that I think really drive the need for transformational leadership. But you and I, we interacted about one of my role models, he also helped us a lot with mobile medicine. And he’s the author of a number of really interesting books, one of them seminal being Strategic Intelligence, Michael McCabe. And so the thing that he underscores is just the fact that we live in a such a diverse context. So diversity is not a buzzword, I get really frustrated when people in Silicon Valley talk about it like that, because diversity is the reality of the world that we live in, especially in health systems. But the patient care population, as well as the workforce, is extremely diverse, much more than anything that you seem technology sector. And every person needs a different form of leadership from us. So medical science and technology, they do have a lot in common, and we should focus on those things. But they also have vast differences. And so how are we going to take what’s in common to marry the best of technology with science in a way that makes medical care better, and I just don’t see any other way except for leveraging transformational leadership. And it’s really what I see as a universal requirement. It’s urgent, but it’s actually really hard. It’s not, it’s, I feel like there’s not a lot of formal education about it, I feel like there’s not enough that’s really understood about it, that people have a really good practice or peer groups, you know, around it. It’s very different from traditional bureaucratic leadership, which is a lot more laissez faire, and sort of rule based. Other things that make it really hard and really rewarding is that it demands you know, real authenticity, I mean, you got to be ready for your teammates to pretty much know everything about you all, all good or bad. Everything in between, right. And the things that talent wants, in terms of engaging in that kind of model is that they want a real community, which is a pain in the butt to build is, it’s really hard. I don’t know if I can say that on your show. But it’s hard work. It’s really hard work, and they want real relationships. And to make that happen it just requires extraordinary execution, and constant communication to make it real. And that is a ton of energy. Transformational Leadership is all about involving people in a totally new way. So, I think the whole thing about it just requires amazing amounts of energy. And that’s just really hard.

Tom 15:54 You know, I think you hit it on the head, right? You know, it’s not a transformational leadership is no longer about, and I can say this, because I’ve been involved in trying to bring change organizations for the majority of my career. It’s no longer about some senior individual setting a vision and saying, here’s where we’re going. It’s much more about a participative process. As a leader being vulnerable, being authentic, being comfortable with saying, “I don’t know the answer, but collectively we’re going to figure it out together.” It’s a very, very different role of transformational leadership than even 10 years ago, from my perspective, and kind of how I’ve learned how I’ve needed to evolve and playing that role. You know, it’s kind of like you’re in, you’re not leading them, you’re inviting them to participate in a process and a journey. And part of that means giving the reins over to them, and maybe learning to become comfortable with that they will make the organization and you know, and the people who choose to join, it will go about a different way than maybe if you were just kind of setting the pace and trying to march the band forward, it’s going to be a little bit more messy. But what’s important is the buy in, right? And I think that’s what you’re pointing to is how do you get that broad participation of people getting on board, communicating, talking, building community and having a collective vision of where the organization wants and needs to move. It’s not a one person game, right? It’s absolutely a team sport.

Sherri 17:24 Definitely.

Tom 17:25 So, you’re involved in, in so many things, right? Since 2014, you’ve been doing your own thing. And it’s not just one thing, you’ve been doing your own things. You’ve been building your own kind of steam engines. But you’ve got this company, that you’re CEO and head of the board on Medigram, can you tell our listeners Medigram, how it came to be, what your vision for it was? What it is where it’s going?

Sherri 17:50 Physicians cannot use their cell phones, much of the time in hospitals, we were talking about connectivity. And that also applies to clinics. And as you can imagine, it’s very important, especially when you have multiple people working on a clinical case, you know, for them to be able to capture/record their thoughts quickly before they move on to the next task. And so that’s really, at the heart of why Medigram exists, is that solving for all that is a totally different technical challenge than like a regular web app, or even the app that we’re communicating on right now. And the reason why it’s important is that we live in a world where a life is lost every nine minutes, because of a delay in information. And that’s according to the esteemed Institute for Healthcare Improvement. So as you know, the huge challenge of building this company has been that driving workflow efficiency is not automatically revenue positive and medicine, especially in certain regions like ours., so when what you need to have is and what we’re building, what we built a Medigram is an integrated cross functional it product medicine and finance capability that can tackle workflows, where you can drive clinical success and efficiently and also drive financial success at the same time. And that’s what we focus on. So we’re really inspired by our values and our team of treating each other with respect, building trust, and our collective love of innovation. So what our technology is designed for is to allow physicians to communicate when nothing else does, which happens a lot. And like I was saying the phone’s not working. It has to be addressed accurately from a tech perspective. So at Medigram, we’ve developed patented a technical solution, we own the IP design, it’s based on peer reviewed published research that we did in the journal hospital medicine. But as you know, and said before, the technology alone, as fantastic as this is, isn’t enough, you have to also incorporate all the expertise and intelligence across multiple functions, that allows us to understand how workflows actually affect clinical outcomes, the quality metrics that the physician executives are measured on, and also the finance or else, don’t pass go. So, what has to happen to make all that work, right, is what we focus on. We focus on Team of Teams, and you have to have that, so that’s been a big motivator of the book, Mobile Medicine is the community. And our CTO Chief Security Officer, Eric Svetcov says that that our book team is really like a think tank really more than a traditional co-author team. So the work on the book really helped make some of the hard work more exciting, which was probably it’s best feature or best benefit. And so, the team members that are both internal as well as collaborators are able to see  what winning can look like when you do complex teamwork, because it’s really hard, So our solution at Medigram is built for reliability, privacy, security, and to all levels of the solution. And the intent of the book Mobile Medicine is to provide the handbook on implementation for mobile medicine, which is an area as you know, of widespread blindness amongst tech companies that wants to get into medicine. So where are we going? At Medigram we are focused on creating a world where we need and define the kind of teamwork that I’ve been talking about, that I’m passionate about. And this is enabled through the groundbreaking and constant training and upskilling that we do in technology, culture, the market communication, and these are practices that we’ve been cultivating for years, where we have advisors, coaches and organizations that we’ve been partnered with for a long time for many years. One of my proudest accomplishments is really successfully recruiting and making productive teams of individuals with very different backgrounds, very different motivations, namely, what Michael Maccoby would call “bureaucratic individuals,” which you have to have in healthcare, or anything that’s high risk, high compliance, and interactives that are going to innovate and solve. So for example, we have an infrastructure technology talent, whose profile we’re really elevating, we’re making that role more interactive. And that’s very different from what’s traditionally been done in enterprise software. We’ve also successfully on boarded and trading several people to bring their unique superpowers from other industries to healthcare technologies like operations, procurement, communications, and cybersecurity. So that’s a little bit about what we did here at Medigram.

Tom 22:26 You know, we were talking earlier, we were talking about the challenges of an early stage company, which comes along with challenges, and you had what I thought was a unique answer in terms of where you went first about what’s key for an early stage company to kind of get its momentum and build itself into a larger company, can you share some of that with our audience?

Sherri  22:43 What I’m passionate about is that I think that technology has to build trust with medicine, with physicians, and with the organizations in which they operate, as well as with the patient to some degree. Um, so building and preserving trust has many layers. To start from an IT perspective, if I can’t explain the technology at every layer of the stack, like in terms of the OSI model, or at the cellular or the atomic or the bit level, then you don’t really understand it. And that proposed product might not work, you know, I think we’re seeing a lot of challenges with a lot of, you know, for lack of a better word, lazy thinking in terms of technology implementations. Then there’s a lot of fallout from that in terms of it not working or in terms of the number of vulnerabilities that it introduces, and the risk that introduces into the environments. And we see this all the time with web apps, and apps that are designed to be originally stationary to work on the desktop, but they don’t really work on the go, or in a different context, or on a different form factor. And they don’t even work for consumers all the time. So I think that we really have to, as technologists take responsibility to build in and demonstrate competence that’s worthy of medicine. Think about all the training and risk and liability and insurance that physicians carry, and the responsibility that they have for the lives of their patients. And as technologists, if we are going to address this market, that we have to take, we don’t have the same training integrated programs, I’m not saying that, and I’m not trying to saddle people with a bunch of extra bureaucracy and insurance, but I’m saying, just understand what you’re doing, and how important it is, and really take that responsibility seriously. And the only way you can really do that, I think, is through advanced levels of teamwork. So that you can execute. And you can’t just pay lip service to it. So, like I was saying, we’ve been working with these partner organizations, for several years, because you have to build competencies. That’s how you build trust, you have to have competence in technology, you have to have competence in market comprehension and communication and team design. And you also need to make it fun. Right? Fun helps with trust. Within a team context with your internal team or the team you’re collaborating with, so you can win together. And a lot of leading companies you see start to have a chief trust officer. I co-chair trust for IEEE, and the UL standard for clinical IoT, like I was saying, and the reason is because we get to help define what trust means. And we solicited feedback on that from the top researchers in the field and the top position leaders. And we need to figure out what that really means for advanced technologies in medicine. But we also get to learn from experts from all over the world, who address trust from different parts of both the technical stack, as well as the regulatory stack. And so, what we believe, is that Medigram can help customers win through understanding helping to shape and foster trust. I think that that’s true for a lot of companies, that they would do well the focus on that. So, what we want to do is save hundreds of 1000s of lives, delay disability for millions more, help health systems be financially successful. But I think that this is really the only way. A startup, in the wake of all this noise, the challenges with tech and health care from companies of all sizes, mistrust of everything from early-stage companies, like Theranos, to even departments themselves hired into health systems and the challenges with that, and their relationships with clinicians, or the nature of those relationships. And all the difficulties in the news about the fortune five, you know, specific to the ire, that a lot of the physicians in a private conversation will tell you that they really feel about the sector. We have to turn that around. And the way we turn it around is through defining and building trust.

Tom 26:32 Excellent, thank you. – Ok Sherri, next question. One of the benefits of having a podcast with such accomplished guests like yourself, is that I get to ask a question that helps our listeners, many of which who are early and mid-career people, who are still building and aspiring their career. What are the keys to success? So that’s my question to you – can you share the keys to success in your career and maybe two to three actionable pieces of advice for those listeners who are still building their career?

Sherri 27:01 Yeah, thank you. I would say, be a builder. Don’t be a diminisher. And develop your self-confidence, and make sure you are very aware of, you know, master yourself. Master your professional habits, your intellectual growth, your emotional management, and you want to get yourself to a point where you’re really more focused on other people than you are on you, while you’re aware of you. And one of the things you want to do, while you’re thinking about what you can offer the world, is think about the super powers that you have… if you have super powers of confidence, for me it’s strategy, I think you share that too, you want to really bet on that. And while driving a constant learning. And that’s what I would advise, for a younger me. You have to, you have to build competency in all the areas you’re going to touch. Especially if you’re someone like me. I’m female, right? And so, I can’t succeed by just being a figure head of one type of function. To be successful, to earn the respect and the trust and collaborations of multiple kinds of innovators, I need to have confidence.

Tom 28:19 That’s excellent, I love it- well, Sherri, thank you for joining us today – it was fantastic having you – again, congrats on the book. We will continue to watch your moves. I’ve always enjoyed watching you orchestrate and build eco-systems. It’s something that I also appreciate very much how hard it is, but also how beneficial it is. So, thanks again for being on our podcast today and sharing all of the things you’re working on.

Sherri 28:45 You’re welcome, thank you.