The Vurge
The Vurge Podcast brings together trailblazers, experts, and industry disrupters to explore the future of tech and innovation in the healthcare industry. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or have just begun your career, this podcast will bring you thought-provoking ideas and opinions sure to bring value to all who listen. Join us in our latest episodes to stay up to date on the innovative changes that are transforming healthcare as we know it.
The Vurge
Advancing Healthcare with AI and Personalized Solutions (ft. Claus Torp Jensen)
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Imagine an environment where technology whispers timely advice, enabling care that’s as unique as our own fingerprints. On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca sits down with Claus Torp Jensen. Claus is a passionate c-suite leader with two decades of transformation and technology experience. He is dedicated to building, leading, and inspiring diverse teams that propel both patient care and team spirit forward. Tune in for an episode that sketches a future where healthcare transcends traditional boundaries, embracing a patient-centric model that harmonizes virtual and in-person care.
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Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Verge. Today we have Klaus with us. He is a past Chief Innovation, chief Digital Chief Technology Officer. Klaus, you've done it all and sat in all of the IT seats intersecting IT and applications and all the end users. Welcome to the Verge. It's so great to have you with us.
Speaker 2Thank you very much, Rebecca. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1You're also one of our advisors to the board at Divergent, so we're so lucky to have you and all of your knowledge in that seat as well.
Speaker 2Yeah, thanks.
Speaker 1So let's start out with talking about all of your history, how you started in healthcare IT and how you got to where you are today.
Speaker 2I mean, how do you get to anywhere? You know some people will tell you it's circumstance, I don't know to anywhere. You know some people will tell you it's circumstance, I don't know. I think it's a combination of keeping your eyes open for opportunity and I've always done that throughout my entire career but also being really clear on what matters to you and what is it that you bring to a job, whichever job you take on.
Speaker 2So my foray into healthcare actually started with a transition from a different industry. I was working for IBM and I was working with some healthcare organizations and all of a sudden I found myself in a boardroom having a very strategic conversation about some major investments that this healthcare organization was going to make. And you know, you sort of introduced me saying I sit in the intersection between business and technology. It was that kind of conversation. I mean, how do you actually take technology and turn it into something meaningful? And lo and behold, three days later I got an offer from Aetna at the time to join as their next CTO. But you get a little bit lucky because they were looking for a new CTO. That was not necessarily the case. On the other hand, you know when your future boss asks you so are you interested? In the middle of the sort of the aftermath of a meeting, you get about three seconds to decide whether you're good to say yes with conviction or not. So this whole thing about knowing what to decide, whether you're good to say yes with conviction or not, so this whole thing about knowing what's important to you, knowing what you like or dislike about a company and also being super clear on what is it you bring, has actually guided me well in my entire career.
Speaker 2So Aetna happened. You know Aetna was acquired by CVS Health. I became the CTO of CVS Health. That's a Fortune 5 company. It was like a big job and if I had had a linear career I would have stayed there. I'd look for the next sort of Fortune 5, fortune 10 company organization and take my next C-suite job.
Speaker 2But then I'm more so catering cancer center right now. But then the most locator in cancer center read that and say, hey, we have this idea that if you merge clinical science and technology science you can do better for cancer patients, and to me that's irresistible. I'm driven by mission. So who wouldn't want to help make cancer care better when you sort of have this desire to make the world a better place. So I joined, you know msk. Uh, great time. I joined at the end of um of 2019 and divestice history. There was a little covid thing that happened, uh, and and being on manhattan with a hospital that you have to help run in spring of 2020 was not the least stressful part of my career with some of the most critical patients, too, being some of the most critical patients and you can't I mean cancer doesn't wait, so you can't just ask people to come back some other day.
Speaker 2That that's not. That's not actually how.
Speaker 1You can't put your treatments on hold for a month. That doesn't help. You can't put your treatments on hold for a month.
Speaker 2That doesn't help. You can't put your treatments on hold for a month. You still need to figure out how do you all of a sudden, you know, overnight, run the hospital by sending 40% of people home? So that was interesting. And then the last three years I spent with Teladoc Health, coming out on the other side of the pandemic. You know, virtual care sort of became mainstream. But what we're all struggling to figure out is it shouldn't be a choice. You shouldn't choose between traditional in-person care and virtual care, because you really need both. The real question becomes how can you put together the next generation of care model that is longitudinal, whole person centered. It's about you as a person, because healthcare is very personal and it transcends, you know, through partnerships, the traditional boundaries between virtual and physical. So it's been a fascinating journey. And I've seen, you know, all sides of healthcare. I've seen the payer side. I've seen you know pharmacy, retail clinics, an academic medical center and now a lot of virtual care, both B2B2C and direct-to-consumer.
Speaker 1Where do you see healthcare transforming next? You kind of touched on it in terms of patient-centric and possibly moving more towards well care. But as you project out five or ten years from now, how much do you think we will have transformed, knowing that health care takes such a long time to catch up with technology?
Speaker 2It does, doesn't it? And I think part of it is because it's about people, and I think what's unique about healthcare is mistakes are unacceptable. In a lot of other industries, look, if something happens, it's like you'll fix it Right. You can't fix it if you did the wrong thing with a patient. That's not fixable. So you have to take on a different mindset.
Speaker 2I think of excellence and thoughtful care in terms of how you apply technology in health care. Forget about the regulations yes, they're there, but I think, more importantly, it's about people. So historically, yes, things have sometimes moved slowly, but there's this AI pressure cooker happening and it coincides with a lot of financial strength. You know capital has gotten more expensive. That's just the nature of the macroeconomic environment. A lot of health care institutions are still hurting from massive losses throughout the two critical years of the pandemic, so there is a very tight scenario from a financial perspective. So there's absolutely pressure for operational optimization, but at the same time, you've got consumerism. You know going and going well in health care. Consumerism. You know going and going well in healthcare. So people are starting to have very strong opinions about what good looks like, and the expectations are colored by other industries that are a little easier to get to work in a consistent, integrated fashion, and then you can add to that the whole shift towards value-based care. There's like four major forces that I employ at the same time.
Speaker 2So if I were to sort of look into the crystal ball, a couple of things I think are going to happen.
Speaker 2I think we will see the lines between the clinical team and the technology team continue to blur. Now that's a hypothesis and it's hard to prove, but increasingly you see forward-looking technology creeping into everything that has to do with a health care institution, and it doesn't really matter what kind of health care institution. Technology is front and center to what health care institutions do and will be even more so going forward. So that's one thing you're going to see, and I think it means that the technology teams and health care institutions have to rethink what their role is. We can talk about how you get them to rethink that. The other is I'm an avid reader of science fiction and I have been for as long as I can remember because it sort of triggers my imagination in terms of what the other possible looks like the jetson, the jetson, yes, the jetson, but there's an element of science fiction which has to do with this notion of an intelligent environment that senses, monitors.
Speaker 2You know, all the time that pops up and does something useful for you whenever you need it, but it isn't in the way when you don't need it. I've labeled it ambient. Think about it. It's this ambient underpinning in your environment. That was part of a book I wrote about a year ago about the possible future of healthcare. So I personally believe that this whole notion of ambient healthcare solutions is a big deal and, as everything from ongoing monitoring to at-home care, to smart homes, to chronic condition management, you know that entire pressure cooker of AI that makes the environment smart, the devices and sensors which we're now wearing all the time, advanced clinical equipment that you could put into clinical space, all that comes together in a very different way that, I think, has the potential to create a surround, sound care model that's more about wellness and how you live your life and less about going to a place to get treatment.
Speaker 1Yeah, and also I think that Ambient Solutions have a place to help people with certain certain diseases or sicknesses. Or, you know, maybe it's going to tell you to sit down if you're getting faint or or something like that. Getting faint or or something like that, um, absolutely, and it would be, um, not replace the, the hearing and sight.
Speaker 2you know the dogs that people bring, but in a way, kind of you know, help or go along with that as well and in absolutely 100, and and add to that in many cases to take danger signals earlier, uh, then you can do in any other way. I'll give you one example. If you look at cognitive disease in particular, you can actually if you can monitor how people move around the room. There are algorithms out there now that will help you predict quite accurately whether you're on the right path or not. That's just so fascinating that you can start taking the combination of physical and mental signals and reason about one of the most complex conditions out there.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's fascinating. What do you do with? So you have the ambient solution, and people are already giving up so much data, but they don't realize it. And then you have the healthcare industry. That's HIPAA, HIPAA, HIPAA. And where do you see this bubble? It's going to have to pop at some point, right? Because either people realize they're giving up their information or they don't realize it. But it's happening, and at some point we're going to have to open up that canister and be able to utilize all of the information, Right? A really good question.
Speaker 2HIPAA exists for a reason. I mean, there's no question that healthcare data is very personal and it should be protected. So the intent of HIPAA was and is to give the individual control over what the data is being used for. So the intent is absolutely spot on.
Speaker 1Which is not what happens today, but it should be happening Exactly.
Speaker 2And that was why I used the word intense. So you and I are seeing the exact same problem. You get all these forms presented to you. How many of it actually read the small print? So what is it really we're agreeing to?
Speaker 2And I think there are players that act with different levels of fidelity in terms of how much it's in your face, and there are also differences in terms of how hardly enforced the regulations are.
Speaker 2Yeah, if you're a provider, you can't actually get the medical record from another provider, even though obviously you should be able to because you're taking on a patient. You can't actually get it without someone signing a form. But as a health consumer, I can click an OK button in an app and I've always been consented to that app taking all kinds of data and using it for who knows what. So there's a discrepancy in how rigidly enforced the HIPAA regulation set is for different aspects depending on the engagement model, and I actually think that's a problem and we're going to have to think about how we help people better understand what it is they agree to, but also making the consent be, you know, less friction than it is right now, because, frankly, in some cases it is a lot of friction and it is getting in the way of giving people the right care. So I don't know that anyone has the right answer for that, but I suspect there's some technology invention that needs to happen to address it.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's definitely a bubble that is going to have to be addressed. What do you? Where's your stance on getting the patients more involved? There's definitely a grouping that's, you know, very involved in their healthcare and very pushing for the well care and is on the cutting edge of technology. But there's a whole other group that you know doesn't go into their patient portal and is not involved. And so how do you see, or how do we help them get involved and take control of their healthcare so that, you know, we can move more towards a well care and start using, having them use the technology, all of that?
Speaker 2It's a fascinating question and I think the answer has to be multifaceted. One part of the answer is less friction. I mean this whole notion of ambient solutions that you don't see but that are actively present around you. I actually think that's going to help because it would allow the clinical slash technology solution to trigger at the exact moment when you need to do something. That's different. I think that the predictive algorithms we now have, the learning mechanism we have to generate AI, are going to help people better understand what's going on with them on their terms and conditions and human language better understand what's going on with them on their terms and conditions and human language. You know getting a piece of paper from a nurse or from your physician. You may read it, you may not. You know it's not necessarily written in language that pertains to your particular situation, so I think we can do better around that. And finally, there's this whole notion of think of it. You know what is my ecosystem.
Speaker 2At home, we tend to think of the understanding of deceased state or wellness state and how do you take care of yourself to lend the need to health consumer, but that's not actually always the case. One of the things that I learned a lot about at Memorial Sloan Kettering is it's really about the family and friends, because in many cases, and especially if you're in a diseased state, you're not necessarily rational about it and you can be very scared. So take cancer as an example, the emperor of all diseases. It's a very scary disease. Three times out of four give or take, when you have a patient that gets a bad diagnosis and then you have the conversation about what happens next. Statistics tell us that three times out of four the patient doesn't remember, but the family member or the friend that was with the patient remembers. So the ability to activate that local ecosystem, your personal care team that sits around you, I think is critical to this whole understanding of how do we activate people more. Because we all know what personal commitment looks like and sometimes we stick to it, sometimes we don't, sometimes we just need a friendly nudge that lets someone else say hey, we talked about this, why don't you? And it's better to have your friends and family do it than some you know sterile system, or even your care team that is professionally sitting on the provider side. So those are some of the elements I think of. How do you activate people to care more, but we do have to recognize that people are different and not everybody is going to care about the same thing. So here's a story for you. Take someone my age a little bit more than middle-aged, so I'm turning 56 next time. So I'm getting to the point in time where I kind of need to think about how do I make sure I transition the right way as I get older, make sure I transition the right way as I get older?
Speaker 2There's a particular sort of scenario that I was part of at one point where a clinical nurse was having a conversation. This was with consent, so nobody broke any rules. It was a clinical nurse having a conversation with a patient-less health insurance member and they were having the talk that, hey, we talked about with a patient plus health insurance member and they were having the talk that, hey, we talked about this and this is what we said we would do. So how is it going? And she got the yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, I know it's like, okay, we talked about it, but it's not really real. What became real is when they talked, what was she looking forward to? And his daughter had just gotten engaged and he was looking forward to her walking down the aisle with her fiancée and getting married a couple of years from now, and that turned into a conversation about okay, here's what you need to do to make that happen. Make that happen, yeah, because on your current path it may not. We need to have that conversation that mattered to him, whereas the abstract, theoretical hey, you're not on a good trajectory and science tells you it wasn't real.
Speaker 1Yeah, needed it to be relatable.
Speaker 2Yes, and something that matters to me. I mean that's what motivates us. It's the things that matters to me. I mean that's what motivates us. It's the things that matters to us and our loved ones. That's what makes us actually change what we do.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's the personalized health care that we really need to start moving forwards to right Totally.
Speaker 2And I think there's the whole learning and guidance angle, which is not about treatment, but how do we learn about what matters to us and how to get there. That has to be positive.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. What do you say to the skeptics about ambient solution, right? So for you and I you know C-level IT people change is easy. We're ready to pick it up and dive in and get our hands, you know, dirty and see how it. I get excited with the new technology and my parents are like Google's listening. That creeps me out. We need to unplug it, right? So how do we help the skeptics believe that that this is actually going to be helpful for them?
Speaker 2I think there are some things you can't solve, rebecca. I mean, it's like if people have a fundamental fear of technology, that's hard to overcome. That's something that will happen slowly over time. Um, people are entitled to their fears and concerns. Uh and look, we both know that it could happen. I don't think it will because there are too many good forces in in healthcare and technology and just don't act like that. But it's not wrong to identify that that's a potential that could potentially happen and we need to sit down and talk about what does it look like and why is it not going to happen to me?
Speaker 2But I don't think you can necessarily eliminate the fear. What you can do is you can ride on familiarity. So the more familiar you can make this, the more it's going to be about things you use anyway and they're just a little bit smarter than they used to be. Like. This whole notion of wearing a smart watch is like okay, I'm wearing a watch, I've always worn a watch. Now it tells me a little bit more. I may not be ready to use all the functions in the watch. Now it tells me a little bit more and I may not be ready to use all the functions in the watch, but it tells me a little bit more than before. Even if it's just I can see what the temperature is outside. I don't have to actually look at the weather. By the way, that's one of the things I have on my watch is is what's the outside temperature?
Speaker 1your heart rate or something like that, or your heart rate or something like that.
Speaker 2So the familiarity that says these are things I use anyway, they're just a little bit smarter than they used to be, I think is one of the ways you can overcome the skepticism.
Speaker 1Yeah, do you remember when the watch came out and had the calculator on it and I had?
Speaker 1to like take it off in math class because I thought you're going to cheat on it and that was like the best, like cool, new thing, right, no way. But yeah, new thing, right, let's. Let's transition, because I just find you to be, um, a super cool leader and your thought process and how you keep your team motivated. But also talk about these team names that you have for your teams and how you come up for these beacon digits and you know other ones, because I think it speaks to how you are as a leader, but also speaks to how you have the camaraderie of your team, and some of them have been quite large.
Speaker 2Some of them have been quite large. I mean, when you get to having a couple of thousand people in your team, I say there's a distress hold when you cross, you know, 500 or so. It just you're one step more removed from your team and it becomes a little bit different. But if you think about everything we've talked about so far, if we're right that there's this convergence of you know, if we're right that there's this convergence of clinical technology, logistics, behavioral science, data science, if we're right in that assumption.
Speaker 2Yes, we are. The technology teams need to rethink we said that already what the role is. So how do you do that? It comes down to identity. What is the identity of a technology team? Well, actually, what they call themselves have a lot to do with that identity. Think about it. How often have we heard someone who's not on the technology team? Well, that's the IT team All the time, and it often has a connotation.
Speaker 2It does, as in that's someone that sits on the side, right? How do you change that? How do you deal with situations where you might have acquisitions that bring teams together? You might go through a restructuring of the team. You may move teams around.
Speaker 2You know, I've multiple times walked into a scenario where, when people presented themselves, they would say you know, my name is x and I'm heritage y. Okay, y being wherever they came from, I'm like good grief, we need to act like a team. And how do you get there? So what I found interestingly is this whole naming thing actually matters, because names carry power, they carry identity, they carry emotion. So the last couple of roles I've had where I had that scenario, I explicitly went out and said okay, we will do a naming competition, and the naming competition has three rules. We need to end up with an acronym. You can actually speak out loud. The acronym needs to stand for something that's meaningful in terms of who we are and what we do, and has to be something that represents all of us. But those are the three rules. And then it would be fascinating what happens when you let people lose with that kind of instruction, especially when you give them a prize. I mean, if there's one thing about technology teams, they love prizes right, if you give them a prize that actually is worth something to a technologist, you'll get them to engage. So we got hundreds of proposals and now you've got to pick the last two I ended up with.
Speaker 2I was the chief digital officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering. That was one of my chief something titles and it was all about digital transformation and this was putting together the informatics team, the technology team, the data analytics team. It was all about how do you power an institution using digital forces, and what we ended up with was digits. It was all about how do you power an institution using digital forces, and what we ended up with was DIGITS, which is a great acronym for that, because you know DIGITS, zeros and ones. I mean, it's fundamental to the whole notion of turning information into zeros and ones and starting doing something with it, and it had a meaning right. So if you look at what the acronym actually stood for, it was like six words, and those words represented that we will be transforming the institution through digital needs.
Speaker 2I had a little bit of a snafu with that one because the physician said why are you labeling your team fingers and toes. But other than that, little misunderstanding, because in clinical terms digits can be fingers and toes once I explained it it was two as in one. We were good, it was meaningful to the team and you can imagine, I think, what a difference it makes that six months later everybody just said digits. They didn't say the informatics team or the technology team or the data team, they just said digits. So it was now not just one identity, it was joint accountability for the solutions we would deliver for the institution. And this matters right, because now you are one team, right, and you are co-accountable for all the parts of what you deliver. You can't say it was someone else because that's just digits. And it was only internally in digits that we knew there was different departments. So how we had set up the internal structure no longer mattered to the rest of the institution. So I did it again at Teladoc Health and the label there became Beacons.
Speaker 2If you think about that job I started out talking about it earlier. It was really thinking through. What does the frontier of whole person care look like when you start merging and then you start to think about physical and virtual and what is the future of healthcare. Beacons is a meaningful word, I mean, it's the beacons of progress, beacons of good, beacons of light. You can you can talk about what were beacons for and again stood for something right. We were the bold expert that advanced novel clinical solutions, that there was like a seven word definition of what it looks like. And lo and behold, within six months and this was an organization that had just done two major acquisitions, so I hadn't spayed the whole. You know, my name is X, I'm from Y. Within six months, nobody said anything but beacons. So it's fascinating to me how just naming something and being consistent about it if you pick a good name that matters you can completely change how the team thinks about itself and, importantly, how the organization you work for thinks about you.
Speaker 1I love it. I love it, yeah, cause normally, or or yeah, I mean historically it teams kind of get beat up as the you know where the the change makers're the change makers, so we're the rebels and the problem raisers.
Speaker 2And you get beat up anyway but think about it If you are a data scientist and you are called the IT team, how does that feel? That, too, it's a good point. If you are a network operations specialist, those are important because you've got to move the bits and bytes, and if they don't move, then you've got problems and you're called the R&D team. How does that feel? So all those standard terms are bad fits because of the diversity of talent that now sits in the technology R&D data analytics team.
Speaker 1The technology R&D data analytics team yeah, even a CISO and security. Or you're on the clinical informatics team and you know you don't want to lose your clinical part as you're trying to bridge the gap between technology and clinical right. You talked about how you talk and bring together your team, um, and you meet with a lot of them individually and a thousand people to meet with is a lot and and how you're come to them with with storytelling and and ways to motivate them, to keep them going and talking about you know, really showing them and reminding them what the bigger picture is. Here, especially at Sloan right, the mission is clearer maybe than to others, and so how do you keep them motivated?
Speaker 2as you know, healthcare kind of moves slow, like we talked about as you know, healthcare kind of moves slow, like we talked about Early in my career. I was presented with, I became a C-suite leader at a very young age. I was a C-suite leader as age 32, which is, you know, you have the experience to take it on. But it happens then and whatever you look for the opportunity and it kind of messed it up because I did everything right from the perspective of the practice, the discipline, the technology sort of the bread and butter of what we do as technology and digital leaders but I forgot about the people and I think that experience that very early in my career is sort of hit in the face with the people part of the equation matters has driven my belief. For the rest of you know what I've done the last 20 years. You can't be a good technology leader without being a good people leader and you can't be a good people leader, at least in technology, without being willing to give your own time. So I actually spend typically, you know, more than half of my time on that and to raise some things from choosing to engage in the more complex sort of things that we do, especially the projects that get into crisis, not through the lens of I'll bring the hammer and I'll tell everybody what we need to do, but through the lens of hey, I'm a professional too and I got two decades of experience experience and maybe if we prove our experiences, we can see our way through this. So I think there's a balance where you don't second guess people, you don't step on people's toes but you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty. And I think sometimes we forget as we get older or more senior and we get larger teams. We're sort of supposed to not meddle, but sometimes we actually have a better context of what's going on and we certainly have the better perspective. So you can actually be helpful by spending time in the more complex projects. So that's one thing.
Speaker 2The other thing is you have to go meet people. I went to every single major location yes, it's all virtual, but people still matter. So all the major hubs that have significant populations. I went there twice a year and every time I went on site I would ask my EA to say hey, I have reserved half a day or a day. Just book it up with half hour meetings with people. I can't meet a thousand people, but I can make it happen out of sitting down and just having a conversation and everybody would ask me like they're all like before they get used to it. It's like, why does Klaus want to talk to me? I mean, what's his topic? And the reality is there's no topic, right? I mean it's just sitting down and getting to know people, and I think you can learn a lot from just listening to what's on people's mind when you don't have an agenda and you're just two people in a room somewhere.
Speaker 2And the third thing I've done for a long time is I believe in the power of giving people the opportunity to learn, but learn, not train. Those are two very different things. I mean, learning is a journey of personal growth and realization. Training is, you know, there's something specific that I need to be able to do. So I have sponsored and led learning journeys around a very specific set of topics, and there's like five. The first one is digital transformation. The second one is technical leadership, and that's not about managers, but each of us lead on a day-to-day basis. The third one innovation in the day job, not on the side. The fourth one is storytelling. That's my favorite one. And the fifth one is networking. So what does that look like? Well, I kick off a semester. So this is like a structured learning program, and actually I spend a day with the team that's at the site just talking about that topic. So those are some of the things I believe you can do.
Speaker 1I really fundamentally believe you have to give your own time if you want your team to be the best it possibly can be. Yeah, they're your family, right? Like we kind of hang out with our team more than we do our own family. So I always feel like how do we support them and let them know that they have a voice as well, right?
Speaker 2Exactly.
Speaker 1We're not just putting the hammer down so quickly. Yeah, klaus, it's been so great talking to you. I end every podcast with a question, and so today we want to know what is your superpower that you are bringing to the world and to your team.
Speaker 2I actually have one word for it my superpower is synthesizer. That is what I do, probably better than most people is. You can throw hundreds of bits and pieces at me and I will just instinctively make sense out of them. I will synthesize, not aggregate. I will synthesize what is the essence that sits inside all of these moving data points, all the moving forces. That's what I'm really good at. I didn't know that at the beginning of my career, but I actually asked myself that question when I had an executive coach some years back that said, hey, what's your value statement? That's my superpower.
Speaker 1I love it Looking for things from the inside and then breaking them down and expanding outward right Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been such a joy talking to you and we will see you out there soon, I'm sure.
Speaker 2Thank you very much.
Speaker 3Thanks for tuning into the Verge Podcast. Thank you very much.