The Healthcare Vertical in 2021 – What Our New Account Executive, Doug Rubino Has to Say

When we said we were working on growing the DataMotion team to up your experience with us, we weren’t kidding. In the previous interview, you got to meet our new Vice President of Sales, Joe Morini. This time, we’d like you to meet Doug Rubino, our newest Account Executive. We interviewed Doug on his new role, the trends he’s seeing in healthcare today, his thoughts on the future of healthcare information technology, and we asked a few fun questions to learn a little more about who Doug is. So, sit back, relax, and let’s get to know Doug Rubino.

Hi Doug, can you please introduce yourself, tell us about your background, where you’re from, your position here at DataMotion, and why you’re excited to join the team?

Doug Rubino: I’m located here in southeastern Pennsylvania, about 20 miles west of the city of Philadelphia. I was born and raised here in the area and never really left so, you can call me a Philly guy at heart. I’m a southeastern Pennsylvania, northeastern person, if you will.

My professional background is within the healthcare information technology space and I’ve spent upwards of 20 years in customer-facing roles. I’ve had an opportunity to work directly with healthcare organizations of many types. For example, I’ve worked with providers, health plans, third-party administrators, and healthcare IT vendors. I’ve enjoyed working with these organizations as they evaluated technology for use across their enterprise to address their particular requirements, whether these be reimbursement, regulatory, or administrative requirements.

In my role here with DataMotion, I’ll be expected to contribute to the continued growth of the company within the healthcare vertical. So, that includes healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare IT vendors. We also want to begin looking at life sciences as an area of growth for the company, for example a clinical research organization or a pharmaceutical company.

So, I’m very excited to be here. Throughout my career, it’s been somewhat of a passion of mine, as it relates to healthcare IT, around the topic of interoperability. From the very beginning of my career, the overarching thing that I’ve been passionate about is how do we improve upon how all of the different stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem communicate with each other electronically? I think that DataMotion is a big part of that. So, I’m excited to be here and I’m looking forward to strong growth in the healthcare vertical in 2021.

Okay, very cool. So, now let’s move on to some goal-related questions. What would you say are some of your short and long-term goals in this position? For example, one thing you hope to accomplish three months from now, and then another that you hope to accomplish a year from now.

Doug Rubino: So, short-term, I ideally want to be able to connect with our healthcare customers. And when connecting with them, I mean getting beyond the general introduction. I’m very interested in how they’re using our services today, how they deployed DataMotion, what their use cases are, and what their thoughts on the service are, good, bad, and ugly. I think there is so much value that we can get from our current customers. Whether it’s information that we take back and share internally with our product teams to drive further innovation in the product, or taking use cases and using those during conversations with prospects. Our customers are a wealth of knowledge and there’s so much we can learn from them. When we don’t take advantage of that, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and to our customers.

So short term, I want to be able to connect with as many current customers as I can to advance those objectives that I just laid out. Long term, it goes without saying, that we want to drive market share, revenue growth, and continue to expand into the healthcare vertical. As I said earlier, we see the life sciences vertical as an area of growth for the company. When we look at clinical research and pharmaceutical organizations, these guys are looking at ways to connect with their constituents. Meaning, members or patients that are part of a clinical trial. I think the DataMotion services and technologies that we can leverage to help them are important in making this connection.

Okay, those sound like some great goals. So, as we’ve been talking about, you’re going to be working with our healthcare customers and prospects. Can you talk about the trends that you’re seeing in this industry?

Doug Rubino: Sure. The one thing that stands out immediately to me, is that ensuring the security and privacy of clinical data PHI that is exchanged electronically, has never been more top of mind than it is now. I think organizations are looking to find more ways to continue to exchange that information electronically.

So, going back to the interoperability discussion, our healthcare data resides in different silos within an ecosystem of care. So, organizations are thinking “how do I exchange information about Doug Rubino that will enable me to better manage and better coordinate his care?” The fact of the matter is, that all of us as consumers, all of our PHI and clinical data reside in different places. In order to ensure the effective coordination of care for any one patient or constituents of patients, an organization’s ability to effectively exchange information electronically is always top of mind. This may be because they realize that it’s a condition of participation, a regulatory requirement, a contractual commitment, or they just want to improve the general care management coordination for a patient.

So, these guys are all striving to improve quality of care, but at the same time, they’re wondering how they can improve quality of care if they have data residing in disparate source systems. That’s why consolidating, aggregating, and exchanging that data is a big trend right now. As it relates to DataMotion, we’re providing them with the technology to be able to privately, and confidently ensure they’ve exchanged that data in a secure manner.

So, all of this relates to improving quality of care and the exchange of data from disparate silos. As we all know, the Coronavirus greatly impacted the healthcare industry. Do you think this is at least partially behind the trends you discussed or was the healthcare industry already heading in this direction?

Doug Rubino: I think the industry was already headed in this direction. It’s been something that has been debated for a number of years now, and the Coronavirus, if anything, accelerated that discussion. In terms of how we enable organizations to communicate and share information remotely, one of the technologies that is top of mind is telehealth. We saw a tremendous growth in that market in 2020 in terms of adoption across the industry. I think that going forward, the industry will actually see this as a standard care option for what they call primary care virtual consults. Two years ago, that probably wouldn’t have been the case. But, looking in terms of where we are headed February 2021, it’s certainly seems that adoption across the industry is more widespread than ever.

I read something this morning on this point with respect to telehealth. I read that there were three new pieces of legislation brought before Congress in Washington in late January, early February, that are aimed at the use of telehealth. How do we expand the use of it? How do we expand adoption across the industry? Looking at things like reimbursement, how do we reimburse for this? How do we drop telehealth into a nursing home or a long-term care facility or a post-acute care facility so that an elderly population can communicate with their caregivers and/or family members?

So, there’s a lot of people looking at telehealth and the acceptance of it across the industry. What we’re seeing in Washington right now is indicative of that. DataMotion is positioned very well to be able to help with that adoption. As members and patients have a need to communicate with their caregivers or families, they’ll be naturally wanting to or having to exchange clinical data. This is where we’re able to facilitate that process with these organizations and for these individuals. So, I see our organization and I see our deliverables playing a big part of that process going forward.

Okay, so now we’re going to move on to a few fun questions. When you’re not working, what would you say is your favorite hobby or activity?

Doug Rubino: I’m a big-time golfer and I consider myself the be a full-fledged member of the public circuit tour in southeastern Pennsylvania. I’m also a family guy, family is number one. But in my free time, you’ll find me on the golf course. I also like to read, I’m a big history buff, I read a lot of World War Two history. In summary, I like to read, golf, and watch hockey.

So, my next question, if you could have dinner with any two famous people, who would they be and why?

Doug Rubino: So, I’m going to draw on my love of history here. The two folks who I selected are James Madison and an admiral from the Second World War, Admiral Nimitz.

I selected Madison because I love to understand how we got to where we are today as a nation, as individuals, and as human beings. You know, Madison was credited as being one of the fathers of the United States Constitution. So, he’s the guy that brought all of the different relevant stakeholders together. And I’d love to talk with him about what was required to bring all of these different folks together with differing agendas at that period of time, with the foresight into, thinking, here’s where we are today, in 2021. The compromises that were required to put that document in place are remarkable. And I would love to talk with him about that political process that he had to go through there.

The other one is Nimitz. Like I said, I love World War Two history, I just finished reading a book about the war in the Pacific. Nimitz was the admiral that oversaw our naval operations from 1941 to 1945. This guy was remarkable in terms of system leadership qualities, and the strategic thinking that went into ensuring that we were successful in the Pacific in the Second World War. I have so many questions I would love to ask him. But, again, it’s the leadership qualities that I keep coming back to in terms of working with folks who have different agendas and thoughts on “here’s what I think we should do.” It’s just that general leadership quality, that is the thing that stands out to me in terms of what those two guys bring to the table, and that’s why I’d like to talk with them.

So, my last question, is there anything else you would like to share with the readers before we go?

Doug Rubino: As I said, the better part of my career has been in healthcare information technology. I’m passionate about the business of healthcare and specifically, the business of technology and services to address a lot of the problems and challenges that healthcare organizations are encumbered with today. So, drawing on that earlier conversation we had around interoperability, I think that improving interoperability among different healthcare organizations, long term care facilities, pharma facilities, and more is incredibly important. If we can help them communicate and share information with each other electronically, I think that will go a long way to improving health and patient outcomes. I see DataMotion as an integral component and a big piece of that process. So, I’m excited to be here and I think that this deliverable is definitely something that we need to bring further awareness to in the market.

Key Takeaways:

• Doug believes that our customers are a wealth of knowledge. We can learn a lot from each other about the problems they’ve solved with our services, what their thoughts are on our products, and more.
• Interoperability is a hot topic in healthcare with organizations constantly looking to better manage data located in disparate silos.
• Doug believes DataMotion is well-positioned to help organizations improve their clinical data exchange and quality of care.
• Doug believes the use of telehealth will continue to grow over the next several years and is interested to see how the acceptance of it will continue to expand across the industry.
• If Doug could sit down and have dinner with two famous people, he would choose James Madison and Admiral Nimitz to learn more about their leadership qualities in regard to bringing people together with differing agendas to unite over a common goal.