Kathy Azeez-Narain on why healthcare is a human business

What this conversation is about

Kathy Azeez-Narain came to healthcare after years at American Express. As senior vice president and chief digital officer at Hoag in Newport Beach, California, she also leads the health system’s transformation strategy. Glenn Llopis opened the episode by asking listeners to pay attention to who she is rather than her title, because of how plainly she talks about the state of the industry. The line at the top of this page is her starting point: Apple is a product company and American Express an experience company, but healthcare carries too much emotion to be either.

Clinicians arrive wanting to help people, she says. Then come the coding, the documentation, the boxes to check for regulatory reasons and the screen that sits in the exam room as if it mattered as much as the patient, and the time with the person shrinks. Technology’s job, as she sees it, is to take that weight off: ambient scribing, AI documentation and anything else that gives the provider back time with the patient.

Time is not minutes

When Glenn asked how long a physician should spend with a patient, she refused the metric. Patients don’t rate their care on the technology; they remember whether the doctor looked at them.

"Time is not about the number of minutes." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:12:58

Glenn described his mother’s recovery from a stroke, and how few physicians took the time even to look at her. For his mother, born in Cuba, one minute of real attention is enough to feel she matters. Azeez-Narain named what that minute gives a patient:

"That feeling of I am just not another number of a person with this disease" — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:18:35

Her design question is who else needs a digital companion. Patients already carry one in their phones:

"how are we building for the physician to have a similar companion." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:20:15

The aim is to give the doctor the data that makes someone more than a diagnosis, so that when the two people meet, the conversation goes deeper.

The nurse who wasn’t retiring

Burnout, she argues, is ingrained. Healthcare’s lines were drawn around how payers reimburse and what regulation requires, not around the right experience, and leaders will have to rethink where, when and how people work. She told of a Hoag labor and delivery nurse with more than 30 years of experience who was about to retire, and who said she would gladly answer new mothers’ questions on a virtual platform for a couple of hours a day.

"in her head, she wasn't retired. She was retiring from the version of the role that she had today." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:25:13

The system had no version of the role for her. Virtual nursing could offer one, and her experience could lighten the load on the nurse who answers the phone and runs in to check on a mother in labor. Glenn’s reading: most people don’t dislike their work. They dislike its current version, and they burn out doing it the way it has always been done.

Where’s the regulation for how we treat people?

Glenn recalled a call with the chief strategy officer of a healthcare organization who challenged him: how do you personalize work in an industry that is so highly regulated? His answer:

"Where's the regulation for how we treat people?" — Glenn Llopis · 00:27:45

Azeez-Narain knew the pattern. As the new person at Hoag, she kept asking why things were done a certain way and kept hearing that it was the law. So she found a healthcare law expert outside her own network and learned that many of those rules were written long ago, and that people were onboarded with blanket statements nobody questioned.

"you then end up just like everybody else, you get ingrained and then you become the person that says, well, it's that law." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:32:16

"To this day, I don't think I've used any regulation as a reason we can't do something." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:32:23

Glenn’s takeaway was that leaders must learn to unlearn what no longer matters.

Transformation is everybody’s job

On digital transformation she was blunt. Hire someone with her title, and the organization decides the work is that person’s job.

"The missing part in transformation for the organization is it's everybody's job." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:45:05

Success, for her, is every leader presenting the strategy the same way. She applies the same thinking to marketing: the product is what physicians do for patients, so the stories should be theirs. Expecting AI to shake up the big platforms, she refuses 20-year commitments to any tool:

"So what I'm doing now is building mosaics. And the reason I'm doing it that way is because I want to stay flexible." — Kathy Azeez-Narain · 00:50:05

Glenn closed by naming what he saw in her:

"We must learn, unlearn, relearn, repeat." — Glenn Llopis · 00:57:16

That is the cycle of reinvention, and he told her she has a natural ability to do all four. More of her thinking appears in Glenn’s Forbes piece Healthcare Leaders: Tech’s Possibilities And The Industry’s Barriers.