The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare | Deborah DiSanzo: On Saving Lives

In the final episode of Season 1, Meg speaks with Deborah DiSanzo, President of Best Buy Health.

Show Notes

On Episode 10, the final episode of Season 1 of The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare, Meg is joined by Deborah DiSanzo, President of Best Buy Health.

Meg and Deborah discuss the untold origins of the podcast. Deborah speaks of her early days with Apollo Computer and the surprising turn her career path took leading her to Hewlett Packard, Philips Healthcare, and IBM Watson Health. Deborah explains the strategic variables and decisions they faced in entering the automated external defibrillator market and what she values most about her teaching appointment at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health. DiSanzo also shares her vision for the role Best Buy Health will play in enabling healthcare in the home.

About Deborah DiSanzo

As President of Best Buy Health, Deborah Disanzo is responsible for the company's health strategy, with a particular focus on bringing health technology into the home. With more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of healthcare and technology, Deborah was previously CEO of Philips Healthcare and held management positions at Hewlett Packard and Apollo Computer.

At Philips, she and her team brought consumer-grade automated external defibrillators to the market, making them first available in public places, then ultimately into the homes of Americans across the country. At IBM Watson health, she helped launch artificial intelligence offerings designed to help doctors, researchers, healthcare providers, pharmacists and insurers better serve patients around the world. Deborah is also an instructor at the Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health.

Further Reading:

Philips HeartStart

Philips Cardiology Informatics

University of Pittsburgh Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

MD Anderson Cancer Center

Corrie Barry, CEO Best Buy

The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company by David Packard (212 pages, Harper Business, 1995)

Episode Credits:

The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare is a production of The Krinsky Company.

Hosted by Meg Escobosa.

Produced, edited, engineered, and mixed by Calvin Marty.

Theme music composed and performed by Calvin Marty.

Intro and outro voiced by John Parsons.

Creators & Guests

Host

Meg Escobosa

Meg Escobosa has 15 years of innovation consulting experience, focusing on the unique challenges of healthcare since 2012. For The Krinsky Company, Meg leads client engagements overseeing advisory board design, creation and management. She also leads industry research, expert recruitment and trend analysis to support corporate innovation initiatives centered on the future of healthcare. Her background in innovation and strategy consulting began at IdeaScope Associates where she was involved all aspects of strategic innovation initiatives including understanding the voice of the customer, industry research and aligning the executive team to invest in promising strategic growth opportunities. Meg received her BA in Latin American Studies from Trinity College in Hartford and her MBA in sustainable management from the pioneering Master’s degree program, Presidio Graduate School. She is also on the board of a non-profit foundation focused on researching and developing technology to support a sustainable society. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two teenage daughters.

Producer

Calvin Marty

A man of many hats, Calvin Marty is a Podcast Producer, Editor, Engineer, Voice Actor, Actor, Composer, Singer/Songwriter, Musician, and Tennis Enthusiast. Calvin produces, engineers, edits, mixes, and scores The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare. Calvin is also the creator of the 2020 podcast, irRegular People, among others. Find his music under the names Calvin Marty, Billy Dubbs, Nature Show, and The Sunken Ship. Over his long career as an actor, Calvin's has voiced many Radio and TV commercials for a wide-range of companies and products and has appeared in small on-camera roles on shows such as Chicago Fire and Empire.

What is The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare?

The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare is a podcast featuring exceptional women making an impact in healthcare today. We celebrate our guests’ accomplishments, setbacks, and the lessons they've learned throughout their careers. We dig into the many healthcare issues we face today and how these innovative leaders are working to solve them. Join host Meg Escobosa in conversation with some of the many brilliant, courageous women on the front lines of the future of health.

Deborah Disanzo: It is a safe space. It is a collaborative space. It is a culture that cares about its people. We do listening sessions. I think these cultures that encourage the leaders to connect with all levels of the organization that encourage speed, that say innovation is good and that say, “We care about you. We want to advance your career here. We want to do what's right for you and your family and your loved ones.” It fosters innovation. So these fast, innovativ, caring about the employee culture, that works.

ANNCR: You're listening to The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare, a podcast, celebrating courage, perseverance, creativity, and vision in the pursuit of healthcare innovation. Join host Meg Escobosa in conversation with some of the most inspiring and forward-thinking women working in healthcare today. Meg goes behind the scenes to uncover previously untold stories of struggle and success in a notoriously complex and highly-regulated industry.  As the worlds of healthcare and technology continue to converge, and as women take on increasingly more important roles in both, these are timely tales that deserve to be told. And now, here's your host, Meg Escobosa. 

Meg Escobosa: Hello everyone and welcome to The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare. I'm your host, Meg Escobosa. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Deborah DiSanzo, President of Best Buy Health. In this role, she's responsible for the company's health strategy, with a particular focus on bringing health technology into the home. With more than 30 years of experience at the intersection of healthcare and technology, Deborah was previously CEO of Philips Healthcare and held management positions at Hewlett Packard and Apollo Computer.

Deborah Disanzo: Meg, thanks so much, very happy to be here.
 
Meg Escobosa: Well, right off the bat, I wanted to share two things with you, and of course our listeners.  First, we don't really talk about the origins of the podcast very much, but we, at The Krinsky Company, were kind of reflecting on just the wonderful group of clients that we get to work with. And there was kind of a recognition that the common denominator among them is all really strong, really bright women.  And of course, you have been a long time client over the years, and we've just been very, very fortunate to collaborate with you. And so you are very much behind why we're doing this podcast. So we just are thrilled to have you finally on the podcast so welcome.  

Deborah Disanzo: Thank you, Meg. And you know, I love The Krinsky Company, you know that.

Meg Escobosa: I do, I do, and we're very lucky about that. The other fun thing I wanted to share that listeners will not know, I wanted to unearth some ancient history and I don't expect you to remember this, but way back in the day, in the nineties, you were a worldwide marketing manager for Hewlett Packard Medical Products Group in the Cardiology Products Division. And you were responsible for figuring out the opportunity around early access AEDs, automated external defibrillators, and so that was just my first introduction to strong leaders. And you were young, bright, decisive, analytical, and there was just something about how you were operating that was just very, it made an impression on me. And so it was just fun. It's amazing for me now, many years later to have this opportunity to have you on the show and to be talking about, you know, your evolution over time, your career.

Do you remember what it felt like to be a worldwide marketing manager at that point and be leading this effort to sort of uncover the opportunity and to figure it out?

Deborah Disanzo: Well, Meg that was some of our best work really. I mean, that was in the time when there were not defibrillators on airplanes or in airports or in hotels or schools or golf courses or churches, there was no such thing as public access to fibrillation. And so we really needed to figure that out together. And Hewlett Packard had decided that they wanted to buy a defibrillator company and we had a choice back then: do we buy one of the established defibrillator companies with revenue, or do we buy this up-and-coming new thing, automatic external defibrillators. And honestly, without the work of Bob Krinsky and his team, we would not have known the answer. And I think history shows now we made the right choice.

When I left Philips, I don't know what the number is now, but when I left Philips, we had 2 million defibrillators installed in public places and we estimated that they saved two lives a day.  And every time I go by a Philips’ heart start defibrillator and, you know, in their red case, whether it be a Disney world or Chicago, O'Hare, or I see it in an airplane. My daughter always says that's momma’s defibrillator. And we're just very proud of the work we did back then.  

Meg Escobosa: It was really quite an impressive opportunity to learn at the front sort of front row seat, if you will, on building a new idea and creating the opportunity and articulating the opportunity. Today, you've come almost full circle, in a way, where that early work in AEDs was about making hospital-grade technology available in a safe way for the public use. Whereas now, today, your work at Best Buy is about enabling people to have high quality health care at home. It's kind of amazing to think about that. Can you share a little bit about the journey you've kind of experienced over those years and what you're up to now?

Deborah Disanzo: Well, it is very funny, Meg, because we just talked about automatic, external defibrillators in public places, but then we then launched the HeartStart home defibrillator.  And we were in fact, the first, and still, only defibrillator that got over-the-counter-clearance. And one of our very first retailers was Best Buy. And so when Best Buy called me in the summer of 2020 and said, “Would you come run Best Buy Health?” And I'm like, “Best Buy?!”, and look, I knew that Best Buy had bought GreatCall, which I had a tremendous amount of respect for.

In fact, when we were at Philips, we, Philips, owned Lifeline at the time and we thought Lifeline and GreatCall were great matches together because Lifeline captured really elderly. Our average age was about 85 years old and GreatCall captures seniors, really starting about age 65.  So we thought it was a great compliment. I actually wanted to buy GreatCall when I was at Philips, but collapsing of competitors wouldn't allow it. So when Best Buy called me, I thought of two things. I thought, “Wow, Best Buy was our very first retailer when we were selling the HeartStart home defibrillator. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for GreatCall.” So I took the call

Meg Escobosa: Wonderful. Can you just share a little bit about your background. How did you get into healthcare? Why? You're well-known in the industry. There may be listeners on the younger side, starting in their careers, potentially looking for insights about how to craft a career in healthcare, and maybe you could share a little bit about who you are, how you got here; as in depth or as briefly as you want.  

Deborah Disanzo: So I've been in technology my whole life, and I started out not in healthcare technology, but I started out in, actually, electronic time clocks. And then I spent a number of years at startups in electronic publishing.  One in engineering workstations and the engineering workstation company got bought by Hewlett Packard. And that's how I ended up at large tech companies. Hewlett Packard was my first large tech company. By the way, I had no intention of staying in Hewlett Packard. I thought it was too large, a company for me. I wanted to be in startups. I decided just to stay for a year. And then I ended up at HP for 12 years, but the healthcare story is really when I was at the engineering workstation company.

We needed a use case for a low-end workstation. I was the product manager for the low end-workstation; it was called a DN 2500. And someone introduced me to Dr. Bob Sclabassi at the University of Pittsburgh. Now people probably don't know this, but the University of Pittsburgh actually was a pioneer in artificial intelligence in healthcare applications. And what Bob was doing was he was making algorithms to help in neurosurgery. University of Pittsburgh at the time did more neurosurgeries than anywhere else.  Now this was in 1988, 1989, so it was a long time ago, but what we did together with Bob was we built an application where we took 250 engineering workstations. We networked them across seven hospitals at the University of Pittsburgh in every operating theater, in every neurophysiologists office. And this meant that a neurophysiologist who had to consult on every single neuro operation going on, could consult from any one of those 250 Apollo workstations.

Now, we put this together; it had, of course the workstations, the networking. We did, very early, three reconstructions of CT images. We made an AI algorithm. It was called an evoked potential algorithm, and we hooked it up to the Hewlett Packard patient monitors, and we had voice and we had video.  And you could see everything going on in the operating theater. Now this was 1988. This was really first-of–a-kind telehealth in the University of Pittsburgh. But the funny story is this, Bob said to me, “You want to come watch the operation?” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to faint? Am I going to throw up?” But Meg, it changed. When I put on the scrubs, I went in, sat there behind the anesthesiologist and I watched how technology was helping the anesthesiologist, the neurophysiologist, the surgeon. And I said, “I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.” And I did.

So that company got bought by Hewlett Packard. I went to work for Hewlett-Packard medical products and a big lesson in my life was I was sitting at my desk in Waltham, Massachusetts. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had come back into the business. They had this famous management by objectives, management by walking around, I was sitting at my desk and Bill Hewlett came and sat on the edge of my desk. Now I almost died because these guys were our heroes, right?

He sat on the edge of my desk and he said, “I'm Bill Hewlett,” “Hi, I'm Deborah.”  And he said, “Product manager right? What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I'm working on this neuro net,” that’s what it was called, “I'm with the University of Pittsburgh.” “So what does it do?” And I launched into this stupid question of how, just like I did with you, actually, we got work to do 150 workstations networking. He said, “I asked you what you did,” “well, because he has such great imaging, we can do 3d reconstructions of CT images. And then he said, “I asked you what you did.” And I was so nervous. I blurted out, “We're helping to save lives.” And Bill had this famous saying, he said, “Very good carry on, carrying on.” And he said it to me. And it was a big lesson that technology doesn't matter.  What are you doing with the technology? And in this case, we really were helping to save lives. And that has stuck for me for the 30, 40 years that we've been doing this.

Meg Escobosa: I remember that, actually, as even then with the AED project. I just remember learning about sudden cardiac arrest and the huge impact you can make by getting to the patient within those two minutes or as quickly as possible. And that you obviously changed the trajectory of their life, that you can potentially save more lives. And that was the guiding principle that you kept reinforcing for all of us. Why are we doing this? It's to save more lives. I vividly remember that.

Deborah Disanzo: And I think when we got to Heartstream and we were managing Heartstream, so Hewlett Packard acquired Heartstream and I remember we went there and we announced it, like December 27th, 1997.  It was a $4 million company. They were not thinking about selling defibrillators in public places at the time. They were trying to beat it out with the established players, selling in ambulances and they had some success. So some of the members of the company weren't that happy getting bought by a large tech company, and Carl Morgan was one of the five founders and he was one of the five founders, but he was really the principal founder. When I met Carl in the early days, he said, “I don't know who you are, but I don't like you. We don't need some hot-shot, young marketing person from Hewlett Packard coming to tell us how to run our business,” and he said, “but I have one piece of advice for you. Focus on saving lives and the money will come.” And I heard him, I credit Carl with a lot. I learned a tremendous amount from Carl, and Carl credits me with getting his defibrillators in public places, right? So it was really a team.

But we were really getting killed by the competition.  They were saying our technology didn't work. They were lobbying lawsuits against us. We were really getting killed. And we mapped on a board with the help of Jeffrey Moore. If you remember crossing the cats, we mapped on a board. Alright, this competitor is really strong in ambulances.  This competitor is really strong in hospitals. We have one client, American Airlines. Let's focus on airlines and from airlines, let’s go to airports, and from airports, let's go to other public places, including corporations, let's go to home. And then when we get all that, let's go back into ambulances and hospitals.   And so we're focusing on that. We're focusing on winning, we're focusing on getting our financials in the place that they needed to be in.

And it wasn't until Bridget MacDonald, who was the flight attendant on the Delta flight, going from Salt Lake city to Atlanta. We had done a 30 defibrillator pilot with Delta 30 defibrillators and 30 aircrafts.  We trained 30 flight attendants. We put the defibrillators on the planes. Two days later, Bridget MacDonald is flying from the training, which was in Salt Lake City, back to her home base of Atlanta. She should have been on that plane by herself. She was on the plane with one of her colleagues that went through the training with her. 10,000 feet in the air, she had a cardiac arrest. Her colleague sitting beside her ran and got the defibrillator, which had been put on the plane two days before and saved Bridget’s life.

Now, I just knew of Bridget. I knew of this story. I knew that she was 39 years old when she had her cardiac arrest. I was that same age. She was, then she was a runner. She had two young children. She had two daughters at the time. They were three and one, and she was a gardener. She was a runner, gardener. That's what I knew about her. But then we were at the September of that year, we were in Washington, DC testifying in front of Congress of why defibrillators needed to be in public places and this woman walked up to me and shook my hand and said, “I'm Bridget McDonald. Because of you and what you do, I'm alive. I get to hug my two young children and smell the flowers in my garden,” and it was at that point that I realized, Really understood what Carl was saying. And we, so we focused on saving lives and Carl was right. The money came and we saved a lot of lives.

Meg Escobosa: I thought we could bring us back to today and just share a little bit about. What you are doing with Best Buy and maybe even some of the more recent developments, the partnership you're doing with Current Health. Can you just describe a little bit about that and what your goals are?  

Deborah Disanzo: All right, sure Meg, so Best Buy called me and I mean, I said to, I remember Best Buy Retail, I said to myself, what the heck is Best Buy doing in health and everybody else might be thinking that as well. Right? So what the heck is Best Buy doing in health? So when I came in, the board of directors had one challenge for me, and that was create a unified strategy for this time now. Best Buy Health had a strategy that was done before the. What's the strategy now? So we came up with a strategy for Best Buy.

This isn't a strategy for Amazon or CVS or Walgreens. We don't have a pharmacy. We're never going to have a pharmacy. We don't have clinics. We're never going to have clinics. We have a bright red line.  And what we do is we help enable technology in the home. That's what Best Buy has been doing forever. So why this makes sense is because the market dynamics now, since COVID-19 is the last decade, we talked about the consumerization of healthcare, but it never really came - the pandemic accelerated it. So now our customers, our consumers say, “Look, I need to take care of my own health in my house, 365 days a year.   I connect with my physician once, twice, three times a year, but I need to take care of my health 365 days a year, and I'm going to do it with health technology.”

So we have this, we have consumerization, we have technology moving into the home, health technology moving into the home and health moving into the home, and this is where Best Buy is because for years we've been helping consumers with technology in their home. So health technology is no different. If you think about it, our strategy starts with our strength in omni-channel. Our strength and logistics, our strength and building platforms and analytics, and we have this 1400 beautiful caring center, empathetic people who care for our clients.

We built the strategy on top of that in three focal areas, consumer health, the merchandising at Best Buy is amazing. So our merchants are going out and they are curating every, you know, sleep bed, sleep ring, hearing aid, continuous glucose monitor, or fitness device that you need for your health and continue to do that.  
We're building a secure platform so that things that need to be bought with prescription under HIPAA compliance are all done.

The second pillar is activating aging. This is the GreatCall acquisition, and this is really, we have vehicles to get to our services. Our services are urgent response, connect to a physician, connect to a Lyft ride. And our Medicaid population - if you're food insecure, we help you connect to a food bank. If you don't have heat, we help you connect to heating sources. And the goals to get to those today are our phones - Lively Flip, Lively Smart, Lively Mobile, but in the future, it's all going to be our app, which is called Lively and it's Lively on Apple or Lively devices as well.  

And the third pillar is virtual care. And this is really what we thought of is we need a platform that we can connect the ecosystem together and that Best Buy can help people in their homes use the technology. So, if you think about it, a hospital-at-home-program, right? If you're sent home from the hospital and you're going to be cared for at home, we need to get the remote patient monitoring equipment in your house that day, or the next day. We need to work effectively for three weeks.  And then we have to get it out. So a lot of logistics, it's a lot of access to curating the right medical devices. That's what Best Buy is great at. But we needed a platform and the platform we acquired is Current Health. So we looked at 300 remote patient monitoring, care and health companies. We had deep conversations with 20 of them.

We selected car intel because the platform is current. The technology is AWS. The hub already connects to 200 remote patient monitoring devices and connects on the other end to Epic, and this is what we needed. So from here, we will build this platform that will connect the ecosystem, the person in their home to their physician.  

And if you think about it, Best Buy is like the CIO or the tech help for people in their home. And in the pandemic, we had physicians unpacking remote patient monitoring devices, putting batteries in, making sure they work, send them with new instructions of views to their patients. Physicians can't be doing that, but this low tech work that's what Best Buy does and that's what we can do for people in their home who need to take care of their health.

Meg Escobosa: That is just so exciting. It really is an exciting thing to see leveraging the assets of Best Buy on behalf of people at home. And it's incredible - the timing. I mean, honestly, to think the pandemic has just accelerated all these trends.  We are excited to see what you guys do and how you make it happen and wish you the best. In 2020, so also during the pandemic, you lead a course at Harvard, the school of public health called Artificial Intelligence and Health. How was your experience leading that course and what did teaching teach you?  

Deborah Disanzo: In fact, I've taught now the class five times. And so I do have an appointment at the Harvard School of Public Health. I’ve learned that I absolutely love teaching. In 2019, I did a fellowship at Harvard University, Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship. I really recommend it for everyone. It is really, it does take your leadership to the next level.   And in that, of course, you're a little bit like free health. So Meredith Rosenthal, who had been at the school of public health, led our program and she said, “Hey, will you come talk to my PhD students about artificial intelligence and health?” And so I did, and that then led me to teaching. So I teach in the spring to master's students. In the summer, I teach to mid-career physicians, you know, physicians in their forties, but they are, you know, we have, you know, a very important breast oncologist at Dana-Farber. We have the chief medical officer of MD Anderson. We have really important people in here. I learned I love to teach. I really love to teach.  
And if you think about it, leadership, being a CEO, being present and being general manager. It is all about teaching. It is about, I mean, I guess you could be a command and control leader and not teach anything, but if you want people to follow you, you need to teach them what you know, why you're thinking the way you're thinking.

Absolutely love teaching. The two classes are very different. So we have students in their twenties and we have students in their forties. Completely different. Students in their twenties, very, you know, digital natives and technology is fantastic. And these are public health students. Many of them went to medical school, and now they're going to go into public health and really thinking about how am I going to use this in my work?  
How is AI and technology really going to help change the face of healthcare? And so that gave me an incredible amount of energy and I loved it because artificial intelligence has been around since the fifties, right? But artificial intelligence is very dependent upon good data, which we don't have a lot of that in healthcare.  So I actually start the class out with the importance of good data. And then if you get good data, what you can do with AI and it's very eye-opening, but then the mid-career physicians they start out really quite skeptical about technology. It's because they were in the times when I don't want to say electronic health records were forced on them, but I want to say they were forced to use electronic health records.  

It's not Deborah DeSanto saying this. It's the industry saying this, that these interfaces on the electronic health record aren't as friendly as the physicians would like them to be now. Actually with AI, Nuance has all these natural language processing interfaces on top of the electronic health records and everyone making them better.   But it is in fact, AI that's able to make those user interfaces better. And so we walked through that. We started at the same place. This is the importance of data. And I know that you hate technology, but this is really the promise of technology and this is what it's going to bring. And I just see them move from complete skeptics to, “oh, I learned a lot,” and it's really great to be able to teach people things that you know that you're passionate about.  

Meg Escobosa: That's really, really cool. Did you have any preconceived notions about what it might be like to teach and have any of those been dispelled?

Deborah Disanzo: I had no preconceived notions, but what I didn't know is and what I loved is like, you're like your own little startup. You create the syllabus, you create the readings, you can have your friends come in and talk. You create that whole 15 days, right? It's incredible amounts of work.  You don't get paid a little bit of money, right? But it's like really a full-time job. And you do your own website. And you have to get it all approved by the education committee, of course, but you're approved and then you go and you are there in your classroom. So it's incredibly inspiring and invigorating for me.  
And I think, therefore, for the students as well. So no, I had no idea what it was, but I love it. Corie Barry is CEO of Best Buy, and I told her that I wasn't going to teach the masters class this spring. I just don't have time, but I just said to her last week, I'm going to teach the summer class because I curate new material every year because things are happening quickly, right? And when you curate it, you learn it yourself and let me teach it right. And so it keeps you very current.

Meg Escobosa: It does. I agree with you. I mean, just being around people who are starting out, who are very curious, who are eager, who want to learn. I think that's just also very, very - reminding you, you know, what's important, why am I doing this work? So I can imagine it's a mutual learning experience, in that respect. People bring in their own experience, especially with more seasoned people.

Deborah Disanzo: 100%, you know, I have actually had MIT students in my class and I've had some, you know, we have a very vibrant, health ecosystem in Boston.  And so, you know, Mass General Brigham has been doing AI. Beth Israel has been doing AI. And so I get those physicians as well, come in and did a program at Mass General. And what I'm able to do is build on their experience and broaden it out to, and it's not just, you know, that project that you did there is amazing and this is where that can go. This is what the rest of the world is doing too. It's really, it's very inspiring. 

Meg Escobosa: As former CEO of Philips Healthcare and GM of IBM Watson Health, and now in your current role as President of Best Buy Health, you've experienced three different organizational cultures for innovation.  What do you know about creating culture for innovation in healthcare and what stories can you share to illustrate the different ways culture can enable innovation.  

Deborah Disanzo: Well, so I loved all my teams, 100%. So if anybody from my former teams are listening to this, I love you. I love team. I want to say that I really think the Best Buy is the best place for innovation.  Now, if you think of Best Buy as a retailer and how Best Buy has reinvented itself over the years, the culture of Best Buy enables that first of all, Best Buy moves incredibly fast, you know? IBM, maybe thought they moved fast. HP, Philips maybe thought they moved fast, but Best Buy is at Lightspeed. So we'll be thinking about an idea on a Tuesday management meeting and somebody will be activating that idea on Wednesday.

And we look at the innovation, you know, we're always changing out what does a vision stroll look like? What can this logistics store look like? What does the small store, what does a big store look like? What's another way to distribute? How do we use our logistics in a different way? Constantly. What enables that innovation is, first of all, the innovation around you, but the speed to action, because innovation is all about speed.  

We hear about fail fast, but it really is. If you innovate and you innovate on a small scale so that if you fail it doesn't hurt that much. You're constantly iterating and you go faster. I remember that I had a manager one time at Hewlett Packard that said, “I would rather run in disarray than standing in decision.” You know, it's just that you and you make decisions and you go, that is enabled at Best Buy. The other thing that's enabled at Best Buy is this thing that we call it psychological safety today, right? But it is a safe space. It is a collaborative space. It is a culture that cares about its people. It really reminds me a lot of the early days of Hewlett Packard. Best Buy puts a lot of emphasis on the development of people. HP did as well. Best Buy puts a lot of emphasis on innovation. HP did it well. We do one-on-ones with our team. You know, every week we do skip levels. We do listening sessions. Hewlett Packard did management by walking around.  
I think these cultures that encouraged the leaders to connect with all levels of the organization, that encouraged speed, that encouraged innovation, that say innovation is good and that say, “We care about you. We want to advance your career here,” that's what Hewlett Packard told me when I first joined.  

That's what we tell our Best Buy employees today. We want to advance your career here. We want to do what's right for you and your family and your loved ones. It fosters the innovation. So, you know, Best Buy incredibly innovative place. I really do think that we are going to make a meaningful difference in how care is delivered in the home by enabling technology in people's homes. Hewlett Packard made, in the days of Dave and Bill and Lewis Platt, an incredible difference in people's lives.  Incredible innovation came out of Hewlett Packard. In these fast, innovative and caring about the employee culture - I really think that we're going to get back to that because of that works.

Meg Escobosa: Can you share a story about a risk you took that did not pan out? What did you learn from it? And how has that influenced the way you evaluate new opportunities today?  

Deborah Disanzo: Oh, there's so many of them. There are so many. There is the idea of failing fast, right? There's lots of technologies that you say, “Wow, this technology is really cool.” At Philips, we were working on something called a - I think it was called an oncology workstation, honestly, at Philips, cause you would think that we, you know, Philips leader in imaging. And if you could put all the images of a particular cancer together to get information from the electronic health record, you could really, you know, we had cardiology, workstations that were very successful, right?  Because you put everything that you need for the cardiologists in place and enabled cardiology decision-making and we did the same thing for oncology and Philips, and we spent tens of millions of dollars year after year after year, and could never really get it to marketability. And I don't know, I think Philips still like stayed on it when I left. I don't know if it is ever coming to marketability.

Of course, at IBM. We had Watson for oncology. Now I will say the reason I joined IBM was because among the smartest people that I ever met, were IBM Research. You know, there are just hundreds of PhDs up in Yorktown, IBM Research, really innovating and really close.  And I remember, you know, IBM calling me and I kept saying, “no, I don't want to do the technology thing anymore,” and then I went to IBM Research and I met the guys working on natural language programming at IBM Research, and what they showed me was reading electronic health records.  

It was just so super fast. And it was because the last time I had looked at natural language processing really had been maybe in the nineties when it was so slow, that it was just amazingly fast. And I said to them, “It doesn't really do that.” And they said, “No, it really does we gotta make something out of this.” So the next stage of was processing was amazing. And of course, IBM had been selling or promoting Watson for oncology for five years before I got there. And so we had this hill to climb. There were literally no clients. I remember this famous meeting. It was in December, right after I got there and the CEO of IBM wanted me to red team analysis of Watson for Oncology.  

And I said to one of my colleagues, “She knows that there's no clients right? She knows that this technology is still in research, right? I told her that I said, “Look at this tech, we have no clients.” And she's telling me that we had gotten like really there's no class. And it's still research.  To get technology out of research, into production. It's going to take us three years. And she said to me, “Well, I don't have three years and that's the old way of doing it.”

We buckled down and actually what Watson for Oncology did, if you really looked at it, was pretty cool because it used that very fast, natural language processing to pick out about 20 features and the electronic health record flashed it up on a screen for the oncologist. This is what you need to know about your patient the clinical child's matching for, you know, it's really confusing to do, to do the inclusion exclusion criteria. Clinical and clinical trials matching patients to clinical trials would go out to the web and find all research about particular drugs that you could use.  

What it did was really very impressive from an artificial intelligence point of view, but it didn't solve cancer. And I've even kept insisting that we were going to cure cancer. And so the expectations did not match what it did, but the technology and those PhDs and the researchers working on that, it was really tremendous technology.  
But of course it was not a marketing win.  

Meg Escobosa: Right. And so it's one of those things where you realize, you know, where you want to tell the big possibility, the big opportunity that's out in front. It may be five years from now, or we don't know how long, but it's so compelling to tell that vision, even though reality may not be there quite yet. 

Deborah Disanzo: We’ll come back, and it's my first job in healthcare technology involved, artificial intelligence. My last job in health technology. Artificial intelligence absolutely can help with a whole host of issues and healthcare, but we need to match the technology to the real need, to really where the customers and clients are and their ability to interact with technology.  And at the very end of it, you need to focus on saving people's lives and the money will come.
 
Meg Escobosa: That’s wonderful. What has surprised you most about the view from the C-suite? What do most people not understand about the demands of being president, CEO or GM?

Deborah Disanzo: It's really, you know, it's, it's an interesting question.  
And I think that I've been here so long now I've probably forgotten, but the real challenge is really knowing what's going on in your organization. And what's going on in your organization is at the people who are doing the work. So for us right now, it's those 1400 people and the Carings mentors, and what are our customers saying to them on? And when my team goes and sits, we learn a lot. Yeah. I said that we do listening sessions. I do round tables, 10 at a time every week, starting at the top of the organization down to the bottom. And when you talk to me, I used to be able to like go back into the lunch room and sit down, have lunch with people.  Can't do that in the pandemics. You have to find other ways, but it really is understanding what is really going on in your organization because there's all layers of management for good intention. Once they put a happy face on something or tell you a good story. And really it is the, the stories is where you didn't succeed.  It's the stories where the struggles are. It's the stories where something isn't working, right? Those are the stories that you need to have because if you know something isn't working, then you can’s fix it. But if you don't know, it's not working, it keeps not working. And it could really, you know, really hurt.  

Meg Escobosa: Very good advice. What advice might you give your younger self, either about life experience to try or skills to develop or education to pursue? If you could speak to that marketing worldwide marketing manager back in the day, would you pass on any specific advice to her?

Deborah Disanzo: I'm going to be bold. And I'm going to say no, because I don't, I know myself as I am today and myself as I am today and all these, I mean, I have had a beautiful career and I have learned so much in my career and I have connected so many people and so many mentors and mentees and building organizations that it's really been a beautiful life and a beautiful career. And every single step has gotten me to here. So I want her to keep doing exactly what she did because it got me to here and did I make mistakes? Of course I made mistakes, but the thing is you learn from those mistakes and those mistakes are part of your beautiful life and your beautiful career.  

Meg Escobosa: That's nice to hear because then the rest of us, you know, we don't have to fear the mistakes that we might make because we can learn from them. 

Deborah Disanzo: We have to make mistakes. It sounds cliche, but it's the mistakes that you learned from, because if everybody keeps just keep saying, “oh, you're wonderful. You're great.   You're wonderful. You're great,” you really learn nothing. You really have nothing. And it is really the mistakes that you learn from, you know, that I started with Carl Morgan, “I don't know who you are, but I don't like you.” I had a choice to make right there. I chose either to decide, I understood what Carl's saying.  I'm going to help build this business, or I could have been, you know, offended. And that choice that I made right there was to dig in and say to myself, I get that maybe I wouldn't have wanted my company acquired either. I get that, but I'm going to make a difference here and I'm going to make it with Carl.  And so in those moments of choice, know that you're in a moment of choice and own your decision.  

Meg Escobosa: Thank you so much, Deborah. This has been such a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time.  

Deborah Disanzo: Meg, thanks so much. Thank you, The Krinsky Company. It was really my pleasure.

Meg Escobosa: And thank you to our listeners for joining us today. If you enjoy our show, please consider leaving a rating and review wherever you listen. It helps us reach new listeners. And if you know other folks who might enjoy it, please spread the word. To find out more about The Krinsky Company. Check out our website. See you next time.  

ANNCR: Thank you for listening to The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare. This podcast was produced, engineered, edited, and scored by Calvin Marty. Please take a moment to subscribe via your favorite streaming service. The Game-Changing Women of Healthcare is a production of The Krinsky Company, a growth strategy and healthcare innovation consultancy.  Visit us on the web at www.thekrinskyco.com.