My conversation with Mark Tomaino today covers Mark’s takeaways from the recent JP Morgan Conference— the trends and opportunities he thinks the most promising innovations will capitalize upon and how to evaluate the value of those innovations compared to their risk-adjusted returns. I’m using my new finance vocabulary word. But wait until near the end of our conversation when Mark offers up a big tip – how to focus on collaboration as a business driver. For more info, go to welschcarson.com.

Pharma and Life Sciences companies have traditionally been very conservative in their approach to the market place. That becomes an interesting question: What’s the lowest-risk, highest-return approach for pharma moving forward, given the upheaval in the market place? I discuss this topic with Dave Dierk, my co-president over at Aventria Health Group.

Mandates come and mandates go, and these days, mandates can be driving around at 90 mph in a convertible one minute and the next minute be somewhere on the darker side of comatose. So the magic trick becomes identifying the sure things – the pediments that all the chaos rests on which aren’t likely to change no matter what. And once you do that, figuring out how to pragmatically address them. Sometimes, the best way to overcome the madness of disconnected complexity and uncertainty is to concentrate on the use case with bug-eyed focus.

We talk about raising the value of Delivered Care: the Triple Aim – Improving Quality, Patient Experience, & Population Health. When we think about how to do this, we jump to processes or technology. But we leap over one massive critical success factor: the people. The physicians and other providers who are expected to do or use whatever we tell them to do or use. If at best we’re getting apathetic usage of our solutions, it isn’t going to do much. Physician burnout matters to the bottom-line as much as it does to the individuals on our teams.

In every provider organization, management is hellbent on enacting policies and metric measurements. Lots of change, lots of action and information overload. But I doubt anyone would argue that besides the ones everyone knows about, there exists deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business. Today I speak with Jamie Davis, who is a nurse journalist turning out 7 podcasts and is also the author of a book to simplify medical math and in his spare time he writes fiction with a medical twist.