What's up, everybody? It's David, host of Highway to Health. We're on the road this morning, and we've got a gig down in Austin, Texas. We're here with Omnicell. We're gonna take a tour of their new innovation lab, have a sit down interview with the chief product officer, Nish Parekh, and the CEO, Randy Lipps. Can't wait for you to join us. Let's do it. I've got Nish Parekh who's the chief product officer at Omnicell. We're gonna show you a little bit about the Innovation Lab and learn about some of the challenges, learn about some of the opportunities, and how we're improving access, experience, and outcomes for the patient community, but also the provider community. No better guest than Nish. Nish Let's do it. Welcome to Highway to Health. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having me. You've got a great facility. Yeah. We love it. Yeah. This is your baby. This is my baby. It has been a dream for not just me, but Randy. Yeah. Michael Gorrell. Yep. You know, how do you go back to the basics? Randy started this business in his garage. Wow. And you get to the scale that we're at. We're in half the health systems just in the US. And how do you go back to that garage feel Yeah. Where you can innovate? And so that's that's where this baby was born. This is a high level garage. I wish my garage is kinda like it is. Yep. So why Austin? Oh. You know, there was a huge tech move from Silicon Valley to Austin. And if you just kinda look around, all the large four tech companies are here, and a lot of tech startups are here. Yep. And so you wanna be in that energy, and you wanna be in that space. Yep. And so a part of doing it here is how do you collectively learn from all the technology around you? Man, collaboration is kind of the key to what I've heard from your team all day today. Yeah. Which I think is a special part. You're collaborating with not only your customers Yeah. And your prospects, your partners, but you're also collaborating with the technology community. That's right. And there's not a bigger, faster growing technology community than maybe Austin, Texas right now. I hope so because we're invested. You're here to stay. We're here to stay. Good. Good. Well, beautiful space. Thanks. Beautiful space. Tell us a little bit about the culture, the community of your employee, your Yeah. You know, your employee base here at Omnicell. Sure. So the culture of our community, I think that our dream and you have to ask our customers, but our vision and dream is how do you show up as the most innovative leader in health care? I think it start everything starts and stops with innovation. Yep. And what is innovation? It's curiosity. So it's a lot of, you know, why does it work this way? What if we did it that way? And you need a space to be able to do that. And so if you create the culture of of innovation, and you create the culture of curiosity, and then you actually form a space where you can make those things happen, you're gonna ultimately be able to move super, super fast and solve more and more problems within health care, which as you know is slow. And speed to innovation, speed to delivery, speed to solution That's right. Is really important in health care right now. Things are happening so fast. Change is happening so fast. And if you can deliver a solution quickly and accurately They're gonna change. You're saving lives. Exactly. Yeah. You're not not that other industries don't move the needle, but for us, it's life and death. Right. You know, one medication error could equal death. Right. And, we we we take that very seriously. And so when we talk about what is innovation, it really is what is that one small thing you can do in software and hardware and robotics that is going to make the cognitive burden of a nurse, of a pharmacist, of a technician so much more or less so they can think. And they can think about the patient. And the patient's what really matters. That's And too often, they get pulled away from the patient. Yeah. And you guys are helping them get back to what they got into the industry for. Yeah. And, you know, sad to say, but many of us end up end up being patients. Yeah. I just, I had a baby about a a year and a half, two years ago. Congratulations. Thank you. And you my medications were not delivered to me on time. My epidural was not given to me correctly. And those are all, you know, impacts of medication management going wrong. Right. And so you even you come back from that type of situation and you're even more dedicated to the journey and the mission that we're after. Yeah. Well, this is a beautiful space. It's a great place to collaborate, to learn. Yeah. To teach, to engage. You got some cool stuff downstairs too. Very cool. Have you seen it? You wanna go see it? Let's go look. Let's do it. Okay. Did you see these murals? Yeah. Tell me about it. What if this is a pretty cool look. Yeah. I love this one. So as you know, Austin is it's it's actually quite big in the mural scene, and we have a lot of freelance artists. So we said, what what could really make it stand out and give that Austin vibe? So we have murals throughout this building. And what I love love love about this one is it's it's, supposed to be two hands making a heart. One is robotics and one is human. Because no matter how much automation you have, you have to have the human touch. Yeah. Automation is nothing without the human touch. And what are we here for? Here for the human. We're here for the You gotta be a part of it. It. Yeah. And outside of that, it's the Austin skyline. It's beautiful. Yeah. Let's do it. Alright. Michael in here. Michael? How's it going? David Kemp. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. What you got going here? Well, this is the innovation lab, and here we work with our customers to understand where some of the big problems that haven't been solved and figure out how we solve them really quickly. Yep. With very disruptive and innovative solutions. So tell us about this guy. Is this is this your is this your favorite part of the innovation lab right here? Well, actually, my favorite part of the innovation lab is just being able to listen to problems, solve problems for our customers, build prototypes, have them, have our customers use prototypes, have us observe them, and really try to figure out how are we solving problems. Yep. This guy here is a robot that we sell today in central pharmacy, call our x r two, and enables, hostiles to automate the way that they store and pick medications in this in this in this in pharmacy. Yeah. Why is automation so important today? I mean we hear it everywhere, right? We hear it in software, we hear it in real world application. I mean why is automation important in healthcare? Well, in in healthcare in the pharmacy world, there is a significant shortage of pharmacy technicians. There's a shortage of pharmacists. There's a shortage of nurses. Nurses are also overworked. And really pharmacists who are customers really want to spend a lot more time with their patients so we could drive the best patient outcomes. And what automation enables them to do is it takes a lot of the repetitive tasks. It makes it a lot safer. It's a lot more accurate. It gives our customers the ability to spend more time on more value added items so that the clinical side can spend more time with their patients and drive those great patient outcomes. Which I'm sure the patient enjoys, of course. And What was that? I'm sure the patient enjoys the increased human interaction also with Yeah. And that's that's the outcome of it. You know, but if you take a macro look, hospitals are getting bigger. What does that mean? That means more patients are within one hospital. Yeah. If more patients are within one hospital, that means more meds you have to get, but the number of people, the staff number doesn't change. So that's where automation comes in. And if you don't have automation, that means if you're a patient, you are not getting your meds at the right time, but when you're supposed to get them, which causes all sorts of bigger impacts, you got to stay longer. You don't recover as fast. Right. You're in pain. Your experience is bad. So those are eventually all the things you're solving for by putting automation into And if and if those things aren't solved, it just adds additional stress to the health system versus then further burdens everybody involved. Patient, the provider, the payer, the pharmacist. So I agree. I mean automation is but what's really cool about this is the collaboration that you get to be a part of with your customers. I mean you're not solving challenges or problems in a vacuum, in a silo. Not at all. Y'all had some people here last night. You had some people here today. Yeah. This is almost like your feedback zone where you can start working with those customers to answer those problems. Exactly. It's, we're all about listening. Right? Listening to what are some of the big problems and challenges that they face that we can address and collaborate and solve them here. We we always say that the answer lives at the customer, which means there is no way Michael or anybody that comes to this lab is sitting here and understanding or even pretending to understand the problems our customers are facing. So we bring customers here customers here all the time to hit with his point. What problem are you facing? And then what they get really excited, though, like, just this morning, they ran over to these machines. They're like, what if you put a camera here and this here and they're touching and feeling and have you looked at this AI technology? Have you looked at this vision? All these pieces, it becomes real for them. That's great. Yeah. And they get to feel part of the process. They get to be involved. And, that builds loyalty and trust with you guys, which is so important in health care because we're not gonna work with somebody if we don't trust, if we don't, understand that they're listening and hearing what we're sharing. Yeah. And this is patients' lives. So if you don't have trust of the health system, they're not gonna rely on robotics and automation to actually help them. They're gonna they're gonna buy this and they're gonna put people on top and that defeats the purpose. Yeah. That's a great point. Well, thank you for showing us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. And, hey. If you haven't learned something today, you haven't been listening. One of my favorite episodes of Highway to Health already. I'm glad you joined us. Thank you for contributing. We'll see you again soon.
