Latest / The Bold Lounge / Bonus Episode: Stephanie Lahr: The Bold Rx- Redefining Innovation and Impact

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Bonus Episode: Stephanie Lahr: The Bold Rx- Redefining Innovation and Impact · The Bold Lounge

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: My name is Leigh Burgess and I will be your host.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: This podcast is all about those kinds of stories.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Every week, we'll hear from someone who has taken a leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Whether they face challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be freed.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Tune in and get ready to be inspired.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bold Lounge.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I'm Leigh Burgess, your host, and I'm Stephanie Lahr, so excited to have you today here and to talk specifically about being bold in your career.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: So we'll start off just with your definition of bold what does it look like in your world?
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think bold is about authenticity, but also pushing your own limits, digging deep into understanding what drives you, pushing your own limits, digging deep into understanding what drives you and then making sure that you are authentically pushing toward that every day.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: We're not going to all get there with every single decision we make, but it's that introspection and the push to just continually strive to really make things better.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great definition.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I think one of the things that in all the podcasts that I've done and over 250 definitions of being bold, there's some similarities there.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: I think one of the most interesting ones across all of them is that it's a choice, right?
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: So you can't make somebody bold, you can't, you know, like no magic wand, right, right, and you're not always bold.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: No, well, yeah, you might be bold, but you're not always confident, right?
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: At least you have a little doubt here or there and you do it anyway.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you think about your career, specifically in healthcare, when was a bold moment where you kind of live that definition?
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Honestly.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: I mean I can think of a lot.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Maybe not daily, but you know so as a physician who now helps lead a health tech company, clearly it's not been a path of direct.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: I thought I don't know that this is going to align with the other life goals that I have and the career goals that I have.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: I might switch, which, if you know about medical education is like not an easy thing to do.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: Just like I think I'll switch residency programs, you don't just change your major.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that'll be fine.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: But I did and I switched to internal medicine.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: I went back to where I had done my medical school training and then just kind of moved from there.
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: When I started my career as a hospitalist, I met with the CEO and we had some conversations and he was like, hey, well, if you have this interest in technology which I didn't really I was willing to use an EMR, which at the time was a big deal.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: It was like wait you're okay with an EMR, like that's notable.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: And he was like, will you help us?
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: And I'm like sure.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: And so then I started this pivot really of my career and thought, well, does being a physician have to be just about practicing and taking care of patients?
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: And it didn't.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: And then most recently, I've been at Artisite now two and a half years, a startup, now post-series B, but I was an executive in a health system and having a great time in a community that I loved.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: But I was ready for change and to impact the market and do something in health care in a different way, and so I decided to take this leap from what had been a career in the provider side of medicine and leap into the vendor side and see what I could impact in another way, leveraging artificial intelligence and automation, knowing that that path was still really unwritten.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: Very innovative, right.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: And you said you weren't bold.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Every day I'm pretty sure there's like a thousand bold moves in there.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah Well, again, I think it's.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: If you're, if you're really thinking about how you can make an impact and you're passionate about it, you are being bold, you just are bold.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't go around like with the sign and you don't start the day with I'm going to go be bold today, you just be you, which goes back to your definition, which is being authentic.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: So when you think about some of the rules that we have now around artificial intelligence and rules are there for a reason, but which one would you boldly break if you could?
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Just to innovate faster or to be able to provide data in a different way?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Or is there one that comes to mind for you with all the roles we have?
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean honestly probably not, because I think we're still trying to understand even what rules need to be written.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Got it Establishing them yeah.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: But I think we have to be bold from the standpoint of thinking about and really accepting the idea that this is the future of where we're going.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Resistance is not going to help anyone.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: The future of where we're going Resistance is not going to help anyone.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: We need automation, but we need to be cautious and thoughtful about where we're going to do it.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: I think, as a company who is sort of centered around computer vision, that's an area of conversation that I get into with people a lot, because there's this idea of like well, cameras watching everything, we don't want that.
• 5:43
  Speaker 2: And it's like well, what's wrong with that?
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, what is it about it that you don't like?
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: It's not necessarily a person watching you, but if that was able to help you get your job done, if that prevented you from having to document that or send a message to somebody else because we could just see it happening, wouldn't that be a tool?
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: So I think there's so lot, so much opportunity with artificial intelligence.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: We are going to have to be careful about it.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: There are privacy concerns, security concerns, all of those kinds of things.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: But I think it is definitely an area where we're going to have to boldly push, but we're going to need some of those guardrails in order to help us figure out what we don't know yet, right?
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: So, as a leader in your company and facing resistance, what are some things you do to help you move through those moments, either with someone externally around it or internally with regard to you know, just resisting that change Because usually, being bold, 99% of the time there's some type of change.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say, internally we are a company of bold people who are probably gravitated toward what we're doing because we're ready to, you know, sort of try a new path.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: But I think a lot of times resistance comes from two things fear and lack of understanding, and they can be intertwined with each other, right, right.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: So I think when you encounter that, then those are the things you have to dig into with whomever you know or whatever entity you're working with, to figure out what is at the root of the fear and or the lack of understanding.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: And then how can we bridge that gap with information, because I think that's, you know, that's often where, where people are just like, well, I'm happy enough with what I'm doing, because what you're talking about is too unknown, and I'm not, I just I'm scared of it.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, my favorite and most, I think, least favorite honestly statement that people make is this is how we've always done it and then nothing's wrong with it, Just status quo, Right.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: But I think that's another piece is people are really, and should, be proud of the history, of what brought them to where they are today.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: Everything is an evolution, right, life is an evolution as we move things forward.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: It's never about disrespecting what we've done previously.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: But I think people get sensitive to that right.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: People put so much time and effort and have so much ownership over where we've been, the what we've always done, that this idea sometimes that we are going to go in another direction feels like a criticism, like, oh so you're saying what I did was wrong, and that's another piece that you kind of have to chip into and say, no, not at all, we would never we wouldn't even be have an opportunity to go to this next level without the path that you trudged leading up to here.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: But now we have an opportunity to go forward in a new way and we need to work through that together.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell me a little about your company and the things that differentiate you from others who may be in the same space.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, one of the things again for me, leaving the provider side of healthcare and coming over to the vendor side, there were some things that I really I needed to be able to align with, and one of them was that our CEO and founder is a clinician, that our CEO and founder is a clinician, right, and so he's deeply rooted in the challenges that we are really trying to address with advanced technology in healthcare, and my mantra sort of personally has always been how do we bring the joy back to medicine?
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: And, as a technologist in the healthcare space with a clinical background, there were many times where I felt like the best I could do was say we can make it suck less, which, you know, I mean not really billboard worthy, but better than nothing.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And it's honest, it's honest, it's authentic.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: But I was inspired by his vision and the leveraging of technology and the team that he had put together, with a deep AI background, software engineering background, to really be able to bring automation to the bedside right.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: So Artisite, at its core, is virtual care platform with automation.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: So, you know, thinking about nurses, pharmacists, physicians that might want to take care of a patient in a more remote setting or, you know, in another hospital, we'retime location system.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Basically, how do we replicate human senses seeing, hearing, speaking, knowing where things are in space so that we can assist clinicians and take the friction stuff off of their plates and if we can see it, if we can hear it, if we can know where it is, bring that to them.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: And so, with a foundation of cameras, speakers, microphones in a room, you create a foundation and a trust and an experience in using those technologies as they were originally designed.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: And then we layer on artificial intelligence algorithms that we can use to analyze what's also being seen and heard and sensed and then we can automate for our clinicians.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: And so that ability to and the deep again deep technical background of the team, that vision for how to carry that forward, and every day there's some new idea about how we can leverage these same technologies to chip further and further away at, you know, some of these high friction areas and to support the acquisition of high quality data.
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we've talked about beliefs and like the system and things that we've learned and things that we'd like to change.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: We've talked about ownership of like who owns potentially the innovation.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: When you think about a learning that we've had and it's being applied in 2025, what does that look like?
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: How are we doing things really at a higher pace of implementation, which was always one of my challenges in healthcare was like things move extremely slow, and rightly so.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: They're not always open to things that have a high risk.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: You know the tolerance for it.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: That's why I liked research so much, because we kind of we got to push it.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: But in IT, specifically, we you know there's cybersecurity, data breaches that we hear about all the time and those types of things.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: What are we doing now, in 2025, like applying a learning, whether it's from one of those things that's happened in the past, or maybe even something new?
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's two things that come to my mind.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: One I do think that there is more of a general willingness to fail and think about failing fast and failing in a controlled environment, but I do think, in healthcare failure that word sounds scary because people think, well, you have lives of people in your hands and so, yeah, someone could get hurt.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: But there are ways to control these innovations in an environment that, if there is a failure, there's limited outfall from that.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: The other thing, I think, though, that is really amazing right now.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: For many years, I think, what we saw from technology was the technology.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: People sat over to the side, created their tech.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: Maybe they had clinicians working for them.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: More than likely they did not.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: They identified a tool.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Hopefully they identified a problem, but they definitely identified a tool.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Hopefully they identified a problem, but they definitely identified a tool.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Then they had a team that went out and went to all the health systems and said, well, we're sure you need what we do.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: And then the health system, very similarly in their technical structure, said sure, that seems like something we would do.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: Maybe they engaged clinicians, maybe they did not, and then we had this very transactional relationship.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: I think we've seen a huge transformation in this space.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: I mean, the number of technology companies that are clinically led now or founded by clinicians who understand a problem and then can go and find ways to bring technology to bear, means that we are seeing technologies come into healthcare that are much more tightly aligned with the problems that really need to be solved.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: The other thing is, I know for us, we get most of our good ideas about where we're going next from our customers, and so I think that's another really powerful thing that we're seeing in the marketplace right now is it's not about.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's been conversation for a long time about vendors saying you know, I want to be a partner.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: I don't want to be, you know, a transactional vendor, but partnership when it comes to the development of your tools is next level.
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: Right, it's one thing to provide great service and be a partner, but we are working with our health systems and literally building the new tools for what we're going to do inside these health systems so that then they are most tightly aligned with really making sure that they will solve the problems that we need them to, because they were created with their assistance in their real environments.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: And I think that's you know.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: Especially as we think about artificial intelligence, that's going to be necessary.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Computer vision you can't train it on a stage, you can't just make up a fake environment.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: We need to be truly embedded with a health system, and I'm seeing a lot of companies and technologies that are starting to really align with a handful of their customers and co-develop together, and I think that's going to get us much further faster.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: When you think about your partnerships and the partners that you have in the systems, is there one thing that stands out from those that are more receptive to what you're doing versus those that are waiting and seeing what's a characteristic of a pioneer that's out there right now?
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think when I look at the organizations that are moving boldly with us, they tend to be obviously from the very top.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: The leadership team has set a vision for being bold, for being first, and then created also a culture of that means we're not going to get it all right.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: It's more important to us to be bold and be out in front and then figure out, you know, where we need to make transitions and that that's okay.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: But then the culture, you see it, they've done an amazing job of disseminating that all the way to the front line.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: And so the front line clinicians, the front line techs, the front line, anybody that's doing the work where really most of our technologies are, you know, being utilized, they see the vision too right, and I think you know there are lots of organizations that can have, you can have, a great vision at the top, but if it hasn't been culturally, you know, disseminated in a way that makes it important to everybody in the organization and what role they can participate in and that each of those levels they too can be bold, then you don't see as much success in adoption.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's such an important part and a lot of people don't even think about the culture.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, we hear it, we hear the word, but in the sense of I mean it's so important, at least for me.
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: Leading any team and I absolutely believe this is probably you as well is you have to be able to innovate and not always knock it out of the park.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: You're going to fail sometimes, right?
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: So when you think about bringing the joy of health care back, what does that mean for a clinician specifically?
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it means that the relationship between the clinician and the patient becomes the focus again and the data that you need, the documentation that you need to do, the tools that can help advance that patient's care are unburdensome and natural.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: And no physician, no nurse ever got up and said gosh, I don't want to go to work today, because if I have to see, you know, one more patient is going to be the problem, Like I don't want to talk to one more person.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: It's never that right.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: That's why you're doing what you're doing.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: I don't want to write one more note, I don't want to have to click one more box, I don't want to have to jump through another hoop of red tape.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: Those are the things that make people say, gosh, I'm not sure I can keep doing this.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: And so if we can really put the relationship back at the center, then I think that's where we're going to see the joy return.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely think you have a book title there.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: So see the joy return.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I definitely think you have a book title there.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: So, in that sense, because I think you hit the nail on the head, we do what we do in healthcare as an administrator, as a physician, as a nurse, as a tech, whatever you are it's about the patients.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: That's why you go into it and, as you were saying, like I never once said, man, I don't want to see one more patient or see another person coming into our research entity or whatever it was.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: It's usually something that's you know, charting or some regulatory piece, or just, you know, implementation of a new technology.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Sometimes that can be pretty painful.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: I love that you're talking about you know to me the right words, like focusing on the patient partnership culture.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: What advice would you give as we close out?
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: What advice would you give to a physician who wants to make that pivot, Not so much during the residency, but now?
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: They're already established and they're up and running and they really want to go and work with companies like yours that are ready to, you know, basically rock and roll and innovate.
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: Well, let me ask you this Do you mean like they're ready to maybe make a career adjustment?
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like a pivot out and it's a bold move right, it is Absolutely.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: Because when you're being bold, you're not always understood, and that's the tough part.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: I think honestly sometimes in your career, like you need to take some time, set aside time to reflect on what am I passionate about, like what are the elements of what I've been doing or the things that are driving me, that will drive passion, Because it's going to take like it will be a bumpy road, the transition will be challenging and that passion will keep you committed and positive toward it.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: And then I would say, build a network, reach out.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: There's a number I mean, there's actually lots of clinicians, physicians that are, you know, hybrid in these spaces.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: Many of them, you know, maybe they're still fully practicing, but they're doing some of this stuff on the side.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Then they convert completely over.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Maybe they've gone into administration.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: There's so many different opportunities.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: That's one of the things I think is amazing about a clinical career is you can morph it into so many different things.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: A lot of lanes, right, yeah, absolutely.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: But I think again, build the network, look to see who's out there, jump on LinkedIn and just wander around to see and then reach out.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: People reach out to me all the time.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: I was just meeting with a colleague this morning who, another physician, made the transition to a health IT company about a year after I did, and he reached out to me at the very beginning and he said I'm new on this path and what do I need to know, like, what should I do and what should I do?
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: And I was like I've only been doing this a year, I don't know if I really have any expert advice, but I gave him some thoughts.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: So we caught up today and we're both in our groove and he's like gosh.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: I just am still so thankful for those conversations that we had and these things that came out of that, and I know that he too has then gone on to have those conversations with others.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: So I think, just look for people who are doing the work that you think you might want to do, reach out.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: They're all going to say let me tell you.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Let me tell you the good, the bad, the ugly, but happy to help.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think one of the myths of being bold that I've written about is that it always has to be big and loud and it's a whole continuum.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: So what you just talked about was the quieter side of being bold.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Right, just start, ask, reach out.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: You're not alone, and I think that's the key thing too.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: When you're in these places of boldness or thinking about something that you need to change, which usually is connected to being bold, you're not alone, and it can be these quiet moments, and you just need to start.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: Right, Absolutely Well.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being on the Bold.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Lounge.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge podcast.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Through the continuum of bold stories vulnerability to taking a leap you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.