Dr. Jay Anders | Chief Medical Officer, Medicomp Systems | Enhancing Healthcare IT, EHR Usability, & Being Mission Driven

Dr. Jay Anders, Chief Medical Officer of Medicomp Systems, shares his career transition from an internist to a leader in healthcare IT, emphasizing the importance of usable technology for clinicians. He discusses Medicomp's mission to enhance clinicians' efficiency and patient care through advanced tools. Dr. Anders also explores the challenges of incorporating AI in healthcare, the disparity of healthcare access in rural areas, and the rewarding experience of international medical missions. He highlights the importance of change management in reducing physician burnout and aims to teach coping mechanisms for managing constant healthcare changes.

 

Guest links: www.medicomp.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayandersmd/

Charity supported: Feeding America

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com. 

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Host: Lindsey Dinneen
Editing: Marketing Wise
Producer: Velentium

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Episode 042 - Dr. Jay Anders

[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

Hello, and welcome back to The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Dr. Jay Anders. As Chief Medical Officer of Medicomp Systems, Dr. Anders supports product development, serving as a representative and voice for the physician and healthcare community. He is a fervent advocate for finding ways to make technology an enabler for clinicians rather than a hindrance. Dr. Anders spearheads Medicomp's knowledge based team and clinical advisory board, working closely with doctors and nurses to ensure that all Medicomp products are developed based on user needs and preferences to enhance usability. As the host of a popular, award winning Healthcare NOW radio podcast, "Tell Me Where IT Hurts," Dr. Anders has discussed the topics of physician burnout, EHR clinical usability, healthcare data interoperability, and the evolving role of technology in healthcare with a variety of industry experts and pundits.

Well, hello, Jay. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited you're here.

[00:01:53] Jay Anders: I'm very glad to be here.

[00:01:54] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent. Well, I would love if you wouldn't mind starting off by telling us just a little bit about who you are and your background and maybe what led you into MedTech.

[00:02:06] Jay Anders: Well, I am an internist by training, and after practicing medicine in a large multi specialty group practice for almost 20 years, I decided to have a little career shift, and the reason I shifted careers was I had a little computer science background, so I said, "Let's see if we can put that to work." And about that time is 2004, I'll date myself. We started getting into electronic health records, and when they first started to come out, they were just these read only, do nothings, electronic versions of paper. And I thought, "Well, this is not going to work out really well. Let's see what we can do about that." So my big clinic decided we'd be one of the first to hop in the pool.

So we did with a company called Integrate. And when we got that all installed and rolled out and everybody using it, they came to me and said, we really need a physician to really help lead what do physicians want or need in healthcare IT. So I said, "Well, we'll just part time." Well, that lasted about six months. And I said, "I can't be in two places at once. I can't practice full time medicine and do this at the same time."

So I switched careers and one of the biggest questions I get asked all the time is "Why in the world you do that?" I mean, I saw, you know, five, six thousand patients a year, big practice. And they said, "Why'd you get out of practice?" And I said, "Well, think about it for a minute. So I can see those five or six thousand patients and affect their lives and help their health get better, or in this industry, I can make the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients better. And not only them, the providers that actually take care of them."

So to make a really long pathway short, that company got purchased by another company, which got purchased by a company, probably everybody knows called McKesson. And I worked in the big corporate medicine world for a while. I got kind of tired of that. And I wound up with working with Medicomp. We use some of their products and the Integrate product that we had. So I've known him for quite some time and he always told me, he said, "When you're ready to make a change, let me know." So I was ready to make a change and I joined Medicomp. It's now been 11 years working at that particular organization. Love it. It's great. And it's got the right mission. So I was looking for where can I really make a difference? And this company really makes a difference.

[00:04:36] Lindsey Dinneen: That's incredible. Thank you for sharing a little bit about your background. And I'd really love to dive into exactly what you ended with because I think that mission is such a key aspect of maybe a lot of things, and probably opinions vary, but I have found that it is really helpful to have something that drives you so that on the difficult days you go, "Yes, but I am here for this reason." So I'm curious, can you expand a little bit about your current company and how it is so missionally driven?

[00:05:08] Jay Anders: Well, Medicomp has a single purpose that has multi facts blended into it. How can I say that a little bit better? It's just, it's got a lot of tentacles, but it does one thing. It was started to actually assist the providers at the point of care to actually take care of their patients. It started out 46 years ago. We're one of the oldest healthcare IT companies out there. We're older than Epic. I love to say that. So we started out to how do you really assist clinicians to, to do what they do. And through multiple iterations and years of development and things like that, we have come up with a set of tools that I think really puts the joy back in the practice of medicine for the providers that have to do it. It also has a mechanism to get the patients involved. So my goal when I first started this is, when I first started looking at electronic health records, I said, "This is not going to work," like I said before. And that's what we're doing now. We're making it work. And it's interesting to see the acceptance or push back, however you want to talk about it. But we have but one mission: is to make the lives of the clinicians that use electronic healthcare work for them.

[00:06:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. My mind immediately goes to perhaps some of the challenges that the company faces with these electronic records, things like cybersecurity and HIPAA. And I'm so curious to know how you have been able to navigate that and adapt and evolve because, oh dear, those are hot topics.

[00:06:51] Jay Anders: Well, yeah, in healthcare, it's probably one of the most regulated things on the planet at least in the United States. And it just got a little bit more complex because the Office of the National Coordinator keeps rolling out more regulations which we have to comply with. It's interesting how Some of these regulations have morphed throughout the process. I'll take HIPAA as an example. You brought it up. The privacy act had a very simple mission is to protect people's medical records from being shared with the wrong people. It went completely over the falls, meaning you can't share anything. And it's really tough to get permissions and all of that.

One of the problems we've had that my company helps solve because we're in the exchange information business is being able to share that medical information when it's needed and where it's needed and in a format that's usable. So when people say, "I don't want my medical record shared," it's interesting because if you really ask patients, they say, "Oh yeah, if my doctor who is in the next town needs what I have, wrong with me, send it. I don't want to have to fill it out again."

And one of the biggest bugaboos that I've seen with patients, including myself, is that every time you go to the doctor now, they ask you the same set of questions over and over again. Has that information changed? Probably not all that much. So it spends a lot of time going through machinations of making sure everything is okay and shareable and all of that. I have noticed that lately things are starting to loosen up a little bit along those lines. So people are not so scared that their information is going to get in the right hands or wrong hands, needs to be in the right hands. So I see that kind of fading in, in the United States.

And what's interesting is our company is international. So we have installations in Thailand and Indonesia and other places. And over there, there's no problem with sharing information, which is a big plus when it comes to really taking care of patients, and that's why we're in this business as a clinician, either on the healthcare IT side like I am now or on the other side before. It's all about taking care of the patient.

[00:09:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and it's cool to think how you have been one of the first providers of such a service because that must have been, I feel like a barrier of entry would have been challenging. What kind of pain points did you have to solve for, especially clinicians who might have been hesitant to adopt the technology?

[00:09:31] Jay Anders: Good question. One of the biggest challenges was the breadth of medicine itself. If you think about all the different conditions that a human can have, you have to have support for all of it. Well, getting to the all of it has taken 46 years. So it's not as if it happened yesterday. So the challenge was actually making it work every time, all the time, for the breadth of medicine. Now, one of the things about physicians especially, nursing not so much, but physicians particularly. We all know that we know everything on the planet and we are the absolute arbiter of everything you have as a patient, and we don't need any help at all. We can handle it.

We're trained that way, which is really not true. Even in the old days, I would dismiss myself from a patient's room because I knew I had to go look something up. My knowledge is a little diminished in that area, so I have to go look it up. Well now, medicine's expanded so much that there's no way on the earth you can keep track of it all in your head. So, what can keep track of vast amounts of information, both patient information as well as medical information, pretty easily? A computer! So how can we make that computer act and think like a clinician. And that's what we've done at Medicomp. We've actually done that process.

So when you walk in with diabetes or whatever condition, I can give you on a screen everything you need to ask and answer about that particular condition and make it easy for you to take care of that patient and document what you need to document and get all the information you need and sort it out. So computers can do that. It's gotten better through time, and now we have the world of AI we have to deal with in healthcare, which is also a little scary, but it does have a great potential.

[00:11:34] Lindsey Dinneen: Well, and to that point, to explore it a little further, what is your opinion of incorporating it? How do you feel that the safety or ethical implications of it, I think there's always a lot of great uses for AI, but I'm curious about how do you feel that maybe it would be best utilized for situations like yours or for companies like yours?

[00:11:57] Jay Anders: Well, AI is nothing more than a large program that's trying to predict what the next word will be in any given text. That's what it does, basically, down to the ground. The issues with AI is it's not trained as a clinician. You can read it every medical text on the planet, but it still does not really think like a physician thinks. So, along those lines, it's a great augmentation, easy retrieval of data, easy refreshing your memory about something if it's a little esoteric. It's great at that. It's also great at picking up synonymy, which is picking up every different medical term that you try to use in a particular situation. It can do that very well.

The issue is it's not trained medically and it really doesn't have the intuition of a well trained physician So I'll tell you a little bit about myself again. When I started as an intern, I had a white coat with every conceivable little pocket manual I could stuff in it, including my stethoscope and tongue depressors and lights and things like that. I passed all my boards. I knew medical text. I knew all that. But it came down, I have to take care of patients now. A little different. And the experience that I developed over 20 years of doing that is something that you really can't stick into a computer. So, I think AI is going to be great about summarizing different sets of information, filtering it, presenting it, doing things like that. I don't think it's going to be used a whole lot to actually diagnose patients. I've seen people try to do that. It scares me a little bit.

The other issue is, who's responsible? If a computer makes a diagnosis, who in the world is responsible? It's not the computer, it didn't care less. It's not the programmer who programmed the computer because they didn't know anything about what you were doing. So who's going to be responsible? So there's that one one step. So it can take you so far. It can really help you to get there, but you have to take the training the intuition, all of the knowledge over time, and apply it. So I think it's going to be a good augmentation, not ever a replacement. I just don't see that happening, at least in my lifetime.

[00:14:28] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, we'll see where it goes, but I, yes, that, that makes a lot of sense, and it's a great tool. I think that's a good way of thinking about it, not as a replacement, but just add it to your arsenal, so to speak, and yeah. Now you are a fellow podcaster and I would love if you would share a little bit about your podcast and how that all came about.

[00:14:50] Jay Anders: Well, it's been, oh, it's been three years now. Wow. We were thinking about other ways that we could get the word out about what we do as a company, because my podcast is sponsored by the company I work for. But I also have a little bit of thespian in me. I was in plays in college and high school and all that nonsense. That kind of thing really didn't bother me. He says, "Well, let's give it a shot. What would it be like?" And he said, "Okay." So we had our first guest, second guest, things are kind of coming along. You get into a flow, really enjoy doing it, and the conversations are so stimulating. And then I had my conversation with Mickey Tripathi, who's the National Coordinator of Healthcare IT, and I wound up winning a Power Press Award for that particular interview.

[00:15:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Congrats.

[00:15:40] Jay Anders: It's been a lot of fun. It's engaging. And the feedback I get from it is that they like the conversation. Everybody likes to talk at you, not with you. And I've really tried to get out of that mode of just talking at somebody, but let's have a conversation about a topic. And I've learned a lot. I hope my listeners have learned a lot and it's been a great deal of fun.

[00:16:08] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, that's great. And I also recognize that you are a featured speaker on healthcare IT. And was that, well, you said you have this background in theater. So was public speaking something that came easily to you? Was it something you developed over time?

[00:16:28] Jay Anders: It came pretty easily to me, I think. One of the things I did back three companies ago is I got to introduce a keynote speaker and talk about a keynote speaker in front of an M. G. M. A. Conference, and there had to be 6000 people in that audience. It was huge. But I walked out there and I said, "Okay, they're gonna listen to what I'm gonna have to say, and that's gonna be it. It's not gonna affect me." And it was a lot of fun, too. But so big crowds like that, it really doesn't affect me if I'm well prepped. If I'm passionate about talking about, it kind of rolls out of me naturally. So I don't have any problem with it. It's a lot of fun as well.

[00:17:12] Lindsey Dinneen: Good. Yeah. Yeah. Just another opportunity to continue spreading that message. You know, I very much enjoyed looking at your LinkedIn profile and learning a little bit about you. And I wondered if you could share a little bit about, I saw that you do or have done in the past, some medical mission work to various countries. I would love if you would share a little bit about that and your heart for that.

[00:17:38] Jay Anders: Well, in the past, I've not done it a lot recently, but I have taken several trips to Asia with a medical team and it had to be one of the most rewarding things I think I've ever done. And we were in the country of Kazakhstan, and we were seeing people who really don't have access to healthcare. And what healthcare they have over there was really not all that good. But we went over with a team of five. Had a physical therapist, a nurse, and probably 15 bags full of medications of which all went through customs without a hitch, which I was very surprised. But I got up in the morning, got there right at daybreak, and I would see 250 people a day and work till the sun went down. And there were still people to see. They were so appreciative of any kind of information, any kind of healthcare, any way you could help them.

All done just, it was, like I said, one of the most rewarding things that I think I've ever done. And one of the best parts about that trip is I went and went to an orphanage that had, the kids needed health screenings. And there were about 200 kids. So we started early in the morning and I saw child after child after child after child ' till we finally got through the whole thing. And at the end of the day, it's now hanging in our kitchen. One of the little boys came up and said, "I want to give this to you, doctor." And it was a wooden plaque of an, with an urt on it, a camel and a little star. And in that part of the world, that's how they live is these urts, these very unique, tent like structures.

And I just broke down. I couldn't, I, it was one of those things where that is going to me, to the nursing home because of that experience. But I highly recommend if anybody in healthcare and I'm not part of Doctors Without Borders, but I support them. If you have a chance to do that, do it. And you can do it as a non medical person because you always need support people. So if you think you want to do it, get yourself involved. It's great to do. It's massively rewarding and an experience that will last you a lifetime.

[00:19:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, life changing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing about that. I thought that was really neat to see that's something that you've done in the past and you're passionate about. And speaking of passions, I know kind of a similar thing, but I think perhaps even in the US, this is something that you advocate for is, something that seems to bother you is the disparity of access to healthcare in more rural settings. And this is something that I feel like, on occasion, maybe some Americans don't realize that even in the United States, there is this disparity. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and your passion for that.

[00:20:37] Jay Anders: Oh, absolutely. I grew up in a town of 20, 000 in the middle of Illinois. And I'll just give you a little progression. So in the town I grew up in, when I was a little boy at six, seven, we had two hospitals, nice size hospitals in that community. Roll ahead to 2024. One is a derelict building that looks horrifying. It's about to fall down. The other has merged with a larger system, which is about 40 miles away. It's coned down in size. They still do a lot of work there, but it's a lot of the major cases get shipped out to the mothership, which is in an adjacent city.

But this plays out across rural areas all over the country. Hospitals are closing, they're under pressure, both cost of care as well as reimbursement for that care. Specialists in certain areas are very hard to come by. And when you look about the delivery of care, this is one of the things that bothers me the most. The people who get better in the hospital the quickest are the people who have support groups around them. They have parents, they have children, somebody to come and visit them and be with them, give them a reason to get better.

When you move some of these rural hospitals and put them out of business or reduce them to the point they're just an aid station and you ship that patient to a medical center that's 50, 100 miles away, that support group goes away. It's very hard for that to even exist. So if you take into consideration the lack of real reimbursement at that level, at those types of hospitals, the lack of specialty care, which is still needed, and really the lack of primary care, things are headed downhill with that as well. It really is a disparate way of delivering healthcare in the United States. Not everybody can go to a Cleveland Clinic or a Mayo to get their healthcare.

I live here in Western Pennsylvania. We have two massive institutions, both of which are wonderful, but not everybody can come here. People that are out in the Northern Pennsylvania, in the middle of the state, they got to travel because their hospitals are closing. And that I think is a travesty of the system. It's something that needs governmental intervention and it needs intervention in several different modes, meaning increased reimbursement, training physicians that want to practice in that type of environment. There are programs out there that are to start to do that, but it needs attention because people out there are not getting the same healthcare as I can get 15 miles up the road in the city of Pittsburgh.

[00:23:28] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing a little bit about that, and even some suggestions for ways that this can be helped. I know it's a long road, but I appreciate that you are bringing light to it and helping to start those conversations that will hopefully lead to change down the road. So.

[00:23:49] Jay Anders: And technology does have a place to play in doing that as well. Telehealth, distance, ICUs, things like that. There are ways that technology can augment that medical care, but it's expensive. There has to be some type of support for it, both at the state and federal levels.

[00:24:09] Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. So I'm curious on your path and your journey so far, and obviously you've had a really interesting career path 'cause you've done a few different things over your career and you continue to, I'm sure, learn and grow. But are there any moments that stand out to you as really affirming that, "You know what, I am in the right industry at the right time, at the right time? I'm doing what I was meant to do."

[00:24:36] Jay Anders: Boy, that's a great question. One of the things that really drew me to working at the company I'm working at now at Medicomp was the fact that they truly had the physicians and the providers of healthcare's best interest in mind. Foremost, everything we do, and I mean, everything we do, is geared to make their lives better, more effective, and deliver better care. That's what we do.

So in my pathway, which came kind of went around in different ways and different companies, different sizes through acquisition and other things, I really wound up in a place where we're not a large company, but we're all of one mind. And that is an absolutely fabulous place to work when you're all pulling the rope in the same direction. And it's all for a great purpose. And when I have providers come up and tell me, "Well, we installed this or we're using this, and it really did help what I'm doing." I had nurses come up to me and at one of our installations that say, "I've got 50 percent more time to spend with my patients. I'm not spending it in an inefficient electronic health record. That's been fixed." And when people say that it's like, "Okay, I'm in the right place at the right time."

[00:26:04] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's incredible. What great testimonies too. Oh my word. Thank you for sharing that. So pivoting the conversation just for fun. Imagine that you were to be offered the opportunity to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be in your industry, but it doesn't have to be. And you'll get a million dollars for it. What would you choose to teach?

[00:26:30] Jay Anders: I would teach physicians and other clinicians change management theory and how to manage change. That's what I would teach. I've had the luxury in my career of having a professional coach for two years, professional training and leadership. It's been a great thing to have, but not everybody has that. I would love to be able to teach clinicians how they can manage all the change that comes at them every day. It's patience, it's technology, it's knowledge base, all of that. It's changing all the time. You got to have a method. You got to have some skills. You got to have some coping mechanisms to go through that. It can't overwhelm you every time you go to work. And I think that's part of our burnout problem is that there's the skill set of managing change just isn't there to the degree it ought to. And physicians throw their hands up. I'm going, "I'm retiring. I'm going somewhere. I can't do this anymore." And I think that's wrong. So, that's what I do. I would teach coping skills around change in healthcare.

[00:27:46] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Excellent. And then, how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?

[00:27:53] Jay Anders: I want to be remembered as somebody who made a difference. You know, a lot of people get into the healthcare IT business because they want to revolutionize this or revolutionize that. I don't want to revolutionize anything. I want to make a difference. And if I can make a difference, I've pretty much done what I went into this profession to do was make a difference with patients, make a difference in my colleagues, and in the industry I'm in now. That's what I want to be remembered as.

[00:28:23] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And then, final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

[00:28:33] Jay Anders: I'm going to go back to my story in Kazakhstan. Every time I think of that little boy coming up, grabbing my coat, jerking on it, to hand me that little plaque, that gives me a smile every time I think about it. It actually gives my wife a smile, too. Because we'll look up at that plaque in the kitchen and go, "I know where that came from. That was a good time." That makes me smile almost every time.

[00:28:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. What a powerful memory and just such great motivation, something to come back to on the difficult days and then you look at that and go, "Yeah. Okay. I can make a difference here. I did make a difference here."

[00:29:14] Jay Anders: I did.

[00:29:15] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that so much. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I am so grateful to you for spending some time with me and just telling me about your background and the amazing work that you're doing, that your company is doing. And we are honored to be making a donation on your behalf as a thank you for your time today to Feeding America, which works to end hunger in the United States by partnering with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger, and they also advocate for policies that create long term solutions to hunger. So thank you for choosing that organization to support. And we just wish you the best continued success as you work to change lives for a better world.

[00:30:00] Jay Anders: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

[00:30:02] Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. And thank you also so much to our listeners for tuning in. And if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you would share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time.

[00:30:16] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.