AI in Healthcare: Why Humans Still Matter with Brandon Fertig, Senior Manager at Philips | Ep. 62

People are afraid of AI taking their job, but if you can learn to use AI to your benefit, learn to prompt it properly, set up your custom GPT, whatever you need to do, it will help you add more value to whoever you're trying to add the value to as well. Grab it to AI because it ain't going nowhere. It's only going to get bigger. Don't want to get so good at AI that I'm irreplaceable. And if you're putting quality training in, you're going to get quality output out of it. If you don't have any training on a situation, you're probably not going to get any output from it, and your Waymo is going to just go back and forth in the middle of the street. I think it comes back to something where you can never remove it, it's the human factors. Leaning so heavily into AI that we start missing the whole point of it in the first place is to build in patient safety and quality. Cybersecurity is evidence of quality code. We'll stop. Hello and welcome back to the Med Device Cyber Podcast. Today we're going to take you down a journey to see where the intersection of healthcare, cybersecurity, and some military experience can come in to tie everything together. I'm joined here by our co-host, Christian Espinosa, and we have a very special guest, Brandon Ferdig. Brandon, I'll turn it over to you to introduce yourself here. Hey, thanks, Trevor. I'm really glad to have made this connection. Christian and I met at MedTech World. So, I want to give them a plug for their ability to connect people of like-minded backgrounds and create and generate excitement around a lot of the work that we do. Christian and I kind of talked at some MedTech conference in San Diego, and I know we've talked online about the MedTech World Conference. And unfortunately, for me, that remained remote due to the government shutdown and some of the nuances of what happened last year. So, I was trying to make it out to the World Conference, but I'm going to try to do that again very soon. Christian, as you guys asked me to be here today, my background is I did 20 years in the Air Force. I started off in IT. So Christian and I share, I think, an appreciation for the military. When we kind of started cutting our teeth, networks were in their infancy. They were just coming out of like a lot of things were still text-based, especially in the military. ADA, you know, we used ADA for programming, or a lot of government programming, things of that nature. And they were the forefront of setting up domains, DMZs, firewalls. Security was a huge thing that everybody was projecting was going to be a huge job for everybody, and it was, and it is today. So, cutting my teeth on that really gave me an opportunity to see a broader scope of what happens behind the scenes. As you get into leadership, as you get into management, you have a brief perspective of what it takes to get projects running, and security is always a major factor. So, when Christian and I discuss this podcast, I think we both found that we're going to have a lot to talk about. I'm very excited to be here, so, thanks for having. Well, thanks for joining. Where are you coming from today, Brandon? Yes, I work remotely. So, I do like to travel, having been to 60 countries for the Air Force, but also for my own enjoyment. I travel extensively, but today I'm coming from Arkansas. I set up camp here mainly because I used to teach here at the C-130 school. I used to fly C-130s in the Air Force and coming here, it was based on a network need, but now that I've been here, we've made huge leaps and bounds in the medical space here, and that actually was a secondary effect of me just being in a project management role and also being central to the whole country. Arkansas is an affordable place to live, has a lot going for it. Big growth, big vision here, and also I think people are looking to find better ways to do business and save money, and Arkansas has been really hot for that right now. A lot of business moving in here - technology, AI businesses, security, and healthcare are all huge right now in the metro Little Rock area, and I just happen to be in the right place at the right time. So, come to you from the Midwest, kind of considered South and West of America. It allows me to get on a plane and jump anywhere I need to be in a moment's notice, and it's really flexible. So, we use the first springboard, and we love living here. Yeah, awesome. I graduated high school in Arkansas. I moved to Arkansas when I was 12 from California. Small world. And then I moved to a small town northwest Arkansas called Clarkville. It was actually called Knoxville. Then I moved to that which had 800 people in it and I developed a thick southern accent. It took me a year to get rid of that accent when I went to college. People made fun of my accent at the Air Force Academy quite a bit, but I got rid of it. I think I got rid of it. Every now and then it shows up, especially if I go back to Arkansas. Yeah, I tend to kind of get around my audience. I try not to. It's not like you're making fun of the accent, but you kind of get plugged into what people are talking like. And I'm from the Northeast, I'm originally from Pittsburgh. So, a lot of the yinzers will come out every now and then about, you know, a crick or a washcloth as a washcloth. It's just little things like roof and roof. You know, America's so great like that, you can go anywhere and you'll hear a little bit of somewhere somebody's from. But the Air Force kind of got rid of that for me. Yeah, the Air Force got rid of it for me too. My wife's mother is from Arkansas, and she says 'washer', the dishwasher, you know, 'dishwasher'. That is the proper way. Right. Well, cool. And thanks for your service. I know you flew for a while as well as did cybersecurity in the Air Force, is that right? Yeah, I had a really crazy beginning. It really started off being. My brother was computers, he's a savant, he's one of the smartest people I've ever met, and he kind of opened the door for me when he got out of high school to be like, hey, you know, this is what I'm getting into, and it's huge. So, it was again somebody leading and I was willing to follow, and it started with my brother. So, grew up kind of very humble means, kind of the American story, you know, at low-income housing and had a single mom, but I didn't have a lot of opportunity. The Air Force gave me that, and I had a brother who was in IT. So those two came together, and then I needed to have a way to move forward and to make something of my life, and it gave me everything. It really did. So you starting off, it was really eye-opening as to what you can get into if you have the time and the desire to put that work into it. I think anybody can do it, but I think some people do have a knack for it. It came in the family. So my brother kind of opened that door for me, and then I started pursuing college, and then college led to 9/11. 9/11, I joined the military straight after that, I just felt like I needed to go. And so, in the first four years, I built out domains in Charleston, South Carolina. I was then in Korea for a year and built out in geographically separated units that came with VPN work. That came with getting knowledge on virtual private networks and building LANs and WANs and how those affected you and security-wise, especially in Korea, and this is early 2000s. So, a lot of stuff was just uncoordinated, there was no quality management system behind it. So, a lot of the things we made up were you know, it was grassroots comms guys coming in there and be like, hey, I'm just a computer guy, but this is what I think we should do, and the Air Force would be like, okay. So, nobody was anywhere was really all that well coordinated in the beginning years. And then, eventually, we centralized to Scott Air Force Base out of Illinois, and Scott Air Force Base then started getting smart on this, like we need to, we need to have every domain look the same so that everything was understood, and you could teach your workforce to work around that. Which is ironic. I work teaching a workforce now for medtech. But, you know, those early years, we were making it up as we were going, Trevor, Christian, you know, because we didn't have a set of standards, which I thought, you know, when you're young, you're like, I don't really feel like I'm bringing a lot of value here. But in hindsight, those were my formative years. It was like working in the unknown. So, I started off that way, and then aviation kind of came into my knowledge about, you know, you can fly in the Air Force. I wasn't an officer, so I didn't think that was, I didn't want to go back to school right away for that. I was more IT driven, more management driven. So, I started flying in the Air Force as an enlisted member, and when I started doing that, it took me all over the world. It taught me how to, you know, be dynamic and to learn. Went on to get my bachelor's and master's, and I think the aircrew world gave me confidence that I didn't maybe didn't, wasn't going to get in an office. So, it really kind of developed me over time. It was like, okay, I got the background, I've got this management style, and then it grew me to who I was, and then when I got out of the military, Philips picked me right up. They were like, yeah, you have all these skills we need. Project management is where you're at. So again, I followed what people were telling me and listened very carefully to what people were telling me. So the military skills helped you get into medtech. It did. It did. It paved the whole way. Cool. And you're also part of MedTech Vets as well, is that right? Yeah, and the MedTech Vets was really my way to give back. So as I transitioned out of the military, kind of give you maybe some more of that story. When I came out, I knew that for me it was kind of really a weird time. We, I came in right after 9/11 and we left Afghanistan in 2021, which is almost a 20-year anniversary and that was the 20 years I served. So, you know, in the military you can, you can take a full retirement at 20 years. So, I knew how much time I had left, and about two years before I separated, I started to really key in on what was important to me. I had a master's degree. In fact, only 8% of the Air Force at the time I looked that statistic up, I think they did a census in like 2017, that only 0.08% of the Air Force actually had a masters. So, I was like, well, man, I'm bringing a lot of value. I think there's something else I need to be looking at. And then that confidence started to come, and then I got my PMP, and then Philips was kind of that transition period where it was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. But I had a brother who worked at Philips, again, the same guy who kind of gave me that confidence, that older brother, said, hey, why don't you come and look over here? And you know, I wasn't medical, that I think that's one thing we need to tell our audience is that you don't necessarily have to be medical to work in IT and in medtech, because the transition for you is, can you lead a team? Can you be a problem solver? That's the huge one. Can you talk the talk? Can you understand complex problems and kind of understand what your customers are going through? And if you can make all those things happen and then get in an interview where you explain what you would do, people are going to see your value right away. So, I got picked up within three weeks of retirement. So, I had a retirement and then I was like, okay, let's go. And then Philips hired me in and gave me my first shot. I've given them the last four years because of that. There's discipline that comes at Philips with when you get in there, you appreciate, especially from a military perspective, someone gave you your first shot, and I gave them everything, and they've taken good care of me since then. So, there's been a promotion in there, there's been a lot of exciting work, and then I just generally on the outside I try to bring that same value to MedTech Vets to give back to veterans, to give back to others, raise money for veterans by climbing Kilimanjaro last year, and just doing what I, I just know that I enjoy, and just being myself, and those things all came together at Philips. That's awesome. Trevor just made, or was promoted, I don't know when it was, Trevor, to COO, so he's a couple months back. Yeah. So he's in the hot seat with leadership and everything else. So what, what do you think, Trevor, like, a lot of what Brandon was saying about those skills you have to learn as a leader and all that to bring to the table? What have you, with the transition to COO, what have you found? I found that I probably could have used some of those skills and the discipline picked up in the Air Force. I did not go down that path, so it feels like at some points flying a little bit blind, but I think that, you know, going up through a process, going up through a company, different at the enterprise level and at the startup level, but being able to see your own growth and control that, I think, is a really powerful thing. And even expanding past from before being hands-on keyboard, executing most of the tasks that we were doing up to this point, has given me a bit of a perspective where I understand where the process came from. I've seen it, I've been part of it for so long that I think it's given me a bit of a good insight where I'm trying to translate those skills, and the rest of the skills becoming an effective COO, that's going to be a work in progress, but trying to get a little better at it every day. Yeah. In our company, I don't know how many we got, maybe, I don't know, like five or six veterans, I think. One from the British Army, so he's a little bit different, but yeah, I think veterans bring a certain unique discipline to the workforce, and they're used to working under pressure, and then most of the time they stay fairly calm. I don't know, what do you think about, is that true, Trevor, based on the veterans we have in our company? I think so. And you know, for an example, our director of project management is a veteran, and she's able to proceduralize and take any of the questions or any of the gaps out of a process to an incredible effectiveness. And so if there's ever any question, how do we do this? You know, where's the wiggle room there? Those questions go away. And that is such an important skill, I think, especially within the project management realm. And it's really important, it's really effective to see. I don't think that it's an easy skill to have either. Understanding how to poke the holes in a process, it's not going to be an intuitive thing. Just following a process and saying,