Tell me about yourself and the company.
I like to think of myself as a technical generalist. My education is in electrical and computer engineering and business, but I’ve been in healthcare IT for 15 years and IT overall for over 20, some of that in manufacturing. I’ve been in leadership roles for 15 years and managed nearly every business functions that businesses typically have. Across all of that, I just love working with people and technology. I continue to be fascinated by both, and everything I’ve done has been with that in mind and the idea of trying to do something good and helpful for the world.
I started Cardamon knowing that we would be a little bit different than most businesses, but we had learnings and experiences that we wanted to apply. For example, we often see data analytics, applications, and operations in silos. I’m not saying that they don’t come together necessarily in certain situations, but they’re often not as collaborative as we would like them to be.
For the last 20-something years, we’ve had a huge focus on getting data in, whether it’s implementing a new system, looking at workflow, and doing optimization. But there’s been a lot of struggle to get that information out at the right time, make sure it’s actionable, and all those things that can make an impact. Meanwhile, I’ve watched consulting firms continue to focus on billable hours. Even if they do different things or try to come up with new models, it’s been about that margin spread per hour of billable work.
We wanted to do something a little differently. We are focused very much on team. We have a team that has data analytics and application experts who want those groups to work together so that we can focus on outcomes. That aligns incentives with our clients. You don’t have this situation where our consultants and our company want the most available hours possible, but the health system or the payer wants the fewest. Instead we focus on the results. What can we do together? What can we make contractual commitments around to get those results for our customers? That means there’s a variety of things that we do, from advisory or specific AI solutions to keeping the lights on and application management services. Our goal is to partner with our customers and find ways to make their lives easier and impact their results.
We focus on two areas. We want to enable the best outcomes for healthcare by maximizing the value of data and technology. The other is for our community. We want to foster an inclusive economy by growing a great, diverse team, but making sure that it also includes people who are overlooked or aren’t often given a chance. That’s how we’ve built this company.
This original article appeared on HIStalk.
