IAM1909 – CEO Leads Healthcare Innovations

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Gerry Miller Teaser 00:00

You can't be great at everything. In fact, really the older I get, the longer I do this, I recognize that I'm better off picking just a few things that I know I'm good at and focusing on those. I recognize and admit with no embarrassment the deficiencies, the things that I'm not great at, and there are many, many things I'm not great at.

Intro 00:23

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of.

This is the IAMCEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:50

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, or what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focused on innovation, disruption, women entrepreneurship, DEI, the gig economy, remote economy, even the cannabis industry. Think about these industries and these disruptive technologies that really sometimes aren't as disruptive, but there are people that are just paying attention to what the market needs, and they're providing that. So really think about the things that are quote and quote outside of the norm, but really help entrepreneurship to grow and fully develop.

I think it's an extremely exciting time when we're talking about any type of innovation or disruption, because I think that there are so many opportunities and needs that aren't felt that are starting to be filled by different groups, different organizations, or even different industries. So what I want you to do is sit back and enjoy this special episode of the IAMCEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Gerry Miller of Cloudticity. Gerry, it's awesome having you on the show.

Gerry Miller 02:13

Good morning, Gresham.

Gresham Harkless 02:14

No problem. Super excited to have you on and super excited to do this interview with you. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Gerry so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Gerry is the CEO of Cloudticity and is a serial entrepreneur and healthcare fanatic with over 30 years in the technology industry. Prior to Cloudticity, Gerry was brought in as the chief operating officer at ePrize. He turned around a failing company that was eventually sold for a fourfold return on the initial private equity investment.

Before ePrize, Gerry spent eight years at Microsoft, first as the Chief Technology Officer for the U. S. Central Region and then running the global business unit that oversaw General Motors, Microsoft's second largest customer, growing that account from over 20 multi-million dollars to over 100 multi-million dollars in three years.

Prior to Microsoft, Gerry spent nearly a decade in technology consulting and startup industry, and he holds all five AWS certifications. Gerry, are you ready to speak to the IAMCEO community?

Gerry Miller 03:11

I sure am. Thank you.

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Gresham Harkless 03:12

Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to jump in the time machine and go back to what led you to get started. Can you take us through your CEO story? What let you get started with your business?

Gerry Miller 03:21

Absolutely. So I've always been pretty fanatical about health care. My opinion is that health care is a misnomer in the U. S. Because we generally don't take care of healthy people. We take care of sick people. And so I call our system a sick care system. There's something fundamentally broken where the sicker you are and the more complex the procedures that doctors have to perform to get you healthier, the more money they make. And so, the sicker you are, the more money your doctors make. There's something broken with that. About a decade ago, I finally saw a path to leveraging some of the technology experience that I have to try to move the needle and help fix that inherent broken aspect of the healthcare industry.

So, about a decade ago, there were a few things that came together to form the perfect storm around how technology could really drive the healthcare industry forward. The first was regulatory. There were 2 major regulatory changes that took place about a decade ago. The first was the high-tech act. That among other things, mandated the adoption of electronic health record systems. And so for the first time ever, it was federal law that health organizations had to digitize their health records. Unlike many other federal laws that have taken place, this one actually came with a budget. So as part of that High Tech Act Congress had allocated $28 billion in incentives to help healthcare providers pay for the adoption of electronic health records.

There was a massive push to digitize unthinkable amounts of health data. At the same time, The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, was also changing the way that health insurers were thinking about their business. Prior to ACA, most claims could actually be denied under the auspices of pre-existing conditions. And the Affordable Care Act got rid of the ability for insurance companies to do that. And so overnight insurers went from being adversaries working against their members claims to being partners in their members health care. As it turns out, only 5% of the patients consume 50 percent of the medical spend. And so it became a big data problem for health for a health insurance payer to identify those people and then engage with them in meaningful ways to begin to drop the amount of spend down.

We spend over 20% of the US gross domestic product on health care. If health care, the amount that we spend in the US on that were an economy, that would be the sixth largest country in the world. So the need to fix this problem is very present. And the third piece to what was happening a decade ago is our bodies began to produce a tremendous amount of data. Everybody started to wear Fitbits, the FDA approved the first subdermal. Continuous glucose monitor, which began transmitting data, implantables and swallowables began producing a lot of information. So we had this gigantic creation of health care data that took place really within a year. At the same time, cloud technology suddenly became viable as a means of consuming, storing and acting upon previously unthinkable amounts of data.

And so when we saw that confluence of events, the perfect storm, if you will, we decided that it was time to start a company that could take advantage of that digitized health record, take advantage of changes in the insurance industry, take advantage of the amount of data that our bodies were beginning to produce and leverage the cloud to make meaningful ways of helping the healthcare industry move forward. That was the genesis of Cloudticity.

Gresham Harkless 07:15

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And so I know you touched on it a little bit, I did as well too when I read your bio, could you drill down a little bit deeper and tell us a little bit more about Cloudticity and exactly what you all are doing and how you serve the clients you work with?

Gerry Miller 07:26

Yeah. So Cloudticity, we are a managed services, managed compliance and managed security partner for health care organizations who want to take advantage of cloud technologies. When we started the company a decade ago, the idea that you would put health care data in the cloud was just unthinkable. And so from day one, we had to focus very heavily on the security and compliance aspects of the business because health care, is a highly regulated industry subject to a number of very intense regulations specified by HIPAA, by high tech and other regulations as you move outside of the United States. And so focusing on that was critical.

The healthcare industry itself is not just on paper a regulatory heavy industry, but it's actually a strong target for hackers. If you think about the information that is held in a health record, it's everything about you, it's your name, any variations on your name, your social security number, your current address, any prior addresses you've ever lived at, your next of kin. So various family members and all of their information. Hackers love that stuff. And so, while the average social security number or credit card number sells anywhere between 50 cents and 2 on the black market, the average health record sells for 75. And so if you can affect a breach and pull out a few 100,000, or even a few million health records, you can see why that's a financially attractive target. And so, security and compliance are top of mind for us.

One of the differences between managing cloud technology versus physical servers that might sit in a data center is that if you manage a data center, you've got to send a lot of people because there are a lot of servers that need racking and a lot of screens that need watching, a lot of keyboards that need typing on. The difference with cloud is that everything that you can do physically in a data center, you do virtually in the cloud. And so managing cloud is not necessarily an exercise in how many people can I throw at the problem, but it's an exercise and what kind of software can I write to manage this environment?

So we've taken what was inherently a people or a headcount-oriented business, and we've reenvisioned it as a software business. And so at Cloudticity we wrote a platform, Cloudticity Oxygen. To this day, we still contribute somewhere between 30,000-50,000, lines of code a month. So it's an ever-evolving and growing platform, but it manages the vast majority of the managed services, managed security and managed compliance that we provide for our healthcare clients. So we've got a highly efficient business that delivers a tremendous amount of fidelity and predictability and speed in ways that other companies haven't quite yet gotten to when we started the company. And so that's our key differentiator and how we think about helping the healthcare industry.

What that does is that frees our clients from that sort of day-to-day management of their technology that they used to have to do that was actually distracting from applying their brainpower to the core business or health care problems that our clients are really trying to solve. And so we unleash them from day-to-day management activities and free them to do the things that they do faster and better than they could before working with Cloudticity.

Gresham Harkless 10:48

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce, and it could be for yourself personally, or your business, or a combination of both. You might've already touched on this, but what is something you feel like sets you apart and makes you unique?

Gerry Miller 11:01

So ultimately it's the team that we have, and there are two aspects of that. One is our team lives around a singular mission, and that's to help every human on earth get healthier through the work that we do. And so we all coalesce around that and we all live that and we think it every minute of every day. We have an incredibly focused team that has coalesced around a mission to make tangible and measurable and real improvements in people's lives. We do that through a very defined culture. And so quite some time ago, we brought in some outside consultants not to help us define what our culture should be, but we had a team that was operating exceptionally well.

So we brought consultants to help us understand what is it? What are the shared values that make this team operate so efficiently with such a high degree of effectiveness? And so, we were able to tease out a set of cultural principles that we share amongst our team, and we were able to codify that and communicate it and train for it. And we hire for culture on rare occasion. If we have to, we fire for culture. But having that shared mission and having a team of absolutely committed, fanatically committed people who live a core set of values together is really the secret sauce that makes Cloudticity effective.

Gresham Harkless 12:32

Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Gerry Miller 12:42

The most important thing I think that I can do is to model the behavior that I'd like to see across the team. And so, I make sure that I get paid less than everybody else on the team. I make sure that I'm up working before anybody else is up. I'm up working after everybody else is done. Even down to, anybody technical on our team has to share a week of being on call for emergency calls from customers, and, I'm still in the rotation.

So I still get paged at 3 am for technical customer problems. You have to model what you want your team to do and you have to show that you're willing to do the hard work and sit instead of looking over everybody's shoulders. You gotta be in the trenches working shoulder-to-shoulder with people.

Gresham Harkless 13:35

Nice. Absolutely appreciate that hack. I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Gerry Miller 13:48

You can't be great at everything. In fact, really the older I get, and the longer I do this, I recognize that I'm better off picking just a few things that I know I'm good at and focusing on those. I recognize and admit with no embarrassment the deficiencies, the things that I'm not great at, and there are many, many things I'm not great at.

When you do that, you can begin to surround yourself with people that are really great at the things that you're not great at.

Gresham Harkless 14:19

Absolutely. Absolutely. Now wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So, Geryy, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Gerry Miller 14:31

It means to lead with humility. Being a CEO is hard and for a number of reasons. Primarily because when you take the CEO role seriously in terms of taking on the accountability of achieving a mission and taking on the responsibility of the team of people that have signed up to work with you to achieve that mission, that responsibility can be burdensome.

To know that there are dozens or perhaps hundreds of people whose mortgage payments and car payments and tuition payments rely on every decision that you make. If you take your job seriously, and you really care about the people that have signed up to work with you, that's a burdensome position.

Gresham Harkless 15:23

I definitely appreciate that definition, that perspective.

Gerry Miller 15:26

Absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 15:28

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I appreciate your time even more. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Gerry Miller 15:40

Absolutely. If anybody is ever interested in sharing tips and tricks or just having conversation, if you're a current CEO or an aspiring CEO I love to mentor to the extent that I have time.

So, or if you're in the healthcare industry and you're interested in learning more about Cloudticity, you can always reach me personally. It's gerry@cloudticity.com.

Gresham Harkless 16:06

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much again, Gerry. We will definitely have the links and information in the show notes. I appreciate the mentorship and the words of wisdom and advice that you gave to us as well too.

I appreciate all the awesome impact that you're making in so many different fields and on so many different lives, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:21

Thank you for listening to the IAMCEO Podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. IAMCEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Get your driven CEO gear at ceogear.co. This has been the IAMCEO podcast with Gresham Harless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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