Why Better Healthcare Technology Makes Human Judgment More Valuable

“Technology kind of raises the ceiling of what’s possible, but humanity determines if we can ever really reach what’s possible.”

That idea from my conversation with Teri Thomas, CEO of Mach7 Technologies, gets to the heart of an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

As AI gets better at processing information, generating ideas and identifying patterns, what happens to the value of human expertise?

Teri believes it actually increases.

She brings an unusual perspective to the question. She spent more than 20 years at Epic, later earned her master’s in nursing and cared for patients during COVID, led a breast health technology company, and today runs Mach7 Technologies. Her career has given her a view of healthcare from the technology, clinical and executive sides.

One of the most important distinctions we discussed is the difference between processing information and creating meaning. AI can tell a clinician that a patient has an 82% chance of deteriorating. But it may not recognize the suddenly quiet spouse, the daughter staring nervously at a monitor or the patient who has stopped joking. Those human signals matter.

The same principle applies to leadership. Technology can provide data and recommendations, but it can’t take responsibility for a decision, build trust with a team or create a culture where people know what to do when nobody is telling them what to do.

That last point led us into a discussion I particularly enjoyed about culture. Teri describes culture not as the values on a poster, but as what an organization consistently tolerates and how people resolve conflicts between competing priorities. At Mach7, for example, the customer comes first. When values collide, that hierarchy helps people make decisions.

We also talked about one of the biggest mistakes organizations make when implementing new technology: investing heavily in the technology itself while underinvesting in the people expected to use it. Teri argues that what we often call resistance to change is really resistance to uncertainty. Leaders have to help people understand what success looks like on the other side.

And perhaps most importantly, we discussed accountability. AI can advise, calculate and recommend. It can also deliver a completely plausible answer that’s completely wrong. At some point, a human being still has to say, “This is my call. I am responsible.”

That responsibility becomes especially important in healthcare, where the consequences aren’t theoretical.

“Technology is going to beb be obsolete faster than the people you invest in.”

That may be the leadership lesson worth remembering most.

Why Listen?

In this episode, listeners will learn:

Why developing adaptable, curious people may be a better long-term investment than any technology an organization buys today.

Why Teri believes increasingly capable AI makes human judgment, creativity and accountability more valuable, not less.

How healthcare leaders can use AI to improve the quality of time clinicians spend with patients instead of simply creating a “faster treadmill.”

Why resistance to new technology may have more to do with uncertainty than an unwillingness to change.

How a clearly defined culture helps employees make difficult decisions when priorities conflict.

Key Insights and Takeaways

Subscribe for More

Don’t miss future insights—subscribe to our blog and join us on LinkedIn: Stewart Gandolf and Healthcare Success.

Note: The following AI-generated transcript is provided as an additional resource for those who prefer not to listen to the podcast recording. It has been lightly edited and reviewed for readability and accuracy.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the Healthcare Success Podcast. Today it's my pleasure to welcome Teri Thomas as my guest. Terry is CEO of Mach7 Technologies. Welcome, Teri.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Thank you very much, Stewart. Nice to be here.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So good. So today we're gonna talk again about transformation in healthcare and we're gonna talk about technology and how humanity intersects with technology, which is certainly a timely topic, Teri. Before we get started, just to give our listeners a little bit of context about your background, tell us a little about your journey from Epic, a little company I've heard of, to becoming a nurse to a leading healthcare technology company.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): And my path here was not exactly a carefully orchestrated career plan. It was much more of a zigzag. And I look back and I can kind of connect the dots. But when I started off, well, a lot more zagging than anything. So originally I wanted to be a doctor. I found healthcare fascinating, quite frankly, blood and guts are interesting. And I really love the mission element. You know, it applies to everybody. We all get healthcare at some point in our lives.

Almost by accident, I took a job at Epic thinking it was going to be a way for me to work down some of my student loans as a gap between my undergrad work and going to med school. And you know, it never happened. I never went to med school. And it's because something happened that I didn't expect. And that was my old boss, Judy, sat me down and explained to me, as a doctor, I could see a couple dozen patients a week, but in health technology, I'm a multiplier.

I could touch millions of patients in a year that I could never see one at a time. And that really shaped my career. So while I did go back to patient care, I got my master's in nursing and did take care of patients, notably during COVID, which made me a much more well-rounded leader. That being a multiplier has really impacted the rest of my career choices. So the combination of mission, wanting to make an impact on something that actually applies to just about everyone.

And the other thing from my Epic days, I spent over 20 years at Epic, is Epic's got a very interesting mission. They explicitly outline it in six words. And it's do good, have fun, make money. And they actually explicitly put it in that order as well. So they say if you start with make money, you often don't do good or have fun.

But if you start off with the mission, the purpose that you want to impact patient care. And let that govern the rest of what you do. Do it in a way where we spend a lot of time at work, enjoy what you do, that generally the money will follow. You know, that's kind of what I was schooled in at Epic. And after I left Epic, and as I became a nurse, as I became the CEO of OPARA, which is a breast health company, acquired by Lunit, became chief commercial officer of Lunit, and then CEO of Mach 7, an imaging company where I am right now am happy to lead a group of people still following those same six words. So do good. We want to access a broad set of images for the patient at the time when they're getting their care. That's our mission for Mach 7. Have fun, do it in a way where we don't take life too serious, even if healthcare is quite serious.

And then make money as an ASX listed company CEO. I have to pay attention to our quarterlies. And making sure that we make fiscally responsible decisions. So that's the nutshell of who I am and how I became CEO of Mach7.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow, that's really great. That's exciting. Thank you for that update. It's funny, we do have some connectivity. I bet we know some people in common and what you're doing today. So you've led technology companies through lots of different waves of innovation. And so why are we talking about humanity today and why do you think it matters more today, not less, as healthcare technology advances?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): You know, I think actually every major technological leap that happens actually increases the value of being human. I know it's kind of backwards to what we're hearing these days, but I actually think that it's true. When information was scarce, expertise was about being the person who knew the answers. And today AI can generate hundreds of possibilities, thousands of possibilities in seconds. So the differentiator isn't so much about knowing more, it's making sense of the information that's out there.

It's like technology kind of raises the ceiling of what's possible, but humanity determines if we can ever really reach what's possible. And I've been kind of mulling over this idea of, you know, can AI truly be reflective? You know, it's exceptional at identifying patterns because by design it's kind of drawn towards a statistical center and it predicts what's likely, it averages and it converges, but innovation and what's uniquely human about us actually is a lot of times what happens at the edges. It's that person that asks the awkward question that other people dismissed, or I keep thinking about I met an extraordinary person, his name's John Bertrand, and he led the Australian America's Cup to an amazing win years ago. And one of his messages to me is: surround yourself with diverse people, including some crazies.

And I thought that was funny, like crazies, but he talked about the key to winning the America's Cup was actually a person who nine out of 10 of their ideas went nowhere. But one idea inspired by seagulls was actually the innovation that allowed them to get the edge over the Americans for the first time in decades. Creativity lives in humanity around those edges, not the convergence in the middle. So AI then fitting with the importance of humanity allows us to explore those edges more quickly, more thoroughly.

It tests ideas in a way that we can eliminate dead ends sooner and scale great ideas that might have in the past escaped notice. So I think AI can enhance human creativity and amplify it. But that's where that unique element of humanity, the pieces that are far from the center, become so much more strategic and important. Because the better technology becomes, the more valuable that judgment, the imagination, and the courage to be the crazy who speaks up in the group becomes.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's great. Well, if they're looking for crazies, I'm in.

So when we talked offline, you made a statement that I love that technology can process information, but it can't assume responsibility, it can't build trust, it can't build confidence, comfort patients, or create a culture where people do the best. Work. What does that mean?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah. You know, I think technology is extraordinary in processing information and medicine is one of the most information-dense things that you can possibly tackle with the complexity of the human body. But people are extraordinary at creating meaning. And, you know, an AI algorithm can identify that a patient has an 82% chance of deteriorating over the next six hours. And that's incredibly valuable and it makes our healthcare better.

But a nurse walking into a room can notice that their spouse hasn't spoken in 20 minutes when they're normally talkative. Or the person who typically jokes is suddenly quiet. The daughter's looking at the monitor instead of her father. Those things aren't in structured data. And sometimes the most important clinical intervention isn't a test.

It's sitting down, it's making eye contact. It's opening up the questions about what are you worried about? And algorithms can't change life by being present, but people can. And so to me, you know, leadership is somewhat similar in a world of AI. You know, becoming intentional about those high-value human moments.

We're doing more leadership meetings in person, more strategic planning face-to-face, more interviews of key people in person because the spaces between the data points are incredibly and increasingly more important. You notice what's not being said, which isn't in the data. You notice who hasn't spoken, who has checked out, or the body language or the energy.

And then this is the foundation of trust, you know, creating relationships, reading the room. Having that presence to sit with people and be with them in those ways that can't be replaced by technology. You know, to me that's the key to becoming a leader that can leverage technology but also leverage humanity in a way that's a differentiator.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Totally. And so like another thing that we had talked about a little bit was organizations aren't failing because they invest too much in this is by the way is a really common theme right now with a lot of the people that I speak with 'cause we know we've done a fair number of AI discussions and it's not so much that they're not investing in technology. It's easy to spend a lot, but the investing in people, helping them adapt. And this is real even with us as an agency, you know, we have a much smaller problem than hospital health systems.

You know, I've got 40 people versus 40,000. But even there, like the implementation is everything and making sure everybody's trained. So talk about that a little bit because that's that's a huge obstacle in my opinion.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Absolutely. You know, buying technology feels like something that's discrete and measurable, and even AI is all about measuring. And people are harder to measure. So you can buy software, but you can't really buy belief that the software is going to help. So, you know, people often think the problem is resistance to change, but I actually think it's much more resistance to uncertainty.

So people they they don't know what the future looks like. You know, that whole thing of the devil you know versus the devil you don't know. Even, you know, people invest in technology, but they don't take people by the hand so well in understanding the why and the what behind the technology and getting them to a point where they can understand a little bit more about what the future has. And, you know, coming back to the AI conversation. For my company, we've established a 90-day to a minimum AIQ.

And even saying that was scary. People are thinking, “oh my God, I'm going to be assessed. And I know my job right now.” And that's a big world of the unknown. And so we can't just mandate, you know, here is the new technology and here's how you will like it.

But rather you have to create the ability to make that bridge from where they were to understanding where they're going to be. And that assurance and that support to how to get there. So it's not just kind of announcing the future, but making the future feel a little bit more familiar, essentially creating a new devil to know. Which hopefully in the end, you know, people look back. And it's often the case that when they're over the hump, it's the angel, but when it's the big unknown, even if they're not in a great place right now, that they don't understand what their personal success looks like in the future.

In a world where things have changed or where they don't have an ability to practice or safely fail a bit, you know, taking them by the hand, showing some examples, celebrating early progress, helping people see themselves succeed, I think is the key to managing through those changes. And that's often what's underfunded or underappreciated and people are put in that box of resistance, but really it's human nature that we have to address. And you can spend millions on technology, but helping people adapt to that technology is oftentimes the afterthought. So for us, I think there's a lot of demonstrated successful paths to help people get to know the devil of the future and turn it into the angel.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So and as you discussed, and we've talked about this a bit before on the podcast, it's you know, most first of all, everybody thinks about how d what does this mean for me personally. It's like that we can't be not thinking about the organization, we're not thinking about our patients. To some level, every human is wired to think, well, what does this have to do with me? And then secondly, you any population of humans, some like change more than others. Some, you know, document first.

Like me, like “I'll change it just for the fun of it.” Other people like “I'd rather die than change.” And so it’s really important. And you need those people that help like, you know, pull people like me back and like, whoa, we don't have change everything. And other people sometimes we have to nudge. But that's just a reality. And so yeah, so on that note, when we're thinking about you know, the culture of change or just culture in general, like how should leaders, you know We can talk about culture all day long and I think it's pretty obvious it's important to walk the walk, but tell me more about that from your point of view.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah. It is interesting. Even building openness to change into the culture, I think, is really important for any technology company because things are moving so quickly that if you don't build checkpoints in related to it at every moment, you're actually going to fall behind. Culture is one of my favorite things in the world. It's something I learned really early at Epic about how to drive a strong culture.

And it is is a central part of my job as a chief executive officer. And I think too, you know, I've learned that culture is not necessarily a poster that you put up or something you have on your website or keywords that you tell people this is who we are, but it's really much, much deeper than that. We used to say “what you put up with is what you stand for.” It's not just what's in the employee handbook, but it's what you consistently tolerate. And and it's actually quite simple.

It's what tells you what to do if nobody's telling you what to do. You know, every day we make hundreds of decisions at all levels of our organizations. And how do you determine the difficult decisions, not the easy ones? You know, do I tell the customer the whole truth, even if they're not going to be happy with what they hear? How do you decide if this a conflict between helping a teammate and meeting a deadline?

When do I speak up? The micro decisions that happen all the way through is really determined by a solid culture, pulling people back towards what matters most when nobody's watching, but also it's the value hierarchy. So, you know, people often say “we're going to be customer focused and investor focused. We're gonna care about the money, we're gonna care about our employees,” you know, this like peanut butter layer across of everything that says “we're gonna be awesome and everything,” but Where an effective culture comes to bear is actually when you run into conflicts across everything that you might want to do. And how do you figure out what wins when there's a collision?

So for Mach 7, customer is number one in our culture. So we just decided that if your values collide, what is the long-term interest of the customer that wins? That wins over employees, it wins over, you know, any of our other stakeholders. And you have to figure out, okay. You know, how do you mitigate the conflicts that come up inevitably every day?

And that's where your culture actually becomes something that's real and usable. So not just describing, you know, “we're a company of integrity and we are caring,” but really what drives the really, really tough decisions that define what people make top to bottom throughout the world of the company? So it's tough and it's a way of life. It's not a poster, it's not an initiative, it's not a project. It's something you have to do every single day.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah. I wish I knew about culture that I knew what I know now, when I'd started my company twenty years ago. 'Cause for sure if you tolerate something you shouldn't it comes back to bite you and it just becomes a way of life and it's something you need to you know, you said something earlier that about, you know, scaling what you do, which I think is really interesting. As a marketing company, it's funny. Terry, like I tell people oftentimes, “look, I had no interest in being a clinician ever.” It's just not something I wanted to be. And I've just loved clinicians.

Wasn't my calling. I thought I was gonna be an engineer or attorney and still like the law stuff and the engineering stuff and certainly like those things, but I just fell in love with human behavior. And I love the way that you could influence human behavior with marketing. That was part of why I did it. It's kind of like what you said earlier about scaling healthcare through technology.

And I should also mention that a lot of people in our team really like that. They feel like I don't want to be a clinician either. I but I do like people getting the care they need. So with the work we're doing here is helping people get the care they need, it's all part of a larger ecosystem. So going back to that theory for you, you brought this up that it's unique because every decision actually touches a patient. How does that the way you think about your leadership?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): I think it helps keep us honest. You know, in most industries, if you make a poor decision, the impact might be financial or an inconvenience. But as a leader, it's important for me to help keep this personal, to help remind our staff that the software that we make has a real impact on the world of clinicians, but also families, and that you could be a patient in the hospital and your care could be impacted by if our software is working as expected or not. So I actually spend time, I even had a staff meeting in which I invited our staff to follow a real patient scenario, of course, without sharing any PHI, but here is a patient that had a stroke.

And here's what happens biologically when someone's having a stroke. And here are all the things that happen to get from first symptoms to treatment. And it's a number of steps. It's an ambulance and phone calls and getting people transported, assessing them in the hospital, getting them into a CT scan, looking at what's going on with their brain, and then determining which treatment that could either save their life or if the wrong treatment could kill their life, could end their life.

And the role in that sequence of events, every minute of delay is billions of brain cells damaged. That could be irreversibly damaged. So for us as a company who stores and serves up images to the right people at the right time, being able to access that information for somebody who's on call. Maybe they're at a ball game and they're being called in to make an assessment about this image. Being able to see it on a zero footprint viewer, being able to make a decision quickly and not have to wait or not have to drive to another facility to do it, that's personal.

Because that patient recovered or didn't recover based on a whole sequence of events happening quickly, including our slice. That's to me, it's a responsibility. It's not just a job. And it is personal. And that's why I work in this industry. But it's also what motivates my people to show up and do their best work, to be proud, to tell their kids “what I do impacts patients' lives, millions of them.” And you know, it's an honor to be able to do it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So when you're going through AI and technology, it's easy to forget about the human side. So you know, what are you most what are leaders at risk for forgetting about people in general? Like we just talked about why to do that. What what causes it to be a potential that that could even be a thing?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yep. I think sometimes people with AI are measuring the wrong things. For example, we might say AI saved an hour here, therefore let's fill it with more appointments. And and here's the you know extra money that we're gonna make. But I'd like to see AI being used to not just save time but improve the quality of the time that clinicians spend with patients.

Can they listen more carefully? Can they explain more cleanly? Can they free up time for those human elements that make us unique for the moments in the room when you're sitting next to somebody? If you can get that extra two minutes to observe what people aren't saying, it come in instead of just rushing out to get two minutes more of patients that you can see. I don't want AI to build a faster treadmill.

I want AI to improve the overall experience of what we do. So when I look in our space, I look at people are focused very much on how quickly can I bring up an image without realizing that there's a fair amount of time that people are trying to actually look in different EMR systems, look in different PAC systems, and trying to get a fuller picture of what's going on with the patient before they go into the room with the patient. If we could take five minutes of data gathering and shorten that to fifteen seconds looking at an AI generated summary that gives them a full picture and then give that five minutes back to the patient interaction, that's when I feel like we're really moving the needle.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's great. So on that note then, as we think about technology is obviously going to change a lot in five years. It's probably changed while we've been talking on the call today.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yes.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): But in terms of the leadership qualities, which seem pretty ever present in humans, why will that become more valuable as time goes on, as technology becomes even more powerful?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah. I think curiosity is a big one. Looking for the edges though, asking the questions that haven't been asked before. And I love that you can spar with AI and you can test out different hypotheses. You can go down rabbit holes of of you know never-ending questions, but yet it's a great way to be able to explore and find things that we hadn't thought of before.

But I think putting it together with a good dose of humility and judgment, that willingness to keep on learning. I think, you know, in the past, kind of back to your first question, we used to reward people for having the answers, but I think now the reward is going to be for asking astute, powerful questions. Not so much who knows the most, but who can learn the most. That learning velocity, I think, is going to become one of the most important leadership qualities as we go forward in our industry.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So what can technology not replace? I mean, what is like what with what is the limitation? By the way, before you say that, I just want to mention on the sparring thing.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Huh.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I've been sparring a lot lately, and one of the things that gets me annoyed is whenever you ask the way the algorithms are designed, they're designed to to make you happy. And there are times

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): It's the exact opposite. And it's like, I didn't ask you about that. It's and it's like, or they'll say it's kinda like Well, what about this? Like it's trying to make everything fair and balanced. Not everything is fair and balanced. So it's just it's and most people don't push

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): It's not.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Back. You have to push back. You just do. But anyway.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): You do trying to steer you to the middle and make you feel good. I've been telling AI, I want you to answer this as if you despise me.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Ha ha ha.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Don't try to make my day. Tell me it's awful if it's awful.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Well, just all you have to do is ask a political question, you're gonna get the most crazy response, like, but that's simply not true. You're right to club me out on that. Like my gosh.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yes, that is funny, isn't it?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): It's scary though, 'cause most people don't push back. So that which leads me again to what can technology never truly replace?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah. I think probably the biggest thing is responsibility. In the end, we still have to own our decisions. We have to be able to look someone in the eye and say, This is my call. I am responsible.

I own this decision. AI can provide lots of advice, but it cannot really replace accountability. I think that's super important. And and it's scary because The word trust comes up in a lot of our AI conversations. And you know, you always say trust, but verify.

Yet when you go down those sparring routes with AI, you can't actually truly verify every bit of information that's presented to you. So you have to be able to make that decision about here is where I've verified to the level that I am comfortable, that I can own this, that I can have it on my name, and then I can trust. That's what I'm putting forth is good quality, vetted, and appropriate. And I think that comes back to actually an ethical morality situation where I, you know, I think the danger is where people increasingly say, here is my AI-generated response, which I laud that people will provide that disclosure, but that is not actually an excuse for letting go of accountability. So You know, that's the challenge for us.

AI is great at calculating things, but if we leave it unchecked, we become a bunch of actuaries. And you know, what we really need to do is make sure that we keep the face. We don't let AI become a response to a person that, you know, has lost a father or is has, you know, made a mistake. And you need to help them, you know, connect with them as a human, keep their dignity. You know, we can't replace the things that make us uniquely human, and we have to trust that element to be guiding our judgment and driving that ongoing accountability.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So it's in I would say that number one is important. Thoroughness and critical thinking is important. And you know, one of the challenges with AI is it can give you a very convincing, plausible answer that's one hundred percent wrong. So I think you still need to maybe as we're thinking about this, the plausibility factor is real, right? 'Cause it's like it's if it's not even plausible, then it that's easy.

But even then you have to really think critically and fact check. So I'll give you an example. I don't know if I've shared this on the podcast before, but I was checking a prescription drug I had to take for a few weeks. And I it in earlier in the chat, it said the half-life was essentially like 22 hours. And then I asked it another question.

It's like, no, no, it's gonna increase in it's in your system over time. Like, well, actually, no. You said like the way it answered the question, it's like by definition, what you just told me is not true. If the half-life is

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): True. Below 24 hours. And it's like, you're right. I did the math wrong. Like I'm trying to oversimplify something and just trust me on this because I worked it out with a spreadsheet.

It's like I had to give it back. It's like, you're right. And most people do that, right? Most people wouldn't come back and go, Well, based upon this and this and this, this is what I think it should be. And I'm not a mathematician, that's your job, but you've psyched the numbers on this.

And it came back and said, Yep, you're right. So It is challenging. This is these are life-saving things we're talking about, right? This isn't a double

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Exactly.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Spreadsheet that I was just going down a rabbit hole with it. This is somebody's life we're talking about. It's really important. So in all this stuff, can you think of any we've talked about a lot of topics, culture, machines, leadership? Like what are the biggest mistakes leaders are making in this topic just broadly? And what

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): Yeah, I think I think, you know, that that concept of looking

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): All right.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): At how do you connect with people as humans in the face of an industry that is rapidly changing. Because, you know, tech is rapidly changing, but it's actually impacting pretty much every industry. It impacts healthcare providers on the front lines. It impacts the IT administrators underneath it. Patients are showing up to be seen with Dr.

Google on their shoulder. In the past, now it's Dr. Chatty, Dr. Gemini, Dr. And so, you know, making sure that we again build in the space to have those conversations, to build the trust and accountability.

It all comes together at how you drive your company, but also how you drive your engagement with your customers and how your very software works on the front lines. I think a lot about trust. I think a lot about data quality. I think a lot about the obligation that we have to keep people safe in a world in which people are expecting more and more from AI. And like you noted earlier, I run into it too.

There are errors. And an error, you know, if Chatty is telling me that my building consent will allow me to put a walkway here and That was wrong, and you know, it said, yeah, good point. I was wrong. All right, I lost some money and some time. But if AI is telling a clinician there's cancer on this image, or there's not cancer on this image, and people are making decisions based on that, that has to be rock solid, triple checked.

And so it's our obligation as leaders in this industry to build. The infrastructure in place to create that trust. And that goes all the way down to the coding of our software, the algorithms that are built in, how those are presented, the data that they're based on, and building some of those safeties to make sure that those that are on the front lines are comfortable that what they see in their technology is something that they can trust. Because one thing beautiful about healthcare is that most people are driven to healthcare because. We actually want to make an impact.

We actually care about the patients. Even in IT, it doesn't matter. In general, most people are. And so we have to lean in on reinforcing that good intent with good tech.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yep, very good. By the way, it's funny you said chatty. I've been saying chatty and then I've proposed Lexi and Claudus Claudette. They're all I have names for all of them. I haven't figured out a good one for Gemini yet, but it's those in my yeah.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): I'm not.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So anyway, to finalize this, if there's one thing you wanted a CEO or healthcare leader to remember from today's conversation, what would you hope it would be?

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): No, it's actually a different topic from what we've talked about, but really

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, go ahead.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): I think technology is gonna be obsolete faster than the people you invest in. I think sometimes we're in danger of forgetting about the people. It's a different element about humanity, but the software that people are buying today is going to be replaced. The ability to innovate and deliver new software is accelerating tremendously. What people use in ten years will look very different from Today.

And this relates to our healthcare provider customers, but even the software we use internally at Mach 7, but the leaders that you develop 20 years from now, that's where you should invest your time. I just had a conversation with one of my kids, and they asked me, What does success look like to you? And I said, It's not actually how much money I make, it's not about building the biggest company. It's about developing people who go on to do things that I could never imagine. And so to me, I want to encourage healthcare leaders to be able to look back on who are the leaders that they built.

Do they, you know, are they mentoring people? Are they the people that are those edge cases bringing in and challenging and supporting the people that started off as the crazies but maybe are the future innovators? Because technology is going to get smarter, but we need to develop people who become wiser. And that combination of people that are in touch with their humanity, that are exploring the edge cases, that are leveraging technology, investing in them is going to be where we can make the biggest impact.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So that right there is really going to be interesting to see how that plays out because we talked earlier about judgment and having context. And it's hard to do that, especially if you're younger and you've never lived in a world that didn't have this, to have that judgment and context. 'Cause like, you know, already, you know, universities are complaining, people are just phoning in their assignments with AI with and so skipping that critical thinking. So it'll be really interesting to see how that arrives. I'm not saying everybody's going to do that, but the The temptation to do that, to cheat in a way, is really big.

And if like you're not using any critical thinking skills and that's a problem if you've never developed those critical thinking skills, that's tough. So a conversation for another day. But Terry, I appreciate your time today. This was great. And thank you for joining me.

Teri Thomas (Mach7 Technologies): You are welcome.