Jonathan Palmer

My name is Jonathan Palmer, and I'm a healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in-house research arm of Bloomberg.

I'm very thrilled to welcome today's guest, Dr. Michael Gao, the CEO of Smarter Technologies.

Prior to assuming the CEO role, he was the co-founder and CEO of SmarterDx, one of the three predecessor companies that were combined by the financial sponsor New Mountain Capital to form this new automation and insights platform.

Dr. Gao completed his medical degree at the University of Michigan,

and his residency and fellowship at New York Presbyterian, where he was also a medical director focused on transformation before his foray as an entrepreneur.

Welcome to the podcast, Michael.

Thanks, Jonathan.

It's great to be here.

So why don't we start with a 30,000-foot view of what Smarter does and where you fit into the ecosystem?

No, well said.

So maybe thinking about this as kind of a journey, if we think about the evolution of RCM, you know, we have the pre-EMR days, which I would think of as paper.

post the High Tech Act.

And now we're kind of in this AI evolution.

So how has it changed along that longitudinal journey?

And I guess, when did you get the idea or the light bulb to tackle this problem?

Maybe that's the ending point.

It's hard.

It's hard.

So with that in mind, you know, let's talk about your founder journey.

You know, how did you come to start SmarterDX?