But I also think, again, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity within that trusted relationship to add value. And I see, again, you know, the healthcare industry being at really a pivotal time in their evolution. So, you know, I was, you know, in the financial services industry 20 years ago when, you know, they radically transformed the relationship with their customers. And while some things went better than others, I think everybody feels like they have a more frictionless environment with their financial services provider than they used to.

10 years ago, I was in the travel industry when digital transformation swept through that. New entrants were coming in, changing, again, the relationship, threatening disintermediation of traditional brands between their customers and how they fulfill services. And how do you basically reestablish that relationship that frankly had, you know, been, you know, moved into too much of a transactional state.
I see healthcare right now as being this tremendous opportunity. It is now is the right time for this industry to rethink itself. Not just from a technology standpoint, technology is an enabler. But really to rethink how do we become much more customer focused? How do we use technology to do that? How do we deliver insights? How do we connect with people in a frictionless way? How do we make it easier to consume health care?

How do we make it more accurate? How do we empower doctors, nurses to provide better care and, frankly, spend less time on administrative tasks? Even within a regulated industry, the opportunity is tremendous. And as each and every one of us is a stakeholder in this, everybody here wants better healthcare. There is no question of, you know, should I consume this or should I not? Everybody at some point in their life is going to need high quality healthcare

So everybody, I think, is an active advocate for, yes, we want the system to be better. And we need the large companies, large brands like Humana to help pull the industry forward.

Richard
You know, it’s been an aspiration for some time, right? And there’s been false storms here. I mean, companies as innovative as, well, Amazon and even JP Morgan, right? There’s companies from the outside who’ve said, boy, there’s got to be a different way of doing this. And not just to mention industry participants and also governments. Multiple efforts to transform the industry using technology. Do you think that circumstances are more favorable today?

Are we finally reaching that time? Because clearly this is not easy. If it’s easy, people would have solved this problem a long time ago, right? And some of the brightest minds in technology have looked at it, both from a startup and from an incumbent perspective. What gives you optimism that now is the right time? Is it just that the desire is more pronounced or is it that the opportunity is there?

Eric
Well, I think there’s a few things that are converging. I think it’s been an inevitable convergence. It’s more a question of timing, which is, you know, yes, there are, you know, I think there are a number of companies that have tried to enter the space for different reasons. And I think what they found out is it’s not purely a technology problem. It’s not purely a financial problem. It’s not purely a go to market problem in terms of should you move from in person care to telehealth, it’s all of the above.

And if you approach it from only one vector, you’re probably going to miss the mark. Because ultimately, again, we all have incredibly high standards around what we think is good health care. And so I think, number one, the technology industry is evolving, where a number of problems that used to be really, really hard are now becoming easier. And as we think about, you know, where big data is going, as we think about, you know, the penetration of, you know, mobile apps, as we think about fitness data and health data that’s now available in personal trackers, some really, really tough things have become, frankly, now accessible and scalable into the market.

I also think, again, consumer expectations have changed. 10 years ago, we all had a certain set of expectations. Today, they’re very different. We expect things to happen much faster. We expect it to happen on our terms, not necessarily on the company’s terms. I can buy something no matter where I’m at. I could be laying in bed. I can be shopping. I don’t need to drive 20 minutes to a store and conduct business on their terms.

So I think there’s a number of things that are just converging at this time on the enablement side and the demand side that says we’re going to make more progress, I think, in the next five to 10 years to a point that we’ve made in the previous generation.

Richard
We’ve got an increasing, and we’ve been on a curve for some time, increasing levels of treatment for that aging population, more sophisticated treatments. And then we have this massive disruption through COVID, which was a sort of education for people in terms of use of new technologies, right? Whether it was, you know, working from home or telemedicine, we had whole generations experimenting with technologies that they hadn’t previously tried and discovering that, you know, these things were pretty useful.

So are these all accelerants, would you say, or do they create headwinds, or are they pushing us all in the same direction?

Eric
So I think, again, just going back to history to say, multiple industries have demonstrated that consolidation makes sense where there are high capital expenditures. It’s more efficient when you get to, again, a more consolidated rather than a fragmented market structure, when capital investment is required in order for you to provide the best product or service. Now, when industries over-consolidate, you see new entrants popping up, new innovation, new disruptors, and they are going underneath it.

So I do believe the market dynamics will get us there. Has the healthcare industry been fairly fragmented historically? Absolutely. So was the financial services industry 25 years ago.

I think I went through like five banks in a year once where they kept getting purchased and consolidated. Why? Because frankly, it was a capital-intensive business that benefited from scale. But when perhaps there was some over-consolidation, you had some startups that came in and said, I’m going to take care of some underserved markets. So I think the market will drive that effectively. I think your comments on COVID are incredibly appropriate.

Eric
I think COVID changed us in so many way.

Obviously, it changed what we expected in terms of how many people now regularly, if not full-time, work from home and have been demonstrated they’re fully productive. How many people got comfortable with telehealth in that, that says, you know, there are times when I need to actually go physically see my doctor. There are times a consultation over video chat is perfectly fine, is more convenient for them, is more convenient for us, is more capital efficient, and therefore, let’s go and do that.

But I think, again, you know, frankly, from a healthcare industry, we are still reacting and responding to the impacts of COVID on the population. The reality is, obviously, a tremendous amount of people suffer from COVID. Some of that was, again, mortality that happened across the world. Numbers vary. The excess death studies that go on are actually really interesting. When you look at it just from a statistical standpoint, as opposed to reported deaths, to say what was really the impact of COVID

But now, again, it’s coming out more and more around how COVID has fundamentally shaped our health. It’s commonly called long COVID, but you get into different people’s genetics and biology respond to the virus differently. Some of people are having very long tail symptoms, changing their basic health structures. The healthcare system is still responding. To how do we now deal with this was not just a two-year, two-and-a-half-year global pandemic.

This actually will probably be a generational or a multi-generational change in how we manage health.

Richard
That’s interesting. You know, there’s no guarantee that that’s the last event of its kind we’re going to see in our lifetimes, right? This is, you know, I think that the potential for a pandemic always existed. We’d had near misses with similar, you know, similar novel viruses that originated in similar parts of the world, and I don’t think there’s great confidence that we wouldn’t see a repeat. Arguably, we’d be better equipped to deal with this, having had the experiences from COVID, you would hope that that would at least give us a head start in being able to respond.

But these kinds of black swan events, and back to your experience in the financial services industry, right? What have we learned over the last 30, 40 years? Black swan events are by definition things that may seem improbable, but aren’t impossible. And in terms of health crisis, we gotta be prepared for the possibility that happens again, I’m sure.

Eric
I agree. Obviously, again, the world is much more global than we used to be. Infectious diseases used to be able to be localized. Containment strategies worked because, frankly, people weren’t moving. The reality is COVID spread. I was in the travel industry when it happened. We saw it happening in China right before it hit the US and it spread within a few weeks in terms of what we were seeing. Being a science geek myself, I also look at how the warming of the world is going to impact this.

So if you talk, you know, they’re talking about as the Siberian permafrost thaws, how many ancient pathogens are trapped in that soil that are going to be released. As you think about, again, I was reading dengue fever, which is obviously considered to be a tropical disease, it’s now present consistently in the US. So things that we normally haven’t had to deal with, the warming world is gonna change all of that and it’s gonna have to change the application of medicine.

Richard
When you think about AI as an opportunity for Humana, where do you see that falling?

Eric
So, you know, I think, number one, this is definitely, you know, you could call it generational change, but the reality, I think the generation is going to be, you know, increasingly quick in terms of what’s happening, in terms of the progress. And that is largely because this is the first truly digital innovation cycle that I’ve seen in my 30-some year career. So when you think about the PC revolution, when it happened, it was a hardware limited problem.

You had to wait until everybody bought a PC for their home. So there was a fairly long adoption curve. If you think about the commercialization of the internet, people will say, well, Eric, wasn’t that purely digital? And the answer is we had to wait until broadband got rolled out to everybody’s house. I remember, you know, a 14.4 modem in my house and how excited I was when I got a 56k modem and how excited I was when I went to DSL.

The entire reason Cyber Monday exists is because people couldn’t shop online on their home connections. They waited until they went to work on Monday so that they could use the broadband at work to shop. So you look at a lot of the innovations that have happened and they’ve been a distributed problem to solve.

I think when cloud came in, there was this really thought of this was the leading innovation that was there. I think now that AI is coming in, we’re starting to realize the cloud was an enabling innovation. Because by centralizing the problem, it’s no longer just a distributed problem, it’s a centralized problem, that a few large players need to solve some problems, but they have the scale to do so.

As opposed to every company’s got to run their own AI infrastructure, which would have been extremely cumbersome, lengthy process to go figure out. I think this cycle is going to move very quickly. I think the opportunity field is very large. I think the fundamentals are very challenged in terms of people understanding how important data quality is in getting to good answers. So as you think about companies, data governance, data stewardship, data lineage, these have all been important topics for years.

They become absolutely mission critical. When you’re talking about how do you effectively train these models to start doing the rote tasks that you can free humans from so that they can work on higher order problems. And so ultimately, I think there’s going to be a tremendous amount of innovation at the top. I think the trickle down into companies will be on the, this is the progress we have made in transforming our core to be ready to accept these innovations.

Some companies are more ready, some companies are less ready. I think it is still a learning for the industry that says there’s some really great opportunities out there where you can help your customers, you can help your employees, you can make people’s lives better. But in order to do that, you gotta do these five things first. And if you try to skip a line, take the fast pass, go straight to the end, you’re going to stumble a lot.

You’re going to spend some money that you probably shouldn’t. I think companies are going to have to learn how to do this. And they’re going to have a relatively short window of time to do it.

Richard
And it strikes me there’s a balancing act here, right? Because if we’re waiting for everything to line up perfectly, we’ll probably never get there. And you talk about data quality and data assets. You know when when we talk to companies that you know usually the first part of the conversation starts with questions about data quality data assets data organization and and usually starts with someone saying you may have seen bad but you haven’t seen this bad right so everyone’s got a generally of a poor self-image of their data assets.

Relatively speaking, of course, everyone’s pretty similar. The fact is it’s, you know, there are exceptions to the rule, companies that have got in front of this, often younger companies to be entirely fair because they haven’t had, you know, 20, 30, 40 years of legacy systems to have to deal with. And so to some extent they have cleaner and more contemporary architectures. So on one hand, We need to fix these problems.

We need to become much better at data governance. We need to become much better at data management. On the other hand, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good, right? We have to start making progress. So there’s a balancing act to be struck here, trying to figure out one foot on the gas pedal, one foot on the brake. Is that a way to think about it?

Eric
Well, I think, you know, again, it goes back to really understanding, you know, what problem you’re trying to solve, and what are the requirements to go get it done. For a company, you know, like Humana or other scaled organizations out there, the question is, can you go and get your data to a high level of quality, accuracy, fidelity in a short period of time? And the answer is probably not. But the question is, can you do it for the five or six domains that are critical for the problems you’re trying to solve in the next year or two?

And the answer is, well, that’s much more achievable. The challenge, I think, that’s out there is when we were doing things on-prem, when we were doing things at smaller scale, we were talking about millions of parameters. Now you’re talking about billions, trillions. The question of how much data is now potentially in scope really, I think, causes some of the challenge.

Eric
My guidance would be one foot on the gas, but stay in your lane and don’t switch lanes until you’re ready to.

Richard
That’s a great note to end on. Eric, one thing that struck me in our conversation is how optimistic you are, which I think is really refreshing. I think both about the prospects for the healthcare industry, Humana in particular, but also the benefits we can achieve with technology in this accelerated pace. And I think that for someone, I think it’s very easy in a position like yours, I know, to look at the totality of challenge and get weighed by it.

Richard
But what really strikes me is how you’re bringing that optimism, which I think is going to be exactly what we all need, is that keep a focus on the potential and don’t necessarily let the inevitable challenges get in the way of the mission. Because that’s too good an opportunity to pass up on, I think.

Eric
Well, I think number one, you know, if we view our job as leaders, which is, you know, essentially my job is to help my team be successful, full stop. Right? That’s all I do. So, you know, if I think about that as my charter, ultimately, in order to lead them effectively, We have to look at, well, where’s the positive outcome? How do we lead to that? If we don’t start with, we actually have a view of what we can do.

I don’t know how you lead a team successfully if you’re focused on the challenges. You have to be focused on the opportunities. The other reason is, again, in doing this for as long as I have, the change in our environment, I think we take for granted. So many things that have been introduced in my adult life that have fundamentally transformed who we were and how we do things. And frankly, we have forgotten many of the limitations that were in our life.

Eric
If you’re old enough, you bought a 20-foot telephone cord so you could actually walk around your house when you were on the phone. You had to tell people where you were going and when you expected to be home because they had no idea how to check up on you. If you needed directions once you were out, you had to stop and ask somebody because there was nothing else to do. I think it’s hard not to be optimistic.

When you look back and say, look at what has happened over the last 30 years. Yes, there’s challenges. Yes, there’s things that should have been done differently. I don’t know how you don’t sit there and say, there’s much more opportunity in front of us than there are challenges.

Richard
That’s a great way of thinking about it. Yeah, try telling my 24-year-old son about extension cords on phones. So Eric, thank you very much. It was a wonderful conversation. I appreciate it. And congratulations on the progress to date. And perhaps, more importantly, good luck with the challenges going forward as you matter.

Eric
I absolutely appreciate it. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.