Health Tech: Michael Bond Of Juno Health On How Their Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With David Leichner

Personalization: The solution should have the ability to be personalized to individual customers.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Bond.

Michael Bond, vice president of sales and marketing at Juno Health, a division of DSS, Inc., has a long history working in the hospital and healthcare industry. Through his deep experience with sales and working directly with executives, nurses, and physicians at hospitals, he is able to help these organizations deliver on their mission. Now, in his role at Juno Health, he works to build, develop, motivate, and retain the company’s salesforce while also optimizing processes and tools, territory and account strategy, brand development, and executive presentations.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

Auburn University is a big part of my life. My father was a history professor there for 30 years, my mother has two degrees from there, and I met my wife and earned an MBA there. My daughter is currently a junior at Auburn. Growing up in the South, I think it’s very different from what somebody who hasn’t been there would expect. I’ve traveled around the United States and around the world, and there’s nothing like it. There is an openness to the community, and you just feel immediately welcome. I lived in Atlanta for 27 years and recently relocated back to Auburn. It feels like a full circle.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Being a salesperson, the most interesting and most rewarding thing was the gratitude of selling a product and seeing the value it can bring to a client. You believe in it, and then it gets adopted. It benefits patients and clinicians, and you see the full circle of the outcomes that you hoped they would get. That was really rewarding because I could see I was making a difference.

For example, an electronic health record (EHR) incentive program, also known as Meaningful Use, was introduced in 2011 by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. These guidelines meant that a huge amount of hospitals were required to upgrade from paper-based to electronic records. That was a big culture change, and many physicians did not want to change from the way they were used to doing things. It was rewarding for me to be the person to educate them and show why there really is value in shifting to an EHR and how it is going to benefit patients.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There have been a lot of people who helped me along the way, but my mother was probably the most influential. She was an educator for most of her life but then decided to move into business and actually was the president of a nonprofit organization that did a lot of good work with the United States Information Agency. As a mother, she was always there for me, but she also was there whenever I needed professional advice. In fact, she gave me one of my first jobs, which helped me develop skills that I still use today.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

My dad always said, “A job’s not worth doing if you’re not going to do it right.” I modeled my career on that advice. Sometimes the right way is the hard way, and taking your time, thinking it through, and really understanding your end goal is important — as is being able to look back and say you made the right decision and put in the work that needed to be done.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Perseverance: Early in my career, I was at a company that was acquired by a larger corporation. There were some challenges with that acquisition, and a lot of things were in question. I was able to stay the course, and that perseverance has helped over the years. The truth is, there are a lot of changes that are going to happen throughout your career. How you weather those changes will shape your path going forward.

I read the book Who Moved My Cheese?, which is about whether you are going to “hem and haw” (the names of two characters in the book) or go after your “cheese,” which symbolizes the things you really want in life. I learned early on that your “cheese” is going to move all the time, and you have to figure out who you’re going to be and what you want to be. You have to be willing to change and deal with that change.

2. Emotional Maturity: This is also related to how you handle changes in life. You can’t get too high when things are great, and you can’t get too low when things are bad. If you stay more even-keeled and stay strong with your morals, you can make better decisions and not deviate from the best path.

3. Understanding That People Will Make Mistakes: You have to trust people to do what they say they’re going to do but also understand that they might fail. They’re going to make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. I have failed. Fortunately, I was trusted to learn from those mistakes and to come back and do better. You have to trust that the people you work with are going to turn it around and improve and achieve better results than they did the first time around.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the technology or medical devices that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

We aim to provide affordable, user-friendly electronic health record technology built on modern web and cloud infrastructure to help hospitals overcome significant clinician and CEO burnout. Out-of-date systems simply do not provide the necessary support to clinicians and can also result in worse patient outcomes.

How do you think your technology can address this?

We are providing EHR software to acute care hospitals, mental health facilities, and public health facilities in the U.S. The problem of clinician burnout, which has translated to CEO and leadership burnout within our healthcare system, started before COVID but was really exacerbated during COVID.

We have developed a solution that is very personalizable. It’s very easy to use. It’s leveraging 21st-century technologies. It’s not built on backbones that are 40-plus years old; a lot of the EHRs that are out there in the market today are built on 40-year-old technology.

By building something in the last four years, we’re able to leverage advanced tools that we see regularly in other industries. Think about banking and how you can do everything on your phone. Our goal was to take something that’s easy to use and put that into the healthcare environment. As a result, we came up with a solution so that clinicians who are struggling, doing a full day of work, and then having to spend two or three hours a day doing additional documentation no longer have to be burdened with that.

Clinicians can use our solution to be more efficient, which makes them happier and want to stay in their roles. Then, from a CEO’s perspective, they don’t have to constantly hire and rehire, pay contract wages, and strain their bottom line. Also, because our EHR solution is newer, it is easier to configure and costs substantially less. Having an affordable EHR solution that’s personalizable has a significant impact on clinicians because, otherwise, they’re struggling.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I have been most affected by seeing the negative impact that older technologies can have on a health system and then how that trickles down to the patient and the community. This is both as a caregiver for family members and also in my professional career.

If you think about it, if your nurses and clinicians are not happy when you go into a hospital, you’re not going to get great care. That’s going to trickle down to our community and our family members who are in the health system. They’re not going to get the care that they really deserve. We’re very passionate about how we can improve that. I have family members, parents, that are in the health system, and it’s tough. It’s dysfunctional and, too often, it’s paper-based.

Decisions that are being made are not always in the best interest of the patient and the family. And if you don’t really understand healthcare, it’s hard to navigate. And I feel for those patients and families who have to deal with that. Even with the experience I have, I sometimes have trouble navigating today’s health systems and the redundancy that’s out there. So, finding a company like Juno Health that has developed a solution that has the potential to change all of that is really exciting.

How do you think this might change the world?

If everybody were using software that drove better outcomes, was more affordable, and was built on today’s capabilities, the entire healthcare process could be improved. That means better outcomes for our patients and lower costs, which is particularly important since the United States’ national health expenditure grew to $4.9 trillion in 2023 and is only continuing to grow, while the quality of care is much lower than in other countries.

There’s clearly a lot of opportunity for improvement, and from what I have seen, the larger companies that are providing EHRs don’t seem to care. There are folks who own those companies that have islands in Maui that are billionaires, and that just doesn’t seem right to us. Being able to change that and driving down the costs that would help patients would make a big impact.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Artificial intelligence is going everywhere. From a healthcare perspective, how that is incorporated and how it is managed is going to be an ongoing discussion. As I said before, there are some good benefits that will help clinicians and physicians do their documentation much faster using safe technology, which will also benefit patients.

However, we have to have an open mind but not get ahead of ourselves and not take it too far. We have to make sure that we are actually supporting the practice of medicine, led by people who have gone through eight-plus years of training and have been in the field for years. As long as we keep that human interaction as a critical part of the technology, I think we’ll be OK.

Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

1. Personalization: The solution should have the ability to be personalized to individual customers.

2. Affordability: Make sure the technology is accessible and affordable.

3. Market Research: Make sure there is a need in the market.

4. Competitive Analysis: Differentiate your technology from the competition.

5. Vision for the Future: Understand where the industry is going.

When I think about the evolution of Juno Health’s EHR technology and how we applied these elements to our product development, we started by gathering people for our team who already had experience with the EHR technologies at the time. We then took that deep knowledge and asked several important questions:

How can we do things better in ways that address the challenges the industry is currently facing?

How do we create a solution that can be personalized to address the specific needs of each healthcare facility?

How do we make something that is affordable enough that cash-strapped hospitals could still implement the technology and enjoy its benefits?

How do we make something that clinicians actually want to use?

Asking those fundamental questions helped us understand our end goal, shape our strategic imperative, and differentiate ourselves from what is out there. When you look at those pillars, you’ll see there is not something quite like what we have on the market today. We also incorporated advanced technology, such as FHIR APIs and codification, as core parts of our database and our solution from the start, while other vendors with older technology have to build mapping tables or retrofit the product to have those same elements.

The main takeaway is: If you’re going to build something, you want to start with the new technology but then also look at where that industry is going. We took the forward-thinking approach of building something for the future — not just for today — based on where we think healthcare is going. That final step of looking to the future is important to consider when you want your technology to continue to make an impact on your industry for years to come.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

When you’re thinking about careers and what you want to do in life, obviously, there has to be a financial component to it. But, I think you also have to have something that gives you gratification, gives you satisfaction, and pulls at your heart, knowing that you’re doing something good — that you’re helping people.

I would encourage young people to find something where they can make money but also make a positive impact. Lifting people up is always something I feel really strongly about. You’re going to have a good life if you can combine those two things together.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I would probably say King Charles. My family goes back to the United Kingdom. I’ve been doing a lot of family history research and found out that I’m related to Henry VIII and Henry VII. I would love to sit down with the current king and just chat about history.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

The best way to follow me is via my LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-g-bond/

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.