Aaron Martin, CDO,  Providence St. Joseph Health

Providence St. Joseph Health is a major health system that consists of 51 hospitals and 1,085 clinics across seven states. Providence Ventures is a $300M venture capital fund that invests on behalf of Providence in innovative healthcare companies. Pulse writer Jamie Marvil sat down with Aaron Martin, the Chief Digital Officer at Providence St. Joseph Health and the Managing General Partner at Providence Ventures, to discuss his background and the ways in which Providence is adapting to a changing healthcare landscape.

The Pulse: : Can you please provide an overview of your background?

AM: I pursued my MBA from Wharton in the Health Care Management program, and through that, decided to pivot to McKinsey where I mainly focused on pharma and medical devices. At the time, McKinsey pushed Engagement Managers to get experience in other industries, so I took a study at a financial services client who was launching one of the first internet banks. Through that engagement, a fellow McKinsey employee and I identified a gap in the technical stack that this bank was trying to launch, and we ultimately left McKinsey to found a company that would fill this gap. In the end, we sold the company back to the general contractor.
After co-founding a second company in manufacturing software, I decided to begin a career at Amazon that lasted for nine years.

The Pulse: How did you end up at Providence St. Joseph Health?

AM: One day, I received a call from a McKinsey alum who was a headhunter at Spencer Stuart, and he told me that he had an out-of-left-field opportunity for me. He goes, “I am going to say two words to you – nonprofit healthcare. Are you still there?”. When he delivered the message, he told me that I had to meet Rod Hochman (current CEO of Providence) and Mike Butler (former number two at Providence), who he said were disruptive healthcare executives. Based on my experience in the industry fifteen years prior, those words didn’t always go in the same sentence, so I knew I had to speak with them.

When I met with Rod and Mike, they blew me away. This was during the ACA when there was a lot going on in healthcare, and they were already thinking about how Big Tech was going to come into healthcare. They recognized that if they didn’t disrupt themselves – disrupt their own business – someone else would.

“They were already thinking about how Big Tech was going to come into healthcare. They recognized that if they didn’t disrupt themselves – disrupt their own business – someone else would.”

So, I ended up joining Providence and now wear a few different hats. First, I founded Providence Ventures, which is a $300M fund with twenty portfolio companies. Second, I run Marketing and our Digital Team for the health system. The Digital Team deals with anything consumer-facing – think our website, our apps, any digital component that the patient sees. Within that, we also have an incubator, and of our twenty portfolio companies, two (soon to be three) were actually created in-house.

The Pulse: In recent years, there have been many disruptors in the healthcare space who are changing the way patients access care and engage with the system more broadly. As a major health system, how do you think about your role amidst this transition, and how do you proactively manage this disruption?

AM: I think the big thing that all health systems are struggling with is that we have a typical incumbent problem. One of the things Rod always talks about is the idea that pharma has all the profits, payers have the balance sheets, and health systems have all the debt financing most of the infrastructure needed in healthcare. Despite this, health systems really do a lot of the value-added work in healthcare – we are the ones who have hands on patients. So, we have a challenge in that we have a massive amount of incumbent infrastructure, some relevant, some increasingly irrelevant, and some necessary at times (like a Pandemic) and not as much at other times. The question becomes, “how do you manage that?”.

The big challenge on our acute care side is balancing what the community needs intermittently. If there is a mass casualty event, a pandemic, there is a certain level of infrastructure that needs to be maintained. How do you insert optionality into these new models of care?

On the ambulatory side, how do you move patients online? Fortunately, most of the patients we see are relatively healthy and just need primary care visits. As such, it is our job to figure out how we engage with them digitally about their health because that is the biggest opportunity to convert the patient relationship from offline to online and to consequently help them become healthier in a scalable manner that will work in population health.

“It is our job to figure out how we engage with [patients] digitally about their health because that is the biggest opportunity to convert the patient relationship from offline to online and to consequently help them become healthier in a scalable manner”

The Pulse: The US is seeing a growing provider shortage and increased prevalence of physician burnout. In your role, how do you think about using digital capabilities to improve the experience of caregivers?

AM: We are tackling physician burnout on two fronts. First, we are trying to make sure that not only are we getting patients to the right venue of care, but that we are also doing as much work as possible with machines before the patient shows up. Second, our CIO, my counterpart, deals with all clinician-facing capabilities. Once a patient is in the clinical visit, he and his team make sure that as much as possible is automated. Then, the clinician is directing their attention to what we call “The Sacred Encounter,” the engagement between physician and patient.

You want both doctor and patient to avoid as many distractions prior to and during the visit as possible. For example, we have a bot called “Grace” who basically asks patients all the rudimentary questions around medical history and reason for visit prior to an appointment. Then, when a patient actually sees their doctor, they have a fundamental discussion about the patient’s health, unimpeded by the hindrances of the system. That’s the vision, and we are heading toward it.

The Pulse: At the onset of COVID-19, Providence was quick to expand its telehealth solutions and remote monitoring capabilities. Can you talk a bit about these changes and how COVID-19 accelerated the pace of innovation?

AM: We were fortunate to have made a ton of investments pre-COVID-19 that paid off because we were able to scale them dramatically. For example, we had been working on the bot “Grace” for two years prior to COVID-19, and we were able to use “Grace” to help people self-assess whether or not they had COVID-19. Then, we used DexCare to enable patients who needed further evaluation to see a nurse practitioner through a video visit. From there, once a patient was not sick enough to be admitted but required remote monitoring, we used another technology Xealth. Xealth would prescribe Twistle, which allowed for remote patient monitoring at scale. We would send a patient home with a pulse oximeter and a thermometer, and Twistle would text the patient three times a day reminding them to take their measurements. This enabled nurse practitioners to monitor thousands of patients and pursue additional care if someone was decompensating. We already had all these technologies in place for similar applications, and the team had built the technologies to be very flexible.