Antonio Marin on Navigating Change and Growth

Welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I'm Lucas Marion, I'm a senior writer with Computer World Magazine, and I'm at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards Show here in Scottsdale, Arizona. Joining me today is Antonio Marin, he's the CIO of USME, which stands for US Medical Equipment Corporation. US Medical Equipment, correct, yes.

It's a medical equipment provider that rents, sells, and manages movable medical devices, like infusion pumps, monitors, ventilators, incubators, all for hospitals, correct? That is correct, yes. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Appreciate it. So let's start off at a high level.

What is your overarching technology vision for US Med Equipment Corporation, and how does it align with the company's mission in the healthcare space? Well, let me start first with the mission, because it's the most important thing we have. Yeah. As a medical equipment rental company, our job is to deliver the equipment, the right equipment, the right place at the right time.

Right. When you look at the community that we serve and you look at a supply chain, the end result of the supply chain, the last part of the supply chain is a patient in need. So we need to make sure that all our technology, all the processes, everything that we do has a patient in mind. They don't call us because it's a beautiful day.

They call us because they need life-saving equipment. Right. It's life or death in some cases, sure. And we have many cases like that where as a person in IT and as an employee of the company, It fills my heart when we're able to deliver that light seven equipment and you know that that hospital is going to be able to help the patient and have positive results.

It is one of the most rewarding jobs I've ever had in my life. Back to the technology question, we're in the middle of a major transformation. The company started with a homegrown system and phenomenal software. It has our culture embedded into the software.

But as we have grown, it becomes more and more complicated to keep up with the times. So we have decided to move to the software as a service platform. We have the first part of the project already complete and been very successful. And now we are finishing the second part.

The beautiful thing on the stage that we are at right now Yeah. Is that we can look at our business processes, refine them, but not only with the, with thinking about making better, but also how we can embed AI to make them faster and more accurate. Okay. I'm glad you brought it up because I'm going to anyways, but go ahead.

Well, the thing about AI, obviously you have to have sound data and you have sound processes. Yeah, garbage in, garbage out. Garbage in, garbage out. In one of my previous companies, we used AI at the very beginning of when AI was just kind of a buzzword, but not really there.

And I learned a very important lesson about AI. You can fit the model, train it, and you may ask a question. In that case specifically, the question came back, the answer came back to our question, and it was not the answer that we were expecting. So we went back to the old ways to analyze data.

We realized one important thing. The answer was right, the question was wrong. That is so critical. Talk more about that, but yeah.

It's one of the problems with escalating costs of AI, inputs and outputs cost you. Absolutely. If the employees aren't asking the right questions, they're asking follow-up questions. If they aren't phrasing the prompts correctly, it can cost more money.

Well, in that particular case, we felt we have a pricing issue. So we focused all our questions about pricing. When we fed the information to the model, the model came back when it was a customer service issue. Yeah.

So something that I learned at that point in my career is that when you fit a model, you have to be open to evaluate the answers and really understand where the real data is coming from and the real sentiment on the data the context of the information that you working with Especially in an industry so highly regulated like yours I feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's always going to have to be a human in the loop. There's always got to be a human in the loop. That doesn't mean that we cannot speed the process for that human.

There's incredible things that we're doing today and we did last year, where an AI doesn't have to be just gen AI. Right, right. So there's so many versions of what you can do with AI, so many variances of AI. So we have done automation of processes where we have been able to automate the ordering process from a single click at a hospital nurse station to our branch operations where we get all the information we need to deliver life-saving equipment.

And in one hospital we actually deliver a full bed with a mattress or surface as we call them, ready to go in less than 15 minutes. What did it used to take you? Well our SLAs are two hours plus driving time. Industry standards normally are between 12 and 24 hours.

Wow, so down to minutes. So in certain cases, when we're in proximity, we can do it extremely fast because there's no human interaction. That actually partially answers my next question, which was, how is technology helping you support hospitals more efficiently, especially during times of high demand like public health emergencies, for example? Well, one of the important things, and one of the first part of the project, and one of the reason why this year here at CAO 100 It's because we rebound the way we do all our inventory management, equipment management field services.

We did a lot of automation behind the scenes and the key part is to having the right equipment in the right place at the right time. Right. Of course. Knowing your inventory, knowing what parts you need to fix that inventory when needed, tracking the life cycle of the inventory, all of those things that happen around that equipment now is very automated very well managed full visibility across the organization so back to you your point about humans it's not about humans to be doing paperwork right it's about humans making critical decisions walk us through some of the recent innovations your teams implemented to improve equipment tracking logistics so one of again one of the first things is to know your inventory.

Know your what I'm sorry? Know your inventory. Okay. Yep.

What equipment do you have? And in the medical in the medical equipment rental business it could be very seasonal. You have your times where you have respiratory issues then you get neonatal seasons. It's incredible.

So what it allows to do is look at our past rentals, look at our inventory and start helping the equipment management team plan their production for the next month, for the next week, for the next day. That is a huge change in how we do what we used to do things to what we can do now. Can you compare the two? How did you do it and how do you do it now?

Well it is It's incredibly, I mean from the time of for example getting life saving equipment prepared for being patient ready. In the old days it could be like get a call, have the technician look for the piece of equipment, go for the PM, do all the work that needs to be done, do the paperwork, do the testing. Extremely manual. Very manual, very interaction.

Now is we know where it's coming, we prepare it. they need parts for that piece of equipment, the parts requisition is already requested. We know where those parts are in the country. We know we need to ship them somewhere else.

So a lot of those things where you waste a lot of time, a lot of those, do I write it down on a piece of paper? Do I send an email to someone? Those days are gone I going to assume this and correct me if I wrong I assuming IoT is involved in a lot of this In a very rudimentary way yes We don't have IoT as... Like on every device?

Like on every device. We do a lot of RFID tracking right now. Okay. Mainly because we want to make sure we don't interfere with any hospital equipment.

Of course, I didn't even think of that, yeah. And every hospital has their own systems, and the other thing that has been critical to, on the IoT thing here, is that the health industry has been under cyber attack for the last two years. Right. So the more, in many cases, the more technology you introduce, some of this could be more detrimental to the operations of a company or a hospital.

You're more vulnerable. More vulnerable. I get it. So what role is AI playing in machine learning in your current technology infrastructure or your future plans?

Well there's different areas. For example right now we create a system that we call GoUSME Connect. It's a combination of RPA, AI and machine learning. Yeah.

that basically can read a request for, generated by an EMR system, so we're agnostic of any EMR. Reads the information, and through machine learning, reads the pattern of the request, that transfers that into an order that ends up in one of our delivery locations. And that's how we can deliver the equipment, that's one part of it. We are really working hard to continue on predictive analytics analytics and teaching the models because as a company, as a rental company, we have so much information about the true performance of medical equipment.

So our goal within the next few months is to be able to predict equipment failures based on historical data. Okay, so how long does that typically last before a breakdown? Well, that's the thing about equipment, right? Medical equipment is just on a computer.

You may have an idea that they have to go through preventive maintenance once a year for sure. Every time they come back from a hospital, they go through a review process. So we always make sure that equipment is patient ready. But equipment can fail.

Right. If you can get all the equipment that we have rented in the last 23 years, which we know the data, we have the data and start feeding those models, then we can actually be more predictive than sometimes probably some manufacturers would. And more proactive, I'm guessing. Exactly.

And again, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is protect the patient. Yep. It's not like you're running out of stock on a shelf somewhere, so I hear it. Healthcare, financial services, maybe transportation, legal, most highly regulated vertical industries there are.

What are your biggest cybersecurity challenges in your particular role and how are you addressing them? Well, there's obviously the protection of personal healthcare information, PHI data, Personal Identification Data, PI. How we do that, obviously we use encryption, we use different systems to overlay protection on top of each other. But the number one, the number one tool to protect any company, education.

If all the software in the world will work protecting data we wouldn't have any cybersecurity issues but when you read about the most important cases in cybersecurity attacks it's always been a human interaction with a phishing transmission there always social engineering weak passwords as when you look at the cybersecurity chain we as humans are still the weakest link So there's a lot of education, there's a lot of training, there's a lot of conversations. But there's also the approach that we have taken to that is making more fun, making more engaging.

We have a specific email in the company where if any employee thinks there's any risk, they can send what they think is a risk to that particular email. It's all internal. And every quarter we raffle an iPad. Well, believe me, every quarter we have people checking on everything.

So that's been a blessing. Are you exploring the use of other emerging technologies, blockchain, edge computing, or other technologies, IoT, as I mentioned earlier, in any pilot programs? We are, especially on the IoT. We talk about security, so we're very, very careful.

and how we approach it. But one of the things that we want to do, at least first internally in the organization, is not only continue with the RFID, but adding BLE. Because we want to know exactly where the team is, where the, not only the team, but also the equipment is at all times. Track it to the end level of detail.

But also work with our hospital partners who are interested in the project and build very strong relationships with them. Okay, okay. blockchain only because it's a secure electronic ledger it seems in a company whose purpose is renting equipment logistics it could be helpful in tracking that is it something you've explored or do you not trust it we can explore it to be honest with you okay fair enough no we haven't okay fair enough but you're giving me ideas so that's a great next step that's why we come over here right there you go blockchain last question I'll make it a fun one personal or professional do you have a favorite gadget or application you like to play with Wow very gadget or application yeah obviously I keep playing around with every application or that comes with AI I have so much fun with it.

I'm a computer science student and many many long many many years ago a long time ago when I was a student AI was just mathematical models. We never had a computer in power so I'm like a kid in a candy store right now which for my team makes it very dangerous. So a lot of the AI tools are coming out. None of them I'm particularly favorite.

Yeah. In terms of gadgets, probably at home, I'm more adverse of gadgets because I would end up being the help desk for my family. I don't think I have enough during the workday. It's okay.

Some people, they have their favorite, like the personal favorite gadget, some for business it's fine I just I'd like to ask the question no perfect no what I did in my with my family everybody had their own phone and you have a Android's the iPhones and I would used to get calls all the time so I standardize everybody on their one model so I don't have to be answering questions all the time okay I love my job but I don't want to do it a 24 7 I there are more important things you know you have to prioritize Antonio thank Thank you so much for taking the time out today to talk.

I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun and it's been a pleasure to be here.

Thank you. Thank you.