Will Bachman 00:01
Hello, and welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’m your host Will Bachman. And I’m here today with Patty Padmanabhan, who is the founder of daymo Consulting. Patty focuses on healthcare digital transformations. He’s out with his second book. Patty, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Well, so Patti, tell me a bit about your second book, you said you before we start recording here, you were about to publish this book at the end of first quarter, and then the pandemic hit, you held off for a couple months, and you added some chapters in there. Tell me about your new book on healthcare digital transformation.

Paddy Padmanabhan 00:45
Got it. So the audio for the book came about when I was working with my co author edmore marks when he was CIO of Cleveland Clinic. And we did a lot of work together, we helped develop an enterprise digital transformation strategy for the clinic. And we had done other work as well, you know, in his role as CIO and other organizations and in my role as CEO of my firm demo consultant with CIT advisors, health systems on digital transformation strategies. So we thought of bringing all of our learnings and best practices together in the form of a handbook or a guidebook, if you will, for practitioners of digital transformation in healthcare, we started writing the book in 2019. And later part of 2019. In the first quarter of 2020, we actually handed over the manuscript to our publisher for the proofing and editing and then the pandemic haters, wrote about March. And we knew that everything had changed, what we decided to do was to hold off on publishing the book, and we talked to our publisher, and we said, we want to hold off for a quarter or two, because we really want to see what the pandemic does to healthcare, and, and to digital health and digital transformation, healthcare isn’t going to kill it is going to accelerate it, what is it going to do, we want to know, and we don’t want to necessarily put a book out there that talks to primarily the pre pandemic. So to our surprise, to our present surprise, many of the themes in our book held up after quarter into the pandemic. And we of course, learned a lot of new things about how the pandemic was changing the way health systems were reorganizing themselves for the future. So we took all of that. And we added, not, not just a couple of chapters, we actually added I think, a one section and in the first chapter, but then we rewrote some of the other chapters to align with what we were seeing in the market. So we kind of refreshed it, if you will, the entire book. And then of course, we hand it back to the publisher, and books just come out a couple of weeks ago, I congratulate

Will Bachman 03:15
someone who is not deep into this might ask, Hey, I thought there was something in Obamacare about, you know, all about funding electronic health records, I thought we were sort of done with that. Walk us through what are the things in healthcare that are not digitized, that require that still require that digital transformation? So, you know, like, you know, real specific examples would be helpful. What are some of the things that you know, could be digitized, but are not yet?

Paddy Padmanabhan 03:51
Yeah. So I like to start world by making a major distinction between digitization and digital transformation, or what some refer to as digitalization and the differences important. So you’re right when Obamacare came about, which was over 10 years ago, now, the Affordable Care Act, the high tech act, and so on, what we really did was we took paper and converted it into electronic documents. So we went from atoms to bits and bytes. And that process took nearly 10 years to complete because healthcare was operating on paper. And both you and I know from our doctor visits back in in the previous decade, how that used to feel. And, you know, it took 10 years to complete the process, and the process was completed using a number of tools. The government provided what was known as meaningful use incentives, which was Basically a sort of taxpayer funded subsidy to hospitals and clinics to go out and buy a certified Electronic Health Record system implemented and demonstrate that you’re meaningfully using. So that was what Meaningful Use was all about. And fast forward to today, we’re about I would say, for all intents and purposes, we have 100% penetration of electronic logic. So it would be a rare clinic or hospital, which is not using an Electronic Health Record system today, I would say that, for all intents and purposes, everyone is using it. Now, what’s happened as a consequence of that is that we’ve just taken paper and converted it into digital documents, nothing has changed. Now, now comes the opportunity for us to take all of the data that is now available in electronic format, be able to analyze it be able to do smart things with it by running algorithms, and so on, to drive care decisions. So it could be diagnostic decisions, or treatment decisions. It could be population health management decisions, wellness care, and so on. But it also now has opened up opportunities to completely change the way care is delivered. Because the technologies are now available. For folks like you and me, we’re just like we are on the phone today, we can actually get on the phone with a doctor through a video concert platform and have a visit. So let’s say you have a pain in your ear, and you want to you want to find out what that is about. But you don’t necessarily want to go into the clinic, you can do a virtual concert is a simple example of how the doctor is now able to have patient visit through a virtual real time digital platform, which in this case, is what you might call a telehealth platform. But the doctor is using all the data about you, which is sitting inside the Electronic Health Record system. So we are taking the entire experience to a whole new level that is what digital transformation is about. And I gave you just one example. But that is kind of a representative example of the world of what digital transformation means today.

Will Bachman 07:31
Okay, so So one example would be, instead of having to physically go into the office, I can get on a zoom video call or a video conference with my doctor. And, you know, they can’t obviously sit there and you know, look in my ear or whatever. But you know, I can explain my symptoms, maybe they have some remote diagnostic thing they can take my blood pressure or whatever. And so that what are some other things that, you know, are, you know, that could be transformed, you know, through a digital transformation, what are some other aspects of healthcare where we’re like, not where we could be today?

Paddy Padmanabhan 08:14
Yeah. So let’s do one example. Practically every aspect of healthcare delivery can be transformed in some way or enabled in some way, by digital tools and technologies. So let me take one example. And this is, let’s take the example of what is broadly referred to as access to health care. So you are patient or a healthcare consumer, as you’re referred to today. And you want to get access to care from a physician for a condition that you don’t quite understand yet, because you’re, you know, you’re displaying some symptoms. There are many ways in which digital tools can be made available to a patient such as yourself, as you go through the journey. Now you’re talking about patient journeys, as you go through the journey of understanding that a you have possibly a medical problem. B, you want to quickly find out what it could be, say, find a doctor with whom you can have a quick concept to find out whether it is serious or whether it is fairly benign. And finally, decide if you need to go into a clinic or not. Right. So you can enable a lot of this and then of course you have to pay for all this, which is the final step in the process before you actually get treated. A lot of this can be enabled digitally. You could have an online symptom triage tool that where you can you know through a conversational interface key in some symptoms and it will tell you So well, you know, you’ve got an ear infection, right? So here are the three possible things that it could be pointing to. So why don’t you set up a video console with Dr. Smith. And the tool will directly take you to a scheduling tool where you can go in look up Dr. Smith and look at when he or she is available to meet with you schedule a consultation. And then Dr. Smith calls you at the time through zoom or, or any other platform which is compliant with data privacy standards and, and that pertain to healthcare. And then you have your concept. And then Dr. Smith tells you, you’ll find well there’s nothing I’m going to send a prescription electronically, of course, a prescription over the Walgreens, which is to me your zip code, and I’ll find the Walgreens that is closest to you go and pick up the prescription. And, you know, take this medication for three days. And if it doesn’t change coffee back. This is this is a simple example of a journey that people go through now, I’ve described the journey in very simple terms, but there’s a lot of technology that needs to be put in place. And technology needs to work seamlessly. They’re not all from the same technology provider. So they have to talk to one another. So there’s data interoperability involved. And then they all need to talk to a back end medical record system, which tells the doctor who you are, what your medical history looks like, and eventually connected up with your financial details to take your payment for your copy and so on. So, without complicating it too much. This is one example of how digital transformation helps hospitals and health systems and patients take advantage of technologies now to virtualize the experience. That is one way of looking at it.

Will Bachman 11:52
Why is it so often that today? doctors offices don’t even interact with you via email. Is it all like HIPAA related? And how do we overcome that? I mean, like every other, you know, business in the world will email you but it seems like doctors offices, they want you to call or you know, like it’s, it’s almost impossible to get them to send you an email.

Paddy Padmanabhan 12:18
Yeah, well, HIPAA is definitely a primary reason why they will not email you. But there are now communication tools that are HIPAA compliant through which doctors will communicate with you. It could be an SMS tool, which is HIPAA compliant, which you know, when they do when they send the messages over the encrypted, and it’s secure, and so on. And that could be one way to communicate with you. But today, increasingly, doctors are communicating with their patients through an electronic health record interface. So depending on who your doctors, you could actually go on to their portal, where you could go in and send a message to your doctor, which is what I do. And I actually, you know, meet my doctor just once a year for my annual physicals. But the rest of the time if I need anything, I send a message over it’s asynchronous, but it’s, but it works. But for it to work, both the patient and the doctor have to be willing to make it work using the technology tool that is available. So you don’t have to really fall for now, if your doctors, you know, well on the way to, you know, digitizing or digitalizing the interface with a patient, but for certain things you’re going to have to call in. But those you know, those may more and more become exceptions than the rules. So yes, it is changing. But again, depending on where you are, the degree of change may feel like more or less. And so, other than other than that, I would say that we’re already on our way.

Will Bachman 13:55
What sort of changes are you seeing in healthcare, you know, with respect to digital, due to the pandemic, what have you seen?

Paddy Padmanabhan 14:06
The first and foremost thing that I have seen is that there is definitely an acceleration towards virtual care models, telehealth models, and that is written extensively about this as well in my columns in CIO and other publications. what is really happening today is what COVID think about what happened when COVID headers you could not go into into a clinic, right? They didn’t want you unless you were actually downward Coronavirus. So if you had, if you had a, you know, an elective surgery, for instance, you needed to do you know, hip replacement, let’s say you just couldn’t do it. They didn’t want you coming into the hospital because the hospital capacity was totally taken up by Coronavirus cases. But, you know, leave aside every placement If you just wanted to have a normal concert like this ear infection that I talked about, even if you, even if you wanted to go in and meet the doctor, you couldn’t do it. But at the same time, doctors also had to take care of their patients. So everybody quickly got onto a telehealth means of operation. So everybody learned how to use the video console platforms, both doctors and patients, not just doctors, but also other caregivers. And they figured out how to start working with it and using it. And the numbers are out there. We saw you know, 10 to 15x increase in video concert was it in the immediate weeks after the pandemic hit us. Now, that’s more than the entire previous years volumes. When it comes to telehealth, it’s not something that is trivial. It’s not an incremental change, it is a step change, it’s a quantum change. And those changes when they happen, they set off some universal processes. One of them is that now telehealth is here to stay telehealth and virtual care. So the virtualization of care delivery is here to stay. And we may have swung very, very hard to one side in the immediate wake of the pandemic because there were no options, you had to do everything remotely, you had to do everything virtually unless you actually had the virus. But now of course, you know, we are going to see a little bit of a shift back reversal to the mean or shift back to the equilibrium, if you will. But even then, the needle has definitely swung in favor of telehealth. And of course, in healthcare. You know, as many of your listeners might know, well, everything is about the money, you know, follow the money, most health care payments are reimbursed in some way shape or form by private or government insurance. So you know, in your case, it could be your employer. It could be Medicare, it could be Medicaid. So ultimately who pays for it. And whether they pay for it determines whether you’re going to deliver care in a certain way. But one of the big things that they that they CMS built in the immediate regular pandemic was to make telehealth visits eligible for reimbursement pretty much at the same rates as in person visits. And so there was obviously more willingness to stay with the telehealth model. And now of course, you know, we we are hoping the industry is hoping that these these concessions will become permanent. And if they do, then we’ve crossed the point of no return. So the this is one big change that has already happened. And there are related changes that are happening. You know, when it comes to give you one, you know the desire for contactless experiences now, even if you go to a hospital, people don’t want you touching anything, you don’t want to touch anything. So trying to do everything contact as your payments, now you go to a grocery, you’re going to more likely than not swiping your phone and pain, right is more likely than not not sticking a credit card into into the reader. The same thing is happening in hospitals. So facial recognition, you know, contactless checkins, things like that. Those are things that are happening as we speak. So we are going to see these sort of experiences change. So those are two things that come to mind right away and immediately.

Will Bachman 18:39
So some of the telehealth change before the pandemic, there must have been some demand at least from patients on that, like, hey, if it’s, you know, if let’s say you have a little spot in your skin, right? It’s either and you’re concerned, that’s kind of new, is that cancer? Or is that just something totally benign? Right? you maybe want to see a dermatologist? Well, you’d probably prefer just to like snap a picture or whatever and or have a zoom in or video conference and say hey, look at my skin. But you know, previously it wasn’t very easy to do that. What was holding that back was it really I mean and probably the providers would probably be happy that you know just fewer people in the office they can crank people through faster. Was it really the the reimbursement was was the blockage for that

Paddy Padmanabhan 19:25
big corner in healthcare you know, you have to follow the money to kind of go back to it. A big part of it. So so in healthcare most of healthcare is in is in what is known as a fee for service model. Right. What that means is you know, you get paid by volume. So you do a visit you get paid you know X dollars for the for the visit. If you do you know lab tests, you get y dollars for the lab test, everything is very unit based, right? a unit of activity will get you a unit of reimbursement and there are you know, pig You know, this whole pig Go Kart directories have, you know tables of no rates and so on so forth. But with the industry moving towards what is known as Accountable Care and value based care, increasingly, providers are taking responsibility for the patient populations that they manage. And when they take responsibility, they get taken upsides for improving health outcomes for their populations. And there’s a whole set of formulae that, you know, the government has worked out, especially in the context of Medicare. And, you know, if you meet those numbers, and you beat those numbers, you can actually make more money than you would make money in a fee for service model. Now, that is, you know, work in progress. And these models will take time to take hold and become more commonplace. But the vast majority of the system today is on fee for service, where it’s fee for service, the tele dermatology example that you talked about while is available, it’s cool, and it’s convenient. You know, there’s got to be a fiscal financial motive for the party on the other side, namely your doctor, or even more importantly, the doctor’s employer, which could be a big hospital to actually encourage you. Now, from a demographic standpoint, a lot of people especially, you know, younger, urban dwellers who do not want to necessarily go into a clinic, or care, or a time and place of their choosing. They would love this, and they, Okay, I’m gonna, you know, I got rash on my skin, I’m gonna send you a picture. And these apps already exist. I said, your picture, tell me what I need to do. Do I need to just go out to Walgreens and buy this ointment? Or what do I need to do? Do I need to come in? They’re happy with that. But there’s a lot, there’s a big section of the population that may still want to come in. And then there’s, of course, this whole, you know, motivation or lack of it based on the reimbursement models that people are

Will Bachman 21:54
functioning with, run the reimbursement side. Put it sounds like previously, the reimbursement for telehealth for a telehealth visit for the same purpose, right, let’s say you’re going to see a doctor and they’re going to, you know, evaluate you for the same purpose. Previously, it sounds like the telehealth reimbursement was lower than it would be if you went into the person in office. What was the force keeping that in place, keeping that status quo in place who who benefited by making people go into the office was with it was like Medicaid or a CMS afraid that people would abuse that and just like run up big bills? Or like, why did they care? Why didn’t they just say, Well, you know, if you need to get your spot looked at, we don’t care if it’s in person or via telehealth

Paddy Padmanabhan 22:42
I think it’s a it’s a matter of being able to do this in a very deliberate way. So that to your point, you minimize the opportunities for abuse, and then doing it in a very kind of a controlled way. And I think that was probably what was driving it, which is why the the the progress was slow, and it and the reimbursement models are really holding back the growth of telehealth pre pandemic. We looked across the nation and you know, there were no clear reimbursement guidelines in place. People didn’t know what they were going to get reimbursed. telehealth was it for this or that procedure or this or that condition. And you have to remember that, you know, in healthcare is pricing is very, very complex, you know, there’s like 1000s and 1000s of codes that determine what we get paid for a certain kind of activity, those units that I talked about. So it’s it’s a question of change, the appetite for change, and the ability to execute change. But all of that was simply forced upon us by COVID-19. And so in one fell swoop because they say, the CMS lifted all the restrictions as it relates to Medicare, and pretty much all restriction they said, we’re going to reimburse you pretty much at the same level. This one wants us to it is still not 100% of what you know. But setting aside those nuances. for practical purposes, yes, they kind of brought it on port, which was a huge leap for the industry as a whole.

Will Bachman 24:16
And what have private insurances done, have they followed suit?

Paddy Padmanabhan 24:20
private insurers have always I think, preferred this because it keeps your costs low. You know, if you if you’re going to pay for Medicaid, I’m sorry, if we will pay for telehealth visits at 30 cents to the dollar. You want to encourage more telehealth visits, right as an insurer. So I think they were always ahead of it in terms of encouraging it. But you know, who would want to cannibalize their own revenues right? So if we want to get $1 for an in person was at any want to swap it out for a 30 cent wizard? Who would want to do that?

Will Bachman 24:54
Okay. Give me some examples of work that your firm has done. So to give us some real examples of what a digital healthcare digital transformation project looks like.

Paddy Padmanabhan 25:08
Yeah, yeah, great question. That’s what this whole book is about well, and so when you look at digital transformation, you’re looking at completely transforming your business born. How in the in the context of healthcare and hospitals and health systems, how you how you provide access to care how you deliver care. These are the two big aspects of a health care operation. And access is, you know, what we just talked about in a telehealth virtual conference, how a patient gets access to care, and then how the care is delivered, whether you’re a patient at home, whether you’re a patient in the hospital, in the ICU, how it gets delivered, and what kind of the tools and technologies that you can use to improve the quality of care, improve the convenience, and improve the outcomes, the ultimate healthcare outcomes for the patient, and do it all in a cost effective and productive way. That’s really where, you know, your digital transformation strategies come into play. So if we take a if you, if you take the example of a large hospital system that wants to really transform the way it provides access to care, they would look at everything. And this is what our firm does. And, you know, look at everything from how you design your portal, how you design the experiences on your portal, how you make available online tools that can help patients self serve themselves, whether it is symptom triage, and whether it is a chatbot, that through a conversational AI interface can tell you what your condition is connected to a scheduling system that helps you find the doctor of your choice and scale an appointment. And then you know, when you come into the office later, you have a serious condition, you know, going to be the ICU. What kind of technologies can allow hospital, you know, clinicians, critical care clinicians in the hospital to really look at all of their critical care patients using tele ICU kind of technologies. But all of this is also supported by core IP infrastructure, your land when your bandwidth, your devices and how they work and where your Electronic Health Record system resides, and how the data gets pulled from it. How do you do your data and analytics in order to understand which parts of the population are at risk and who specifically individually is at risk? All of this needs to be redesigned, right. That’s what you know, the leading health systems in the country today are investing in. But I also have to say that while this is kind of the holistic, comprehensive view of what healthcare is, digital transformation is not everybody is at this, at this holy grail, if you will, we have a maturity model that we use to really help health systems understand and assess where they are, is a four stage Maturity Model. going from one through four. One, which is the least mature is a model in which you basically look at your Electronic Health Record system, and you say everything that I do is going to be done through the system and whatever capabilities this system provides to me. Well, that can be pretty limited, because the EHR system doesn’t give you everything that you need for your future state. So what do you do you layer on a few, a handful of best in class tools to provide patients with digital experiences, and you kind of wrap your Electronic Health Record system around it. So that’s model two. And then so on a model four, which is our most mature model is what I talked about earlier, which is a comprehensive transformation of your it core IT infrastructure, a transformation of the way you deliver care, the processes, the change management, and ultimately, you know, creating digital front doors for patients to gain access to care and to receive care. So that’s kind of what does this landscape looks like now and health systems across the country are at different stages of maturity, we have 4500 hospitals in the country. You know, if I were to look at model form, which I talked about, maybe there’s only 50 of them, that are somewhere in that journey towards the model for the vast majority or orders one and two. And so what we really do is help people understand where they are, have them assess their maturity levels, and have them move up the maturity model because everyone wants to get there.

Will Bachman 29:35
What changes should we expect to see as patients in the next one or two or five years? How will How will it look different receiving health care?

Paddy Padmanabhan 29:47
You should as a patient and I want to, you know just like all of us are, what I would want to see and what I think we are going to see is the One more transparency, which means you’re going to see, you know, you’re going to be able to access more information about the costs of care, your options when it comes to getting a certain kind of care, more information about who is delivering the care to you, and how qualified they are, and how much expertise they have in that in that subject. You know, what is the reputation of the hospital that employs them? A bunch of other things. So we’re going to see a lot of transparency, and consequently, choice. So that’s one thing we’re going to see, we’re going to see a dramatic increase in convenience, which means a lot of the things for which, you know, I go through very clunky experiences to get access to care, you know, to your point well earlier, we’re having to make a call because your provider won’t call you back, all that will go away, you will be able to get access to a device of your choice, whether it’s a desktop, whether there’s a smartphone, you will be able to get access to most care and most of your answers to most of your questions. And it’s going to be done in a very convenient and seamless way. These are two things that are definitely there are definitely going to change dramatically in the coming few years. There’ll be other things too, that may not be as visible. But you’re also going to see, from a structural standpoint, you’re going to see a lot of new players offering healthcare services that you may not have considered as healthcare companies. Today in today’s context, and they are emerging, and you know, the three, four or five years, the landscape is going to look very different. So

Will Bachman 31:51
we’re talking like Amazon, or Google or whatever you’re

Paddy Padmanabhan 31:55
talking about. Let’s start with you know, we’re talking about companies like CVS, or Walgreens, they’re kind of in the peripheries, when you think of primary care, when you think of going to hospital for something. But there may become more and more mainstream when it comes to your healthcare needs.

Will Bachman 32:12
That’s one thing at the minute clinic, right?

Paddy Padmanabhan 32:15
Let’s see, CVS has the medical unit. And Walgreens has now, you know been making, they’ve started offering a lot of health care services through partnerships through the app. But you know, that’s just two examples, you’re going to see one or two of the big tech companies getting into healthcare in a big way all Apple already is, but not as a healthcare provider, you know, through their Apple Health app, you can actually connect your Apple phone, data, your personal data through the Apple Health app, and combine it with the your medical records from your from your provider, it’s a simple, you just click a button on your app. And if your provider is signed up for policy to be part of the apple program, then the data gets combined. And then eventually, you could conceivably start accessing some of your care needs to an Apple Health app. That’s not the case today. And I’m not saying that I know more than what the next person knows. But I’m just saying that that is that is potentially a logical step forward. For a company like that, you’re going to see other emerging players in the last week, you saw the we saw the announcement of the merger of two big digital health companies, Tella, doc and livongo. And they are going to create entirely new care healthcare organization with an entirely new digitally native care delivery experiences. And that’s going to dramatically change the landscape as well. So you’re going to see a lot of change. But as a patient as a consumer, what you care about most is convenience, cost, transparency, and you’ve ever seen all of those change in your favor.

Will Bachman 34:00
We talked for a minute about your work creating a thought leadership. So you come up with this book. You also mentioned that you have a column. Could you talk about that and any other sort of thought leadership or writing or speaking that you do?

Paddy Padmanabhan 34:17
Yeah, so I you know, I write extensively in the healthcare industry publications. So I have a long running byline column and CIO magazine, where I talk about healthcare technology trends, digital health trends, in particular, nearly 100 pieces there over the last several years. I’m frequently published in other publications as well. In addition to that, my company constantly puts out research. We track digital health trends across the market. We track what the big technology firms are doing. We track what digital health startups are doing. We track what the big health systems are doing. We’re constantly putting out research and we do more research through our partnerships with industry organizations like chime, where we really go in and do you know, in that surveys and research and focus groups, to constantly on top of what is going on what the what the changes are, and we publish research. And also it can be pulled off our website. And in addition to that, of course, through our work with our clients, we learn a lot about what is actually going, you know, happening on the ground, how decisions are made, what gets prioritized, and what doesn’t, what are the drivers based on individual institutions or their marketplaces. So all of that really drives the thought leadership that we, that I put out on my phone puts out? So those are just a few examples.

Will Bachman 35:43
And what sort of impact has had has that had? You know, do you get a lot of your work through inbound inquiries from people that have seen your work in various places like CIO magazine? Or just Yeah, what’s the what’s been the impact of all that effort?

Paddy Padmanabhan 36:02
Great question. It just so happens that this past quarter, we signed our first, first ever contract, a consulting engagement, developer digital transformation roadmap for a big health system. We never met the client, I never knew the client, we we didn’t meet them during it, obviously, we didn’t meet them during the engagement because of COVID-19 restrictions and so on. They came to know about me, through my through my writings and my thought leadership and the work that my firm does. So yes, it certainly has helped in our brand, as a company, and of course, my personal brand as well, which is what our business is all about. And a lot of the work therefore, this comes into word about fit a few different things. You know, one, the work that we do for one, one healthcare client, you know, the word gets around about the work that we do. And healthcare is a is an industry where there’s a lot of, it’s a fraternity, and you know, what gets around. So that’s definitely one part of it. And secondly, of course, all the work and the thought leadership that we do, I, you know, I have my own podcast where I feature guests who are C level executives from healthcare, mostly technology executives, so they come in and talk about what they’re doing, when we, you know, we get to learn from that. But we also get to share best practices that others their peers, get to learn from. So I’m going to publish a weekly newsletter, where we analyze the events of the past week, where we publish our own research, we publish charts, and, you know, we share our podcasts, we have guest guest blogs from some of our clients in our industry colleagues. So that’s another way through which we so we we really care deeply about sharing our knowledge and being seen as thought leaders through that sharing, and the exchange of the vibrant exchange of ideas with our peers and colleagues in the tech community. Wow. That’s really how we do it here. How do

Will Bachman 38:12
you do your newsletter? Are you reading all the news yourself? Do you have a member of your team who’s who’s helping to do that research and pull it together?

Paddy Padmanabhan 38:22
It’s we you know, there’s a team that curates the curates. You know, the the news items. And the newsletter contains articles that are curated from what has been published. But it’s it also includes some of our own publications, including my own publication. So most weeks, it’s, you know, it’s the curation of articles on a particular theme or a topic with maybe, you know, maybe a piece that I published during that week, or add a new piece of research that we published. So there is a team that does that. And we get together every week, we will look at all the pieces and then we decide which ones go and it’s usually about, you know, half a dozen pieces that we include in a you know, weekly newsletter. And then, you know, I put in some commentary on that as well.

Will Bachman 39:08
What sort of investment Have you made in building an audience on Twitter or LinkedIn or other social media? Are those relevant to your space?

Paddy Padmanabhan 39:18
Twitter, LinkedIn? It’s very interesting. You asked a question, because, you know, the the experience on Twitter and LinkedIn has been very, very different from my own profile and following in LinkedIn is far more than it is on Twitter. And I use both for work so I don’t mix my personal life with my work life in Twitter. Of course, I don’t do that in LinkedIn. No one does that. But my my engagement and followership on LinkedIn is far, far higher than it is on Twitter. For my company, it’s the exact opposite. You know, my company’s Twitter following Twitter engagement is far higher than Other companies engagement on LinkedIn. So we kind of, you know, obviously we, we go with what works. And we have invested in that. And then of course, we do a lot of you know, my team, I have a fantastic brand marketing team they do, you know, they do all the fun stuff in the background with the SEO and, you know, the Google Analytics and Google search and so on. So they pull out some magic. And I just, I just follow along with whatever they tell me to do.

Will Bachman 40:33
Got it? Well, speaking of all that, where can people go online to find out more about your work? So

Paddy Padmanabhan 40:43
you can google me, of course, some Paragon ANOVA. And most likely, if my if my marketing team is right, you’ll probably find me on the first page. But you can find my company demo consulting.net. And go to my personal website also is the big unlock.com the big unlock one word, not com and that’s got my profile, all the work, my publications, my speaking engagements, my podcast, my newsletters, thought leadership, and I’m a guest on various podcasts. And I speak in industry conferences. And of course, I interview and I interview and host a lot of guests on my podcast as well. So all of that you can find it on my, on my personal website, or in my, in my company website. Amazing.

Will Bachman 41:35
Well, you are one of the most productive people I know, cranking out books, a podcast and newsletter, while still managing to actually run a firm and do some consulting on the side.

Paddy Padmanabhan 41:49
Well, yeah, and, you know, I will tell you, I’m not going to just take credit for all of it. Because the truth of the matter is that I have a rockstar team that supports me, they’re kind of, you know, behind the scenes, they let me they let me stay in the limelight, if you will. But I am very fortunate to have a really, really strong team that works with me and supports me. And I’ve been in this a long time. So you know, it’s taken a long time, as you can understand. But we are very committed to this. And we we really care about the space that we’re in and we care about the community that we’re a part of. I think that makes a difference.

Will Bachman 42:29
Fantastic. Well, Patti, we will include those links in the show notes. So to find out more about Patty, check those out. We’ll also include the link to my Twitter account. I’m getting more active on Twitter. So I post there now pretty regularly if you want to follow me it’s at Will Bachman on Twitter. Thanks for listening.

Paddy Padmanabhan 42:47
All right, thank you. Well, it’s been a pleasure being on the show. Take care