Expert Spotlight: Michael Reeves – Fostering Passion for Tech and Care for the Team

Michael Reeves is a technology executive with extensive expertise in software engineering, architecture, DevOps, and development. He specializes in cloud-based SaaS solutions, integrating complex systems, and leveraging IoT applications.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn here.

1. How do you see the role of technology evolving in patient care over the next decade?

Technology is reshaping our lives in profound ways. Just observe how teenagers seamlessly interact with their smartphones today, and you’ll witness the ever-evolving landscape of technology adoption.

In the healthcare sector, where patient care involves a complex web of interconnected teams and stakeholders, technology holds immense promise. From streamlining administrative processes to enhancing diagnostics and treatment, there are abundant opportunities for improvement.

However, staying abreast of rapid technological advancements poses a challenge. Healthcare professionals are already juggling demanding full-time roles, leaving little room for extensive research. This is precisely where larger organizations require trusted advisors—experts who can navigate new technology initiatives, assess their value, and determine whether they’re truly worthwhile.

To address this, formalized efforts and robust evaluation processes are essential. By systematically understanding and evaluating emerging technologies, organizations and caregivers can make informed decisions that benefit both patients and practitioners.

2. Which emerging technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on healthcare in the near future?

In the near future, AI is poised to have the most significant impact on the healthcare industry. As its adoption becomes more widespread, standardized models for AI usage will emerge, making it an intuitive and natural tool woven into our lives.

To illustrate, consider the analogy of tractors in the early 20th century. Just as tractors allowed farmers to cultivate more land with less effort, AI will enable healthcare professionals to effortlessly manage and analyze much more data and information than what they were able to manage individually. For instance, imagine a doctor diagnosing a patient’s symptoms. With access to an AI service that has reviewed every documented case, the accuracy of matching symptoms to patient issues will increase. 

Beyond diagnostics, intelligent services will transform multiple aspects throughout healthcare, including payments, insurance, front-office operations, and research. Across the board it will streamline and improve processes and communications. There are so many individual parties involved in healthcare services, and improved efficiencies in how they all work together will bring value.

3. What role does/will artificial intelligence play in your current and future projects?

We use AI internally and we expose the benefits of the AI services through our systems. 

Internally, we have found GitHub CoPilot (an AI coding assistant) to be a great tool for our developers. It has sped up development across the board, with only a short learning curve. It has also reduced training time for new developers to learn the custom libraries we have built. We also use AI services through meeting minutes, schedules, documentation summaries and in several other areas. We are adopting new processes based on these services, and we hardly even recognize that we are using it.

Using AI in the services we provide and software we develop is something we are continually working through. We are closely evaluating its use in several areas, but it is not the golden tool that fixes every challenge. For instance, on one project we evaluated using AI predictive services to work through staffing forecasts but found that the algorithms we had already built did this work accurately and in a simplified manner. So as attractive as it is to use a “shiny” new tool, we are careful to make sure that it is the best solution. 

One important area for us (the technology team) is to be able to describe the benefits and new functionality these smart services can provide, and how the business can benefit from using them. Ultimately the business needs to justify the investment into the new services and functionality, our job is to communicate to the business what the capabilities are and what we can accomplish.

4. Can you share an example of a major project or initiative in healthcare technology that inspired you?

I am excited and eagerly looking forward to the outcomes of all the work being done in training AI models on such vast sums of health-related data. I expect there to be so many new discoveries from the abilities to train and manage these models on such large data sets. I also expect that the value of data these systems produce will significantly accelerate as quantum computing becomes available at a commercial level, it will be really interesting to see what the healthcare environment looks like in the next 5 to 10 years.

5. How do you foster a culture of innovation within your technology teams?

The technology landscape is different today than it was yesterday. The pace of innovation, with new tools, services, processes and best practices is changing so rapidly that it takes the full team to monitor and recognize opportunities. There must be a continual sense of restlessness in each team member and a drive to be better tomorrow than today. Everyone must understand that if we do not innovate, we will wither and disappear. The importance of innovation starts at the top and must be supported throughout the entire organization.

Secondly, each member of the technology team must be confident in their role and their place on the team. Tomorrow will be different from today, which requires all of us to try new things and approaches to work. Everyone needs to be able to look ahead, push forward and try new things. Not every experiment will be successful, and that is OK. As a team, we are prudent and careful, but we do take calculated risks and try new things. We support and encourage experimentation, with our main requirement being a lot of communication. If something works well, we will evaluate rolling it into our services. If it does not work well, then we know what not to do. 

And finally, everyone must understand what their value is to the organization. When a developer understands that they are delivering functionality to the business rather than just checking off a Jira ticket in the latest development sprint, then they view their responsibilities to the team as something more than just delivering code. This is when the team is at its best, they are all looking for ways to innovate, create value and improve our (and our customer’s) business.

6. What are the key skills and qualities you believe are essential for a successful CTO in the healthcare tech sector?

To me, 3 key skills stand out as critical for success as a CTO.

Passion for technology: The CTO role is not a 9-5 job, where one shows up, completes items on a known checklist, and then goes home.  This is such a dynamic role, and one must have a solid grasp on the technical environment. This includes not only technology in itself, but also related systems and process. As I noted earlier, technology is changing so quickly that if one is not keeping up to date, then you will get left in the dust. There will be new technology tools available to be discovered, with new ways and processes to leverage them. This industry requires that you are fully committed, or you will not keep up. 

Care for others: a successful CTO is not isolated and will be judged by what his/her team is able to deliver. No single person should be a “bottleneck” within a team, and this is especially true for its leader. It is difficult for individuals to strive to be better and push the boundaries if they do not feel safe and supported. 

Structure: The CTO needs to create a sheltered environment for the technology team. There must be understood, structured and disciplined practices and processes to bring requests from the business to the tech team, or chaos will ensue. Business value for any technology project must be understood and estimated, so that the right projects can be funded and supported. Otherwise, technology investments will not be maximized. There are no shortages of technology projects to investigate, best practices will be to have a series of processes and steps so that the most meaningful and valuable projects are undertaken.