Jason Taylor
Appearances
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
We actually work really, really hard as Canadians to try to maintain that facade that we are all very nice and we apologize a lot. But I think inside, a lot of us have that more American core that we want the opportunity to get out and be aggressive and be a little less nice. But we don't get to explore it at home. We end up apologizing more often than not.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
So I think this year, that's a more relevant discussion than anything, Scott. We've had with the new administration coming in in Washington, we've had some new policy initiatives that have been, I'll say, partially introduced. I think that's creating a lot of tension in the system for health care providers. So we could be fans of what the Trump administration is doing or we could be opposed to it.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
What matters right now is there's a lot of uncertainty. And this comes at a pivotal time in investment in tech for a lot of healthcare systems. So as you know, because you spent a lot of time in this, there's roughly 400 health systems in the country. There's another 400 or so standalone hospitals that act independently.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And then there's 1,200 kind of critical access safety net systems that are mostly rural but spread out across the country. So this is a fairly small community. But even within that community, we spend a lot of time talking about the big 30 or 40 systems, the Mayo Clinics, the Cleveland Clinics, Johns Hopkins, kind of big name firms that deliver health care.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
What we don't spend a lot of time on is that the bottom 90% of these health systems and large hospitals are fairly resource strapped. They don't have big teams. They don't have big budgets. And so when change happens, even if it's positive innovation change, they don't have a lot of opportunity to chase it.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
So what we're seeing this year is we're two years into this AI surge where now we've got this ubiquitous everybody must do AI. Demand for tech is rising. We've got these policy uncertainty things that are being introduced, like potential costs from tariffs, potential revenue problems from Medicaid changes that have been promised but not yet enacted.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And you find a lot of systems who have uncertain investments, not enough time to look at it, not enough people to go kind of investigate what I should be doing. And it's causing a little bit of paralysis, right? So that that's the health care provider side.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
Thanks, Scott. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. So I am Jason Taylor. I am originally a Canadian, which has some relevance into this as we talk about health care, because I come from a place where health care is delivered phenomenally differently than it is here in the U.S., I grew up in Toronto. I spent a long time part of my career with IBM, always in the tech sector.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
What it's doing on the tech side is causing a ton of uncertainty for a lot of very innovative, very kind of mission driven or positive minded firms with these great innovations. And they're facing a market that's kind of taking a taking a pause, catching its breath, not really buying a lot very quickly. And it's going to cause a little bit of a bubble.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
There's a lot of companies with VC investment or outside investment that have expectations and milestones. And they're facing a pretty tough year as, you know, some of these firms have gone a little too fast. They've overinvested in tech for two years. Now they're sitting there with uncertainty in the market. They don't know what to do. So what we're tracking this year.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
What I'm spending a lot of time on is how are these innovative, smaller health tech firms going to navigate this uncertainty, especially when the health systems themselves may not be in a position to be much use or to be very advising in that context?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
Yeah. I think they are stuck to some extent and they're relying on each other, which is great. There's an awesome community in health care. They're also relying on third parties, including people like myself, to come in and help them try and navigate. But you said it right. There's actually a group, those 30 or 40 systems, they're in a position where they are overtly saying we want to fail fast.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
The rest of them are in a position of saying we can't afford to fail at all. You know, if we have one project failure, it actually could turn into a full year, year and a half impact on their IT budget because that money is gone or slow or not able to deploy. The biggest problem that they have is actually spam. So if you look at, you know, I live in Los Angeles.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
One of my favorite close to my heart health systems is MLK Healthcare, which is in Watts, which is a little south of where I live. And they serve a primarily Hispanic community. They've got a lot of people on Medicaid or Medi-Cal as we call it out here. And it's an underserved community. They do fantastic work, but their IT staff is anemic compared with some of the larger systems.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And the breadth of understanding that it takes those leaders to be able to get their head around 100, 120 different topics that could come at them from a digital perspective or from a health tech perspective, it's just unfathomable. They can't go from one meeting to the next and be experts at everything. And so what ends up happening is a pure kind of Maslow version, right?
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
They will focus on the things that must be focused on. They'll focus on resiliency. Business recovery, cyber, and then maybe they have time for one other thing. And in times like this, it's going to be something related to RevCycle where they can prove to the CFO that there's a material ROI coming out the back end.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
They don't have the luxury of investing in some of the more softer return things like population health or patient access or patient experience type things. type of solutions. And so it almost creates a bigger divide, too, where you get these underserved communities, the systems serving them don't have the ability to invest.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And about 13 years ago, in one of my global roles, I was actually living in Europe, I met a girl. And because of the girl, I ended up moving to Los Angeles and going through a career change. We're married now, so that all worked out fine. But I got an opportunity to start reevaluating where I wanted to spend my time. And I became fascinated with U.S.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And we could be kind of falling into this greater gap in health equity where the wealthy systems who are already serving a wealthy populace can move even faster and the underserved people become even less served if that's possible.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
Yeah, and there's even a further divide, which we probably don't like to talk about all that much, which is there is a safety net system. So there's 1,200 hospitals that are critical access. They tend to be mostly rural, and they tend to be bailed out.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
So we as Americans, as our system, we're not going to let those 1,200 hospitals fail because we have a lot of people in more remote or rural communities that need health care. And every time they run into trouble, there is money to go bail them out. The thing is, though, Scott, those systems serve a population that's about 81 percent white. They're not serving the people of color.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
They're not serving minorities because that's not typically where minorities live. And it's the urban safety net hospitals that are going to be in kind of more trouble if this trend continues, the Grady Health in downtown Atlanta or MLK here in Los Angeles.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
I think there's been a few advances or kind of investments made by some systems toward the point you just made, which is how do we change a little bit of how we approach care or the modality of care for some of those more remote communities? There's been some work done, some research that says patients that are served
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
in their own communities surrounded by their families and support systems tend to have better outcomes. So you've got a few people, a few systems that are investing in hybrid remote visit or hybrid telecare type of models.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And so the idea is – and there's one example that I can think of from Providence, for example, which is out of Seattle, but they serve a lot of rural Washington and surrounding states – where they're using a hybrid of telehealth to bring specialty care to the point of care to enable a responding doctor to deal with something.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
The idea being if something goes wrong, the last thing we want to do is put you on an ambulance or a helicopter and move you to the big building. We want to do a better job of enabling people at point of care so that the responding physician has the support of that specialist that doesn't live there, but it is remote and it's kind of a three-legged approach to the patient.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
health care and all of the challenges and opportunities that sat within it to try and make a difference, to try and make things a little bit better through the use of technology or workflow or various other things. So I've spent about the past decade primarily in the health care provider segment.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
One of the challenges we've seen, and it's inhibiting a little bit of the investment in it, is we've had inconsistent funding, too, from a policy perspective. So the CMS engines just extended a little bit their coverage for telehealth. That's not locked in. I mean, obviously that needs to become a more permanent part of the budget.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And so there are some systems kind of waiting, keeping their powder dry, so to speak, around how far they want to go into this until there's some guarantee of reimbursement on the back end. But certainly the people who are leaning in have shown some pretty good results.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And I think the more creative we can get using tech to bring care to where people are, that's pretty exciting because, you know, my personal belief is, you know, you can say what you want about entitlement or access to care, who needs it. We need a healthy workforce.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
We need healthy people in all elements of our society and our economy, because as we saw through COVID, when we don't have that, it's a problem for all of us, irrespective of how they got care or why they got covered. If somebody delivering your groceries is sick or driving your Uber is sick, you're very likely to get sick. We can't compete as a country even if we don't have a healthy population.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
I would say, having been down this path kind of as a more mature entrant to the U.S. market and the health care market, I would say invest in relationships. You know, most of what happens in healthcare is done by really, really good people, really mission driven, you know, people who want to do healthcare because they want to make a difference in the world.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
I think that the more you invest in the people you surround yourself with, the more you invest in the right relationships with good, similar minded people who are just trying to make a difference, you know, the more that comes and pays back and even pay it forward. If you see an opportunity to help somebody, take it because it will come back to you. It's not a very big community.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
And those relationships are actually what ends up driving a lot of the collaboration between systems or systems and vendors or vendors and vendors in terms of actually moving things forward and making a difference. So, you know, it's great to have a career path and I need to accomplish all these things and skill sets.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
But investing in the people is going to be the difference maker or the secret sauce for those that actually want to be long-term successful in healthcare.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
Scott, thank you so much for having me. And I look forward to seeing you next week at the annual meeting.
Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Innovation, Health Equity, and the Future of Healthcare with Jason Taylor of Panda Health 4-28-25
working with health systems and hospitals on things ranging from patient engagement to revenue workflows to just generally how we can use tech to improve lives for both the clinicians delivering care and the patients that we all serve.