Claus T Jensen – Chief Technology Officer, CVS Health and Aetna

Johann

My name is Johann Berlin host of the Discerning What Matters podcast and CEO of TLEX Institute. Throughout this series, I’ll be interviewing experts and leaders who are driving with the future of work will look like within their companies and across their industries. During the podcast, we’ll be exploring a central question as technology speeds us into an uncertain future. How can we design a future of work that meets our human needs and values? How can we create environments that will help us flourish and thrive in the way we live and work? We’d love to hear from you what matters most to you in the future of work. Please share your thoughts with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook at TLEX Institute. And you can check out our work and symposiums on tlexinstitute.com. I’m pleased to introduce Claus Jensen CTO of CVAs health and Aetna, as a senior executive with more than 20 years’ experience driving product, cloud sleeves large scale transformations by combining his people, business and technology skills. I’m sure you’ll agree he offers a unique insight into what humans need and can offer in the future of work in healthcare. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did and we would love to hear your comments on TLEX Institute social media channels. Welcome Klaus and I wanted to start off by asking, what do you see as the key challenges as we transition over the next five years into the future of work and into the future of healthcare, particularly from the patient side.

Claus

Together, it makes up the fact that we have a very poor compliance rate when it comes to health advice so that’s one problem. The other problem is that we can’t always bring all the pieces of the healthcare ecosystem together to become a connected journey as seen from the perspective of the person that experiences it. So if you look at what’s going to happen over the next five years. We have to crack the code on that, which is going to require, I think, working together differently and probably a lot more crowdsourcing and information. And I think some new approaches to how to recreate the trust model if you go back 150 years. Everybody trusted the village doctor. Okay, but why don’t you trust your doctor today right. Why do you think that Dr. Google is smarter than the doctor? Did you go visit that took a long education. It’s an interesting dynamic, but that is the human factor of what’s actually happening in the in the health sector.

Johann

Interesting and what do you think the biggest challenges are to kind of to getting to a holistic view. I like your point about legacy peices maybe not working well at are creating the whole if you’re just trying to piece them together that there may need to be something that new. What are the biggest challenges you see to get into maybe a more holistic view on this or getting to that transformation point?

Claus

I think a part of what’s happen is that in some ways medicine has become dehumanized. And I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense shape or fashion, right. Because the medical professionals work hard. And the vast majority of them care perception that the system is dehumanizing. And I think part of it is because of the level of specialization we’ve had to rely more and more on disintermediated interactions. Be that buyer letters or messages or whatnot and good digital apps don’t actually fix it, it still opens immediate it makes it easier to get access to information, but it’s still a disintermediate interaction. So what makes human contact so powerful? There’s smell there is you know, sense touch. There is what you can see, one of the most important factors is actually voice the thing about it. Reading and Writing are learned behaviors there are not things we’re born with. Whereas the oral tradition and this is scientifically proven, impacts our brain in a different fashion. So perhaps by a different blend of interaction models that don’t have to be in person because it’s impractical whatever. Perhaps we can finally get back to a type of interaction that actually talks to our genes. Not just to our minds it’s one perspective.

Johann

It’s beautiful and I love this point about the how we’re wired for narrative and for voice and even for touch and for social connection. And that to some extent that that has been dehumanized. And if I could mirror back what I hear you say it’s what maybe we can find a way to find that fabric. The fabric that makes our human experience and needs unique, that also blends with the transformation and the technology that can go both ways. I think that’s super, super interesting way to look at it. What is the thing that you’re most hopeful about? Just if you had to pick something that gives you a lot of optimism in the field and the transformations happening? What would that be?

Claus

It’s a good question I think we finally have technologies available to us, that can change the interaction paradigm. When you think about the last 50 years at least right. The primary interaction model, say 40 has been a personal device. You had a personal computer, you had a personal laptop, you had a personal phone, portable phone, you have a portable smartphone and you got the iPads and whatnot, whatever your devices are called. It’s my personal device, but your personal device has a flaw it’s based on a textual interface. Now I can do video blah, blah, yea but that’s not what I’m talking about, you’re not talking to it. You’re still clicking and pointing and typing and writing. You even talk to your friends. Nnot quite to shift on we’re at an inflection point. A transformative technology innovation chain where the technology is coming together to not just give us new capabilities, but changed the interaction model. If you look at the breakthrough transformation that’s happened to technologies. All of them have had the element of a different hardware factor a different software factor and a different interaction model. Personally, I suspect that voice represents such an inflection point. And 10 years from now, we won’t recognize the world we live in today because that’s just bold.

Johann

Very interesting another question for you if you don’t mind, I’ll go kind of rapid fire here. So much of what we have in the world wasn’t chosen intentionally right. Like meaning technology transformations have happened. Independent necessarily of our intentionality of how we want to use them or how we want to interact with them. It’s sort of like a perpetual motion, right. Like computers are getting smaller. devices are getting closer to our body in the world of the you’re in. What is it that matters most to you? If you were going to have an intentionality around what the future of work should look like or what the future of healthcare should look like what would you discern as the most important thing?

Claus

That is a good question. I’m gonna give you a half-baked I guess answer. So you got to forgive me. I’ll explain I think the future work is crowdsourcing of knowledge didn’t say data. I didn’t say information. I said knowledge, we’re getting to the point where we have searched and we have so much information at our fingertips. But do we truly understand? Do we have information or do we have knowledge? The reality is people that understand bits and pieces. how do we drive a synthesis of all that stuff at our fingertips. We say we live in an information society, yes. But we also talk about information overload. So maybe the future work is fixing that problem to not insisting that one person can have profound knowledge about everything. Well, finding a different way of crowdsourcing. The knowledge we each have and maybe at the same time, creating an amplification effect. People talk about enhance. You know, enhancement and about acceleration, but even with acceleration you don’t go as far as you can touch is there a way a moving from acceleration to amplification. Is it possible to have an outsized effect on the world around you, compared to the amount of effort you put in? I’d like to think that that’s the future work amplification.

Johann

Interesting and I got to say, you said it might be a half-baked answer but I would tell you, I think half baked answers are the only good ones if it’s fully baked in. It’s incomplete right and I love this idea of like what you just proposed, there is a beautiful wonder difference between a question of a one and a wonder, is that a question you want an answer. And then wonder becomes something that can take many permutations or sort of lines of inquiry. Right of thinking about it. Klaus really appreciate you sharing your insights with us wishing you all the best and look forward to following your work and your integration with CVS health and Aetna.