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Claire Bonaci
You're watching the Microsoft U.S. health and life sciences, confessions of health geeks podcast, a show the offers Industry Insight from the health geeks and data freaks of the US health and life sciences industry team. I'm your host Claire Bonaci. On this podcast I welcome Kathy VanEnkevort, the newest member of our Microsoft health and life sciences industry team. Kathy is our industry team Managing Director, listen in as she shares with us her extensive health background and a few of her ideas on how to transform healthcare. Hi, Kathy, and welcome to the podcast and welcome to Microsoft.
Kathy VanEnkevort
Well, thank you, Claire. I'm happy to be at Microsoft. And I'm thrilled to be one of your geeks.
Claire Bonaci
So you started at Microsoft a little over a month ago, and you were leading the team of healthcare industry experts here at Microsoft, do you mind just giving the listeners a brief background about yourself?
Kathy VanEnkevort
Sure. So I'm Kathy VanEnkevort, people know me as Kathy V, because no one can ever remember my last name. But as Claire said, I'm the lead of the industry team here at healthcare and Life Sciences U.S. at Microsoft. I'm a clinical epidemiologist by trade and have been in healthcare for over 25 years, my journey has taken me through some incredible companies like IBM and Truven health analytics, Thomson Reuters, in the Department of Defense. Over all of these years, my focus has been super clear, it's bridging the gap between what we know and what we do in healthcare for the very purpose of ending unnecessary waste, suffering, the inequity that we see. And the friction between the data and the people and the technology. I, my heart aches because being in healthcare, I see our teams worked so hard, and their brain power is extraordinary. And so for the systems to be struggling as much as they are putting so much into care, and realizing sub optimal outcomes. Well, that's my heart song. And that's why I'm here.
Claire Bonaci
I love that answer. And I love you even bring up the health equity piece, because I do think that's the piece that's often left out, especially when large tech companies are involved involved in health. And that's definitely that is the forefront of what we're trying to accomplish as well. So what makes you excited to have made that leap from IBM Watson to Microsoft?
Kathy VanEnkevort
Oh, I have been blessed my entire career my entire life to have been surrounded by mentors and super talented colleagues who have been super generous with their time and investment in me and growing me. And their whole purpose was to transfer knowledge. So that together, right, no one person wanted alone, that we could scale all of our contributions to this industry. And that really seeded my purpose for giving and more importantly, for making sure that no matter what company I was in, I was to surround myself with people that yearn to tackle the challenges of not only modernizing our healthcare system, but protecting this industry that, frankly, we all love we've been in, and its ability to provide not just for care, but for human well being. And so that culture existed at Microsoft, when I went through my interviewing process. And that's the strong pull to come here. I will, I will say, as bright as the minds are here at Microsoft, the hearts are even brighter, like they care, they care about each other. They care about their clients, they care about their obligation to the world, you know, your point about health equity, they truly do feel that it's an obligation as one of the major brands in the world is to make sure we reach everybody, even those who are in plain sight. And so I feel very fortunate to be nested within such a company as Microsoft.
Claire Bonaci
Great. Well, honestly, we're so happy to have you. And I remember when you first started, you even mentioned that, you know, everyone was so nice. And everyone was really they were having fun on these calls. Despite everything being virtual, everyone was still smiling and laughing and really making the best of the situation and of being part of such a great industry team, but even a broader HLS team as well. So I truly believe that I think sometimes we lose sight of how great the culture is here. So it's great having some fresh eyes really kind of put that back into perspective.
Kathy VanEnkevort
Yeah, you guys are extraordinary. I will say extraordinary
Claire Bonaci
Love hearing that. So what is one innovation that you foresee in just healthcare broadly that the industry really needs to be in front of right now?
Kathy VanEnkevort
Oh, there's so many and I'll probably touch on a couple simply because no one innovation stands alone. I think they need each other in order to get the full synergy. But as an epidemiologist I think a little bit differently. We are trained to get to root cause we are always asking why. Why? You know why? Because everything before that is just a symptom and we don't Want to be solving for symptoms we need to be solving for true root cause that's when true transformation occurs. And so with all the innovation, that we have seen that the improvement in healthcare has not been commensurate. And so we really have to get to the root cause of why that is. And we keep building innovation that surrounds our current health care system, enabling not health care, but sick care. And the incentives are aligned to get us exactly what we have designed for, which is curing a patient. And I've been super blessed to have that extend in my mother's life, six years with a rare disease. It has cured family members of mine, I'm sure family members of yours. And so I love this system. And I have been so impressed with it. And we can do so much that I want it to do even more. And so that's my urgency is in innovation, that what if we could mitigate ever being a patient, right, ever seeing that suffering. True innovation that finds us really racing to the next gen patient, which might not be a patient at all, but a person for whom we've delayed or arrested their need to ever be seen. So on the flip side, there's a lot of people who need to be seen, but never will be due to access or costs or just merely lacking the digital footprint to be found. And you know, you'll always hear me say, if you can see more of the person, you can do more that for the person. And right now, the only way we truly see some people is by actually going out and sensing them. And, frankly, if there's one thing that this industry knows how to generate its data, and finding ways to intertwine that data, the Internet of Things data, which we need to exploit genomics into the workflow of this incredible industry, I think that will allow us to see outward in unimaginable detail. And so, the innovations of today are really unveiling a world that has always existed, but we were just never capable of fully seeing in effect, they're exposing us to a new reality. Today, our reality is I can see you 20%, because frankly, that's all the EMR, that's all the healthcare data collects is about 20% of what say, Claire really is, you're more than diabetes, or an A one C, you're also someone who we need to see how you exercise, your stress levels, all the things that you have going on, you know, where do you live? What access do you have to nutrition? Or how far are you from care? That's reality, like what we see when you come in as a patient is not reality. And so at Microsoft, I think we have to learn more so that we increase the reality, we call that exogenous data, right? And we got to get to that. And so we're going to burn through a ton of innovation, because we are not going to solve the problem at a rate in which we want because the system is that consumes it hasn't changed its business model nor widen the guardrails of health. And you know, I'll give an example. We can start small, instead of seeing the sick within the brick and mortar. What if we saw sick people at home? Right? When when we don't have to deal with the friction of getting there and health care takes time out of someone's life? What if we put health back in the workflow of someone's life and saw them at home? And once we get kind of good at that, and we change our system, then what if we moved to monitoring their disease at home so they don't get sick? Just because you have diabetes? doesn't mean you have to get sick? So what if we could see them and not wait for them to come to us, but we went to them, so that even though their disease? They are not sick? Right, giving them more better life? And then what if we moved to delay in the disease altogether? So they're having diabetes today? What if I could push that out? 10 years, because I actually knew you. I knew your signals, I knew your risk factors. And I was able to mitigate those, or at least have you aware and taking steps towards mitigating that? And then what if we mitigated the disease altogether? Right? So in fact, IoT plays a very powerful ally to the vulnerable populations we talked about, and it being harnessed to get the challenges we're seeing globally in healthcare, revolutionized clinical trials, personalized care, and really allow patients to be much more involved in their health. The healthcare system can't do it on its own. So we've got to find a way to empower the patient or the person to help take care of themselves. So I'll end that question with, frankly, making the world better has never been easy. And not all innovation will fulfill its promise. But managing complexity and what we just talked about is at the heart of what we do here and being called to do the really hard things. I count as a blessing. I count as a privilege. Not everyone is called to do hard things, a lot of people go to their grave never done hard stuff. And so we welcome the challenge here and in that I have to be willing to be wrong, you have to be willing to be wrong, and then change our core. And I think that's where we are right now is we are pivoting and changing our core of healthcare to health. And once we change, then we'll begin again, with urgency. So that's kind of my long answer to where we need to get out in front of it's not the traditional tech innovation. But it is the core of the healthcare system that we've got to get right for that innovation to last.
Claire Bonaci
And I like that you come at it from a very different perspective. Honestly, when I've asked this question to people in the past, a lot of times the answer is some form of technology. So it's AI because we have all this data, it's just any kind of technology that is new and upcoming and kind of the hot, shiny new thing and, and really, you came at it more of the perspective of preventative care and really understanding the whole person, and almost looking at it more from a need socially and a need just in our community, which I do think that's kind of the way that healthcare should be going and the way that we should be looking at healthcare and health and people. So I think that's a very interesting answer. I love I totally agree with you.
Kathy VanEnkevort
Awesome. Thanks, Claire.
Claire Bonaci
And then my last question is something fun, you know, what is something that people don't really know about you? Could just be a fun fact, or just, you know, something that a lot of people wouldn't guess about you.
Kathy VanEnkevort
Um, that's a hard one, I'm not a very interesting person. I would have to say, people don't know that I'm really at my core, I am a true introvert. I'm like a hardcore introvert. Most people would not guess that about me, I have learned to be an extrovert. It was a requirement if I was to develop, I love people, I love people with an opinion and a point of view, especially if it's different than mine, and who are really willing to rumble around the hard things and then wrestle them to the ground. So that requires me to get out of my shell, and it far outweighs my need to resort back into myself. So part of my growth was to come out of that shell A long time ago and be completely uncomfortable with being intellectually vulnerable. And now I embrace that and even crave that interaction.
Claire Bonaci
Well, I would have never guessed because you do seem so extroverted. So that's super interesting to know about you. And I think I'm gonna out you here. So I know you mentioned in that first question, some of the work you did with the Department of Defense, I think that's a super cool fact, do you want to share a little bit more of some of the work that you did there?
Sure. I'm in. I was chief epidemiologist here in Michigan, and had headed out to the Department of Defense or the Pentagon, to really do some very interesting work with vaccinations. As well as really reengineering or transforming the Military Health System. Military Health System is the largest health system in the world. It is not trivial what it takes to be ready to fight on three fronts to make sure we have enough manpower to take care of our soldiers. We take that super seriously about the health of our soldiers. But we also need soldiers. And so really making sure that we balanced how much manpower we needed overseas, how much manpower needed here and homeland, how many people we needed in homeland to take care of, and fulfill the promise of taking care of those who had come home and taking care of their families so that we made sure that they stayed healthy. And so a tremendous plight in in at the Pentagon and being able to do that type of work, and be with some, I think some of the smartest people in the world, it in such a complex healthcare system, where you're not just fighting against health, you're fighting against trauma, and against danger, and in areas that we just aren't trained in. And so even the training requirements that we had to look at to make sure that when we sent health care personnel overseas, they could take care of gunshot wounds, they could take care of head trauma because folks weren't wearing their Kevlar helmets. And so a very interesting business in making sure that that was running in a way that we fulfilled the obligation to the soldier.
Claire Bonaci
So I love that I think that's such a cool fact about you. And you have, that's such a unique background. So really, I'm so happy that you are leading this team of industry experts here at Microsoft and thank you again for being on the podcast, Kathy.
Kathy VanEnkevort
Thank you, Claire. It is my pleasure. And thank you for being one of my great experts on my team. I just I'm better for you.
Claire Bonaci
Thank you all for watching. Please feel free to leave us questions or comments below. And check back soon for more content from the HLS industry team.