John Beadle

Epic is always, I think, an elephant in a room for a lot of folks building startups because they're expanding their service area in terms of the types and the number of solutions that they're going to look to build themselves.

We look to do things that are complementary to Epic.

I think in most cases, if Epic has a great solution, our health system partners want to use that solution.

And I think we fully respect that and have never tried to compete directly in anything that Epic wants to do.

But I think the way we view all of the startups that we build is how do we help our partners

get full value out of the major investments they've made in all the core IT platforms they use, whether that is their CRMs, their EHRs, their ERP systems.

In many cases, they've spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to be able to implement these core systems.

And so our big thesis is around this application layer that sits on top.

How do we make sure that they can get the best value out of those investments?

And so I think our thesis is very much in this applied AI layer

Where are there new applications that are AI native that we can build on top of those source systems to be able to drive, you know, effectiveness in, you know, helping them and helping them, you know, drive forward core workflows?

It's a great question.

I think the systems we've seen that are doing this most effectively have very strong support from the C-suite.

Okay.

Very strong in a strategic direction in terms of where is the health system going.

And then you need to marry that, of course, with strong bottoms-up support within particular business units or service lines to executing whatever that core strategy is.

And then I think encourage folks

leaders within those different business units or service lines to be entrepreneurial and to seek out where are there great solutions you want to use?

And then how do we as a health system create mechanisms for people to be able to make recommendations of new solutions that they want to experiment with?

and then a set of processes for evaluating ROI.