Chris Phelps (00:02):
From Advisory Board, we are bringing you a radio advisory, your weekly download on how to untangle healthcare's most pressing challenges. I'm the managing producer and your host today, Chris Phelps. I've got a little bonus content for you today. Back in February, Rae and I went to ViVE 2026. ViVE is a digital health conference for healthcare executives and vendors, so as you can imagine, there was a lot to discuss. That's the conversation I have for you today. Rae and I sat down together to compare notes and share some key takeaways from the presentations we listened to and what we saw on the show floor. Here's that conversation.

(00:42):
Hey, Rae. Welcome to ViVE.

Rae Woods (00:44):
Hey, Chris.

Chris Phelps (00:56):
Rae, let's start with the basics. Why do health leaders actually come to ViVE? What problems are they hoping to solve here?

Rae Woods (01:03):
The researcher in me hopes that a primary reason why health leaders come here is to learn. They need to learn, how do we use technology to make healthcare business better. They want to get examples of what are the experiments that I can be running today? How can that make my business better?

Chris Phelps (01:19):
So that's why leaders come, but what about you? Why are you here?

Rae Woods (01:23):
Well, I came here for two reasons. First, I was invited to moderate a panel, which is one of my favorite things to do. I am a storyteller at heart. I love trying to help other organizations powerfully land the ideas that they might be struggling to get in the hands of health leaders. So that's the obvious reason why I came.

Chris Phelps (01:39):
And that was a great session.

Rae Woods (01:40):
Thank you. I thought it was a great session as well, but I do think that I came here to try to understand how the partnership between vendors, tech companies, health plans, even life sciences companies, providers, how we can actually solve problems in healthcare, and here's the thing, there are no easily solved problems anymore. The low hanging fruit is completely gone.

Chris Phelps (02:05):
Before we get into the practical side of things, I want to talk about the hype around AI. What's one thing that was over hyped?

Rae Woods (02:11):
Gosh, the biggest thing for me that is over hyped is that everyone is still talking about solutions as though they live in a vacuum. Here is the individual point solution, and they're almost talking about it still, still to this day, Chris, as, "AI will do this. With only this solution, it will get you X," and what I feel is there's this just lack of connective tissue between the technology that a vendor is selling and how that fits into a health system strategy, into a payer strategy, and our view is always that it should be purpose or strategy first, and then you figure out what solutions fit into that, which, by the way, might be a new solution. It might be something that's old. It might be tech forward. It might be tech more on the backseat, but we have to move from a world of point solutions to a world of purpose.

Chris Phelps (03:04):
Okay. So that's what's over hyped, but what about the flip side? What do you think was under hyped this year?

Rae Woods (03:10):
What's under hyped is still the real focus on the infrastructure that it takes for these solutions to succeed. That is perhaps more of a boring conversation than people want to hear from a stage at ViVE, but when I see, especially a case example from a provider organization, from a payer, I want to hear, how did you actually embed this technology into workflows? What was the change management? What were the champions that you had to have? What were the guardrails? What are the incentives? Because that's how you take something from an experiment to a scaled solution. This far into the generative AI lifecycle, I think we need to be talking much more about scale.

Chris Phelps (03:53):
There's obviously a lot more we could cover, but I want to end this section with what's still unclear. What's one big question you think ViVE didn't answer?

Rae Woods (04:02):
There's one question that I'm leaving with that is like a blink and you would have missed it question at this conference. You and I actually heard it in one of the smaller stage discussions, which is the unanswered question of how humans fit into all this tech and how much we need to still rely on human beings and not just default to tech entirely.

(04:23):
So let me give you the example that they talked about. Everyone likes to talk about doctors and clinicians using AI to improve ambient listening and clinical documentation, right? Reduce the administrative burden of medicine, but they're also quick to say a human being has to check that. It can't be no human involved at all. The question is, how much? And I really appreciated that this panelist ran at human nature and said, "Look, we're all human beings. Our default is do the easy thing," and she said, "If the artificial intelligence is writing good notes four times in a row, maybe you checked those notes really well time one, time two, maybe do a little bit less of the checking on time four. When it comes to time number five, you're just not going to check as closely, but that doesn't mean that the AI is going to be perfect every single time," and she said, "Look, I don't have a good answer here. I'm curious to hear from others," and they said that they're starting to experiment with what kinds of guardrails or incentives they need to have around the docs, or does there need to be a minimum amount of time that physicians are checking the notes?

(05:32):
So if you're checking it for 10 seconds, that doesn't mean that you actually read the entire note. It has to be at least some number of minutes. I found this fascinating, because we spend almost all of our time talking about how tech can make us faster, can make us more efficient, and this was a moment of saying, "Wait, wait, wait, we can't actually bring the efficiency number, the time down to zero." There has to be a floor that we protect to make sure that the humans are still involved, and I'm leaving with that idea in my head, wondering how are we going to build guardrails around that?

Chris Phelps (06:11):
So not every healthcare leader, or our listeners, frankly, can attend ViVE. Tell me one insight you learned from ViVE that everyone, our listeners, everybody here at ViVE should take back to their organization.

Rae Woods (06:25):
Chris, I'm actually going to give you an insight that has nothing to do with technology at all, which might be surprising considering that Vibe is a digital health conference, and it's actually all about trust. So the question I have is, as everyone is protecting their margin, as everyone is focused on making their business better, their business more efficient, it is often or could be at the expense of another part of the ecosystem.

(06:50):
So the trust conversation is, can I as a health plan trust what the provider is doing? Can I as a provider trust what the health plan is doing? And we have to get towards a shared purpose and not just this protectionistic view of technology, and that's what I want folks to take back to their home organization, is that we have to have shared purpose and shared trust if we ever want to take these tools, again, from these point solutions towards something that is scalable and helpful for the entire ecosystem of healthcare.

Chris Phelps (07:20):
Was there a moment or conversation that shifted how you're thinking about the future of healthcare?

Rae Woods (07:26):
I'm going to cheat. The moment that changed the way that I think about the future of healthcare was a conversation in my panel about power dynamics. It used to be that a handful of big, well-capitalized corners of healthcare, or maybe even specific organizations with healthy margin held the power. They were the ones that set the pace. They were the ones that led the innovation, but the rapid advancement of technology and artificial intelligence, coupled with very, very severe margin pressure, has actually diffused power across more and more organizations and more and more sectors.

(08:05):
So for example, health systems, providers armed with artificial intelligence are wielding a lot more power, and I think that can be scary to their health plan partners. I'll say vendors are wielding a lot more power than they ever have before, and that's only going to grow, and that is something that is novel when it comes to healthcare today and will change the power dynamics for healthcare for tomorrow.

(08:35):
That's what I'm watching. That's the potential biggest shakeup that we'll be feeling if we look towards 2027, 2030 and beyond.

Chris Phelps (08:43):
All right. Let's switch gears. How about some rapid fire questions? First off, what was the biggest buzzword at ViVE this year?

Rae Woods (08:51):
I hate to say it. I think AI is still the buzzword.

Chris Phelps (08:53):
Yeah, I'm with you. I heard AI everywhere, but very few people could actually define what they meant.

Rae Woods (08:59):
You know what's another one that I want to see more definition around? And it gets me back to my business push. I still hear people just say ROI and not say how or why or under what context or for whom. You've got to go to the next step to really show how we can make progress. Don't just stop at, "And it generates ROI."

Chris Phelps (09:22):
Okay. So you already promoted your own talk. What was another great talk you heard?

Rae Woods (09:27):
We sat in on a conversation around cybersecurity and cyber resilience with friend of the pod, Anika Gardenhire, who led, actually, a conversation with other leaders about what does the state of cyber resilience look like practically? I found that fascinating. Frankly, I found it a little bit of a kick in the pants for myself, especially when one of her panelists said that they got pushback from their health system or their hospital, when the hospital said, "Oh no, you can't shut that down for our test," and he responded with, "No, I need to shut everything down, because this is what would happen."

Chris Phelps (10:04):
That's the test.

Rae Woods (10:05):
That is the test. That is the test, and I thought that's an example of practical conversations and practical help and advice that I find myself craving at these conferences so much.

Chris Phelps (10:17):
Yeah. One moment that stuck with me from that session was the point about cyber resilience, that things are only going to get harder as organizations layer multiple AI tools from multiple vendors. It's going to force a real rethinking of how we prepare and test for crises. Ray, what's one thing health leaders should stop doing after ViVE?

Rae Woods (10:42):
I genuinely think that health leaders should stop settling for sh*tty pitches. I don't mean to be too blunt here, but there is just not enough money to go around. The problems are too big. The time pressure is just too strong. Demand answers to your tough questions. Do not settle for buzzwords. Don't be afraid to ask the follow-up of why or how or when or in what context.

Chris Phelps (11:18):
Yep, and this goes back to your point about getting aligned on ROI, getting past buzzwords and talking about the actual solution you're trying to do. Really, you should be talking about the problems and how both of your companies align. That's the way to avoid falling into the trap, and finally, what's the one thing leaders should start doing going forward?

Rae Woods (11:42):
Every single listener should start thinking about how they tell their story most effectively. That is especially true if you are selling something, right? If you are trying to get your solution, your innovation, your experiment into the hands of today's health leaders, you need an effective way to explain why your solution is helpful, on what timeline, for whom, and how that's going to make healthcare better. If you are an incumbent health leader, you also need to focus on how to tell your story. How is this making healthcare better for patients, better for providers, better for members, better for partners? How is this getting us to a place of a better system, a better ecosystem of care? By the way, we want to help you tell those stories because as always, we are here to help.

Chris Phelps (12:33):
Thanks, Rae.