The Tech Glow Up - Fabulous conversations with innovative minds.

Connected Care Infrastructure to Patient-First Pharmacy Networks - BD & FDB Vela

• Nathan C Bowser • Season 2 • Episode 4

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More of Nathan C's conversations with 2 healthcare leaders solving what happens when medical devices talk to each other, and what happens when patients have real choice.

Bilal Muhsin, EVP Connected Care at BD, is building infrastructure that moves healthcare beyond disconnected devices. With expertise from his first company where he scaled embedded device providers into solution platforms, Muhsin now oversees pharmacy automation, infusion dispensing, and patient monitoring—all communicating within a unified ecosystem.

BD's new Incada platform does what healthcare infrastructure hasn't done yet: connects products so clinicians see the whole patient picture, not fragmented alarms. His philosophy centers on trust and safety, using physiological models to guide AI rather than black-box algorithms, validating everything before patient contact, and learning offline before reintroducing improvements.

Lathe Bigler, head of FDB Vela, the E-prescribing Network at First DataBank,, tackles the last-mile problem: once doctors prescribe, patients need to actually get their medications. For 15 years, Bigler has been a patient advocate focused on transparency and choice. Vela connects EHR systems to pharmacies through a neutral network, giving patients real agency—they don't just tell doctors "send it to the pharmacy by my house"; they can see pricing, check drug availability, compare options, and choose where to pick up their prescription. 

FDB's database has protected patient safety for years through drug-drug and drug-allergy interaction screening, but Vela extends that mission to the entire patient journey. 

Highlights from Bilal Muhsin at BD:

  • Leads BD's Connected Care segment spanning pharmacy automation, drug dispensing, infusion, and patient monitoring—now unified through new Incada platform
  • Philosophy: AI guides within physiological models, not black-box algorithms; validate before patient contact; learn offline, reintroduce improvements only after full validation
  • Origin: NICU nurse showed him a premature baby monitored by BD sensor, saying "What you do saves these babies' lives"—redirected his entire career toward outcomes-focused healthcare infrastructure

Highlights from Lathe Bigler at FDB Vela:

  • Runs First DataBank's e-prescribing network (Vela) connecting EHRs to pharmacies, enabling patient transparency and choice around pricing, drug availability, and pharmacy location
  • Patient advocate for 15 years; focused on transparency, choice, and consumer agency in healthcare; using AI to detect fraud, waste, abuse, and anomalies in prescription patterns
  • Spicy take: 720+ healthcare data breaches in 2024; advocating for redundant networks as patient safety infrastructure so one breach doesn't shut down the entire prescription system

The result: healthcare infrastructure that works because it listens to data, validates everything, keeps humans in control, and gives patients real agency in their own care.

A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.

At The Tech Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.

In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.

If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.

Nathan C:

On three will clap. So 1, 2, 3. Hello and welcome to the HLTH Tech Glow Up. I'm Nathan C, and today I'm talking with Bilal Muhsin from BD, Bilal. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Bilal Muhsin:

Thank you for having me.

Nathan C:

Amazing. So first off. Could you please introduce yourself and the work that you do at bd?

Bilal Muhsin:

Sure. my name's Bilal Muhsin. I head a segment at BD called Connected Care that has under a few business units, everything from pharmacy automation, to drug dispensing and infusion, and also monitoring. Yeah. Oh, that's the idea. Exactly. Bring it all that together.

Nathan C:

amazing. So Bilial Specifically at HLTH from that connected care perspective? What are the kinds of conversations that you're looking to have?

Bilal Muhsin:

Yeah, so what's exciting at HLTH is we actually launched a new platform, amazing BD Incada. The platform has a vision of going beyond what people. Think about connectivity today and truly creating a connection and insightful connection. It's really about patient centricity and focusing on how we can improve outcomes for patients. So we're leveraging our footprint today in hospitals with what we have, from what we've talked about, like pharmacy automation and infusion and dispensing, all the way to monitoring, and now bringing that into a complete new ecosystem and making everything smarter, not individually as individual products and solutions, but all together. So now we can actually see, What's happening to the patient. At the same time, we're infusing drugs into them or dispensing drugs into them and hopefully improve healthcare outcomes for them.

Nathan C:

what are the kinds of outcomes, that you're focused on through these kinds of connected care around, medications and dispensing?

Bilal Muhsin:

Yeah, so look, medication management and dispensing become really critical when you're. Dealing with patients, right? It's really about safety for those patients. It's really about predicting where they're gonna go. If you're reacting, you're just getting tons of alarms and now the patient's in a different difficult situation. If we can change that into a predictive model and add decision support logic to that. We can prevent things from happening to patients or recommend things to clinicians early on, way before alarms go off. and certain conditions, you know, deterioration occurs on patients. So that's what we're excited about. Mm-hmm. Right? About that vision. But it's gonna go beyond that, right? It's actually gonna go all the way to, now that we have all these solutions communicating with each other, they can actually close the loop, right? Mm-hmm. Why do we need somebody in between it all? We need it in the beginning, right?'cause we want to feel safe, just like in self-driving cars and so on. We wanna feel like it's there. But once it's there, hopefully it proves that it can, it can, you know, allow clinicians to focus on the patient where they need to be, not on all the devices that are connected to them. And hopefully you can set up the therapy now and drive a solution all the way through.

Nathan C:

Amazing. The, idea of trust and safety, especially in this era when there's a lot of focus on disruption, right? Like workforce is over indexed Patients aren't getting the care they need. There's all these demands and so to automate to, Make more efficient to speed things up. There's this big push, but at the same time, right, like unlike Silicon Valley innovation, when you move fast and break things, it's real people's lives. How do you balance and how do, what's your approach, being one such a gigantic, presence, in the world? How do you approach safety in the sort of, some of the things you're pushing toward are like personalized care or localized care, and like balancing like safety at a global level and personalized care

Bilal Muhsin:

so, unlike tech companies Yeah. It's actually part of our DNA.

Nathan C:

Right. Okay.

Bilal Muhsin:

So when we come to develop any algorithms, or even when we allow AI to develop things, we're not treating it like a black box.

Nathan C:

Yeah.

Bilal Muhsin:

Right. We're not gonna just throw data at it and just say, okay. Here's what the AI algorithm is telling us to do.

Nathan C:

Yeah,

Bilal Muhsin:

Right. We base everything on what we understand on the physiological model of the patient, We understand what the limitations are, how certain behaviors should be. We're actually digging deep into the clinician's mind to see how they actually look at patients, And we translate that now into a model and we allow AI to play within that model, but not take over the entire model per se. So we do a lot of these things and where we come to now. Feeding our model a ton of data and seeing how we can drive outcomes, and then we test it, we validate it, but then we lock it right in some sense. And then that's what we launch. It's not to say that we're not learning. We can take a lot of this data back and truly learn, but we don't do it in real time necessarily. So we take it offline to learn and we bring it back and reintroduce it, as something that is a little bit more robust and something that is fully validated before it touches the patient.

Nathan C:

That, that fully validated before you go to the customer is like, so common sense in your world. And it's like something I have to advocate for in mine. We got deep into your work at bd, some of that mission and even like some of that global reach. I'm curious, Bilal, every innovator starts somewhere. what's your origin story? what got you so excited about? automation, ai, and, and outcomes

Bilal Muhsin:

Yeah. So look, I come from a Middle Eastern, background. and growing up in a household like that, we only have two choices. You can be an engineer or a doctor. There isn't a third. I was better at math, so I chose engineering and I was actually, I was lucky. I graduated and I got an internship at a monitoring company. and the first time I got to walk into a hospital was out in Philadelphia and a nurse saw my badge and saw me, you know, look lost basically. And she pulled me aside and walked me into a nicu. And I walked into that nicu. she picked up a baby that fit into the palm of her hands, not mine. And it had the sensor, that the company produced. And she said, what you do saves these babies' lives. And for me that was like a wow. I've always liked tech, I've always liked technology. and then seeing what impact it could have, on these babies' lives and on overall people's lives. I was just drawn to it. From that point forward, I knew this is what I wanted to do forever.

Nathan C:

As somebody who is passionate about this space, has known for quite a while that that's where, you want to be. you've seen trends and hype and maybe even bubbles, paradigm shifts happen. We talk about glow ups on the show as transformation as a way to look at goals and having a vision. So I'm curious from your perspective, what is the vision, what is the glow up you wanna see happen in healthcare in the next six? Do a year.

Bilal Muhsin:

Yeah. You know, I look back and I remember when, servers and just getting, devices connected onto the hospital wifi, was such a big deal. and I think every, CIO or CTO in the hospital really didn't want that and said, Hey, we can't have, healthcare devices being connected to our network. and they finally overcame that, right? And now today they talk about having cloud data and having AI and moving forward, and there's some people still challenged with it today, but what they need to recognize is today. Patients are a lot, lot more knowledgeable about their health. they use tools that are personalized to them today. It's fast, it's quick. and if we don't as a healthcare, ecosystem follow that we will not be able to serve these patients in the future. so I think that's something we need to focus on and make sure we get ahead of.

Nathan C:

Yeah. there's definitely, a trend of like, well, if the end users, whether those are doctors or nurses, or patients or caregivers, are using these tools and it's part of their stack for managing their healthcare not having something that's totally uncontrolled and wild, wild west, having something that fits with those systems. Right, right. I had to spend some time caring for family in the hospital, and what I noticed was the medical devices in her room were not Steve Jobs gorgeous, but they were incredibly focused and effective usually at one thing. Even the really difficult things would have a big green circle and a big red stop and an up arrow and a down and there would be like four buttons on a thing that was keeping my family alive and it was such a reminder that user experience. And context matters so much when you're using technology at all, and when it is a lifesaving moment, It needs to be reliable. It needs to not cause infection Just to see what it takes to make a purpose built, safe, trustworthy, sanitary. Right. the number of things that all kind of point back to user experience is crucial to enabling the technology to work was so on display

Bilal Muhsin:

and I think what we're talking about today is now, you know, elevating, elevating the products and solutions and reducing the complexity. Yeah. Right. Because when clinicians are coming and they're dealing with four or five different unique products and, and trying to. Manage a patient care through these buttons that we're talking about, right? Yeah. These interfaces, if these things can talk to each other, the amount of button presses or even what needs to be displayed can now be more, instead of a red big button, it could be pure English of what's going on. Right? Mm-hmm. And what needs to happen next.

Nathan C:

Yeah.

Bilal Muhsin:

and that's where we need to head from health tech and that will also enable us to go beyond the clinician in terms of communication, but also to the patient. Which is extremely important as they become more educated about their health, they're part of this journey. Their family is part of this journey. If you were in that hospital room and instead of looking at these devices and fearing them in some sense,'cause they're all beeping, they're all alarming, they all look like they're pretty ancient in some sense. Mm-hmm. but instead is if you were looking at them and you were seeing, you know, not necessarily numbers. But a true evaluation of what is occurring, this person, you're stable. Or if it's not stable here in plain English, this is what's happening to them. It also allows you, now it's which you become part of the care and to say, okay, this is what I need to care for when I'm dealing with my loved ones in hospitals. Right. And eventually it'll all the way come to the home and we need to differentiate between tech devices at home. That you can, you can, you can play with, you can enjoy. During your run or during your sleep patterns and stuff like that, that are helpful. Right. But I think there'll be a big differentiation when they become critical. Right. And that's where we wanna make sure there's a differentiation there. Patients and people need to be aware of that, and need to treat it differently and need to adhere to it differently. And hopefully we see outcomes come out of it differently.

Nathan C:

Yeah. I thank you. That's amazing. you mentioned something that. connected devices right? Makes these jobs easier. And as one of the largest manufacturers of devices, BD kind of has an interesting differentiator, which is you understand how all the devices work or many of the devices work, is there? There's kind of two different ways. there might be more, but in my brain right now, there's two different ways that you can kind of approach that knowledge. one is to like have a proprietary system that's only BD tools or prioritizes. It's kind of like what Apple does. Mm-hmm. and then there's also the sort of standards route. How do you approach those decisions and, does BD have a preference or, yeah. So look,

Bilal Muhsin:

we have to be patient centric

Nathan C:

Yep.

Bilal Muhsin:

Right? So we're trying to solve the problem for the patient

Nathan C:

Yeah.

Bilal Muhsin:

And the outcomes for that patient, whether we do it with our own. Tools and devices. And we can accomplish that. But we also need to work within the ecosystem. We need to figure out if we need a partner we also do acquisitions with organic. we need to solve the problem at the end of the day. we're gonna take an initial approach, With the products that we already have out there, that are pretty ubiquitously used today. And we're gonna try to solve as much as we can, but we're gonna hit a roadblock and eventually when we roadblock, we're gonna need partners and others. To come into that ecosystem because we're here to serve that patient at the end of the day.

Nathan C:

Mm-hmm. I love that answer. the part in the middle where you're like, we're going to encounter roadblocks, and that those are the moments where we will learn and adapt and solve. I think is like. often in innovation, the roadblocks feel like failure, but for you, it's like an opportunity to ask for help, an opportunity to grow, to expand, and like, I feel like that's what, some leadership experience brings to that. So, yeah. Bravo. amazing. We, I know you have a flight. Soon. So, the theme for the show is Heroes and Legends, and I'm using this as an opportunity to talk about the mentors, the educators, the coaches who have impacted innovative leaders, careers, and their journeys. how have coaches or mentors or heroes legends, impacted, Your journey?

Bilal Muhsin:

Yeah, I've been very fortunate, honestly. I've been surrounded by smarter people than me the whole time. they led me towards a path where my curiosity is what drove what I wanted to do. when I was an engineer writing code. I wanted to know. How the data was actually getting from point A to point B. And I had a lot of mentors within the engineering team leaders that said, Hey, go figure it out. and that's how initially in my other company, we went from being an embedded device, provider to becoming a solution provider. That was my first experience of going to a beyond kind of coding tomorrow of a product. platform and solution. and then I had the trust of all the way up to the CEO, where they saw something in me. they took me to pay, they took me to customers. Yes. and that was a, that was a massive, learning experience for me. I saw how, my former CEO. Would interact with customers. And it's not about walking in with a bag of trying to sell something. When you're dealing with customers, you gotta do a lot more listening than you're doing selling, and that's where innovation really occurs. Mm, I learned that and I, and I really appreciated those knowledge. And I'm fortunate today, with Tom Polen at BD and his way of approach, having no fear and looking at saying, Hey, where are our plans? Where's healthcare going in the next five to 10 years? And well, your responsibility is to guide us there, right? So allowing me, to work in an environment that is so, truly open and looking at innovation and looking at ways of solving it, whether it's with our own products Or with others. So I've been fortunate, to be led by true leaders throughout. leadership isn't always at the top, by the way. you have those leaders that kind of guide you, but there's leadership at all levels That really support you, and lift you up as you go about your career. And I'm fortunate, to have leaders that have helped me throughout. My journey.

Nathan C:

You can't do big things alone, right? That's correct. Yeah. several conversations around mentors, have centered on this. Like this person gave me a project to go research this person gave me, right? Like the trust to go build an application. This person like connected me with things that I didn't even know I was interested in yet. And like that, early seed is just, it's such a magical question. Okay, perfect. I love it. Thank you Bilal of BD Thank you so much for joining me on the Health Tech Glow Up. There's one last thing to do, so please, let's clap it up. 1, 2, 3. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Bilal Muhsin:

Yes, thank you.

Lathe Bigler:

I'll tell you one thing that we're really good at, as Americans, we can shop online. So why can't I get my prescription, look at it, shop and then select where I want it built?

Nathan C:

1, 2, 3. Hi, I am Nathan and this is the HLTh Tech Glow Up Live from HLTH 2025. Today I have a very special guest. I'm talking with Lathe Bigler of FDB Vela. So good to meet you Lathe. Thank you, Nathan. Welcome to the HLTH Tech Glow Up. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's exciting. Ah first off, could you introduce yourself and the work that you

Lathe Bigler:

Lathe Bigle, I am with FDB. I run the FDB E-prescribing network we call Vela here at First DataBank been here for about, seven years. And, this is like my fourth time at

Nathan C:

HLTH Amazing. Can you describe a little bit about, the product, in that, you said it was a database, it was a prescribed. Can you describe the product a little bit, more what is your technology and the differentiator that you have? Absolutely.

Lathe Bigler:

Yeah. So Vela is a full end-to-end e-prescribing network. So we, take prescriptions from the EHR systems that we partner with through health systems. And we route those onto the appropriate pharmacy based upon the patient's direction.

Nathan C:

Amazing. that connection between care to pharmacy to home is like such an important last mile. how does Vela, ensure outcomes and results for both your customers and their patients? Great. So

Lathe Bigler:

FDB has been around for many years. We are a staple in healthcare. We have large amounts of, customers using our database. Services. That include the drug to drug interactions, the drug to allergy interactions. Patient safety focus there. And we essentially help a provider write a good script. Now we used to just stop there so it's not handwriting. Those are the good old days. I just aged us. Sorry. Now it's digitized. We helped with decision support and in 2022 we launched Vela because. We not only wanted to help create the prescription, we wanted to deliver it and bring new value in that part of the market, which includes bringing value to pharmacies, PBMs, as well as providers.

Nathan C:

Amazing. Let's actually turn to the innovator now. I'm curious, what was your origin story? What was your foundation, that got you started working in, innovative technologies in health? It's

Lathe Bigler:

exciting'cause I'm a huge patient advocate. Ooh. I always have been. and especially over the last 15 years, I would say I've been really focused and dedicated on doing just that.

Nathan C:

Do you do that through like messaging. Through apps, like what is the connection, what is the sort of technology to customer connection look like? So FDB

Lathe Bigler:

Vela is a network. no one should know who we are, but what we do is we enable applications. There are so many outstanding applications available in the market that do really good at what they do

Nathan C:

and the databases, your data and your understanding of the network and that backend. That allows those tools to correct,

Lathe Bigler:

we safely enable, apps to, so I'll give you a quick example. today when we all go to the doctor, we're all healthcare, tech professionals. But we're patients, right? So when I go to the provider and she asks me, where would you like your prescription sent? I don't know other than what my habit is like the pharmacy by my house, and then when I get to the pharmacy, I'm hoping for two things. One, the script actually got there. Which it hasn't gotten there. Sometimes And two, it's not gonna cost me an arm and a leg, but I go in blind. I don't know what it's gonna cost me.

Nathan C:

I'll add a third one. I take ADHD medicine. So is it at that pharmacy? is there actually The drug there. Yeah. That's right.

Lathe Bigler:

that's another whole area we could talk about too. So what Vela has basically done is that rather than tell my doctor, send it to this pharmacy, what I can say is send it to x, y, Z app. Yep. We work with lots of different apps. We have one called Rx Wallet as an example. Yep. I can say, you know what, just send my prescription to RX Wallet, the provider and their workflow and their EHR is gonna type in RX wallet and it's gonna be there.'cause it's on the Vela Network. Yep. What we do is the prescription goes to the Vela network, it's held securely, doesn't move, and we have an API to RX wallet. And RX wallet then engages the patient, it's the details of the prescription. The patient could start shopping, looking at pricing information, looking at, where the record locator and figure out what if the drug's there actually at that pharmacy and can I get it today? And then at that point, the pharmacy, the patient selects it. It tells Vela we're to deliberate and we delivered on as a new RX, so the patients Inc included in that whole process.

Nathan C:

So those apps and those referrals then act like a concierge almost to do that last mile of translating the data, translating the complexity. Into something that it could Exactly, because,

Lathe Bigler:

we all get confused with our benefits. do I use my drug benefit for this or should I pay cash and get a better rate? Like we don't know. And so having that all in front of us is so important because I'll tell you one thing that we're really good at, as Americans, we can shop online. So why can't I get my prescription, look at it, shop and then select where I want it built?

Nathan C:

Absolutely amazing. let's turn to the show a little bit. Let's go a little high level. thank you for that deep dive. We're at HLTH and the show is The Tech Glow Up. I'm curious what's the glow up or transformation you're looking to see in the healthcare industry at large?

Lathe Bigler:

So what I've really enjoyed talking about this health conference is around. Redundancy. One thing that really concerns me about healthcare is that in 2024, as an example, we had over 720 data breaches in healthcare tech. That's reported. you only report the ones you have to exactly. That's almost two a day that we, in healthcare tech, all the companies here are experiencing at some level I'm concerned about areas within healthcare that we are single threaded. And so I really like the idea of glowing up our redundancy in healthcare so that if one network goes down, there's another one that can very quickly send that prescription electronically. That's one thing that we're lacking in healthcare today. and I'm sure e-prescribing is not the only single threaded area, right? There are some cases where there's claim processing, which, slows down revenue cycle and there's all sorts of issues, but I'm more focused on the patient safety aspect to it, because if our data's being, accessed or we're being breached and, someone's doing ransomware on us, it literally could stop e-prescribing flowing altogether and pharmacies would not be able to keep up to manage the prescription fulfillment that patients need.

Nathan C:

do you have a preferred, method to achieve that kind of redundancy and uptime?

Lathe Bigler:

I think it comes down to this, if you are a CMIO or you're a CTO of any organization and you're looking at all of your internal as well as your external connections to maintain your business. To me it's look for all the single threaded ones and fix that. Add a secondary, add backup, add redundancy. and I think if everyone just from a very basic level looked at their businesses that way, there's so many options out there to introduce that the market could take advantage

Nathan C:

I feel like I'm about to ask an uninformed question because I don't know a whole lot about redundancy in healthcare, but I do know. I actually have an artist friend who recently was like in the studio, had some tracks they were really excited about and so they were saving them onto multiple hard drives. Okay, so that you already know where I'm going, right? Saving it to multiple hard drives so that they'd be really super safe. And in the process ended up deleting the files. Also in an age of phishing and of hacking, just like we might have redundant systems for our data. There's incredibly redundant risks for people getting into my parents' email accounts. Sure. Can you talk a little bit about how you balance redundancy and safety and redundancy and accuracy? that's a really good question.

Lathe Bigler:

I'll look at it this way. An individual organization may have redundancy in the sense that they have, an east and a west, redundancy Network wise, right? Sure. From a platform perspective, you're using AWS, you're using Microsoft, you're gonna have redundancy, If one area goes down, you can switch it to the other, right? But if a hacker gets in and holds that ransom, this feels timely. It doesn't matter. So a great example is Change Healthcare last year, right? When Change Healthcare was breached, it was a ransomware situation. They did not have access to their own network for months to even do anything. It was literally shut down. So redundancy, it can mean two things. You within yourself can have redundancy, but it also means what if one organization completely goes down like a Change Healthcare? Is there another avenue or solution I can be using as well to ensure that if one goes down, I can switch to the other and vice versa?

Nathan C:

Yeah. with Ai, with, quantum computing, with, personalized medications, how do you get people's attention on redundancy?

Lathe Bigler:

The good thing is, is it's finally happening. Unfortunately, I think it's our human nature, it took a Change Healthcare situation to get the attention. Oh, okay. We have been talking about this, we're learning a lot lately. sometimes we learn the hard way. Vela was launched in 2022. We had been telling the market, listen, there's another network now available where you can have redundancy. And it's yeah. And then change, change, hell happen and we are suddenly seeing an immense uptick in, okay, maybe we need to be more proactive on this fix. And that's how Vela's growing. I think one of the reasons Vela's growing so much right now is, with connecting to all of our EHR partners, all of our pharmacies, all our health systems, is because they're really starting to see that

Nathan C:

amazing. So let's take this reflection and this glow up, a little bit more internally. looking at FDB and your work with Vela, what's the six month glow up, that you're looking to make, for your organization?

Lathe Bigler:

Great. Great. Yeah. Well, huge in Ai. You know, it's, That is like the biggest buzz going on right now within any technology forum. we at Vela are focused on the very same things and a lot of it comes down to internal tools and AI tools to improve our own processes, and our own tools for, our customers. But we're really focused right now too on leveraging AI over the next six months to look for any anomaly detections within our network. So bad actors of prescribers. We're trying to cut down on fraud, waste and abuse in that regard. So that's one of our key focuses right now.

Nathan C:

Interesting. When you just stopped my brain, the idea of like fraud or bad acting prescribers, really just shows there are so many facets to the data that really, like I'm thinking from a patient, from a, what's my prescription? but there's all of these layers of data and signal that you're collecting, by being that connector. It's true.

Lathe Bigler:

No, that's a really good point. Sometimes we rely so much on like the the EHR is gonna cover it and they're gonna do all their bells and whistles and that's all well and good, but we wanna make sure at the network level that we're able to police that as well. Yeah.

Nathan C:

And then, having those sorts of signals and early detection buoys. Out in the world then obviously gives you additional signals that you can provide value back to those partners. Exactly. And who wouldn't wanna know when, you got a hotspot in, Detroit of some weird activity that you'd wanna shut down quickly. Amazing. So the show's theme this year is Heroes and Legends, and I'm using it as an opportunity to ask innovators about the heroes and legends and mentors that have impacted their journey. I'm curious. In this context of being at HLTH who are the mentors and heroes that have helped you on your way?

Lathe Bigler:

There have been so many, really great mentors and I think in healthcare that have really, paved the way for us. I do have to go to the broader picture around. You're looking at someone like Steve Jobs, right? Who is just one of my personal heroes. what he really brought to us as humanity has enabled so much for us to do, I think what I wanna focus on is continuing to follow that path in terms of disruption being very. aggressive and driving and pushing new technologies, new opportunities, because I think we have a, and I hate to say it as healthcare, but it's just true. We've seen a lot rest on our laurels a little bit. we're usually a little slow with technology. But I really feel like we're at that chasm of leveraging AI to where it's gonna help healthcare move quite quicker, which is my hope, my goal.

Nathan C:

You hit on a theme that I've heard. I'm actually a little bit surprised to hear, and I think you've said it the most gently by describing it as we're reaching a chasm, but at least three other leaders that I've talked to in the last day, mentioned straight up paradigm change in some of these systems. That are keeping healthcare from catching up to the moment. for you, is it all AI or is AI like the easiest lever to grab? When we're looking at workforce, when we're looking at aging, when we're looking at change in regulation and government, like this is totally off script. No, this is great.

Lathe Bigler:

So I think the technology level AI is what's really important. It's gonna help us.

Nathan C:

Yeah,

Lathe Bigler:

we have a business problem. We have a business model problem in healthcare. we lack transparency. and I think the way that we've viewed benefit, is also something that holds us back. the sooner we can say, look, open it up for more patient choice, more transparency, not steering and driving so much for, rebates and other things. the more we can focus on that and the quicker we can get past it, it's gonna be so much better for all of us.

Nathan C:

I was trying to give it a little bit of space sometimes. Like the idea is so big I jump on it. Sure. did we actually, I asked you a follow up question to your heroes question. was Steve Jobs enough? Was that he was enough? Okay. Yes, Steve. Steve, you're enough. I thank you. Amazing. did we get to everything that you were hoping to share? I think so.

Lathe Bigler:

a great conversation. we talked a lot about redundancy. price, transparency, and consumer choice, and those are our key focuses right now. Okay.

Nathan C:

Let me give, let me like, wrap us up. Give us a little bit of an outro. Great. My brain, it must be like time for a sweet snack. Yeah. Nathan, thank you so much for joining me on the Health Tech Low Up. I, I honestly learned some big new things about redundancy and, the networks, that go into bringing my pharmacy orders to my door. it's such a pleasure to meet you on the HLTH Tech Glow Up Thanks for having me, Nathan. I appreciate it. Amazing pleasure. You ready? Yep. Okay. 1, 2, 3. I love it. Good job.