Physician-technologist Sarah Matt on leadership: ‘Solve real problems, work with good people’

Dr. Sarah Matt was near the end of her training to become a surgeon when she realized her skills in research and complex experimentation could magnify her impact on health care far beyond the patient’s bedside.

Matt pivoted to a career in tech.

She earned an MBA at the University of Texas-Austin. Vice president roles in product management, strategy and global health followed at medical software companies NexGen, ESO and Oracle. Matt was chief strategy officer at Sovato, a robotic surgery startup.

Her newest venture is the book, “The Borderless Healthcare Revolution: The Definitive Guide to Breaking Geographic Barriers Through Technology,” to be published Dec. 11 by Wiley. It is a playbook for clinicians, health system strategists and policymakers seeking to overcome physical, financial, cultural, digital and trust barriers to delivering care. The book includes real-world examples, from cath labs in Manhattan to community clinics in Kenya.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, Matt will be a keynote speaker at the annual conference of LifeSciences NY, a statewide association of biomedical innovators, at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown.

Matt grew up in Fayetteville, attended Fayetteville-Manlius schools and graduated from Cornell University and Upstate Medical University. After moving to Austin, “I pretty much vowed to never come back because at the time, Syracuse wasn’t doing so great,” she says.

Then the pandemic hit, “and the entire state of California moved to Austin.” Matt, husband Gus Lott and their four boys moved back to Fayetteville in 2020 to be near family. With improvements to air service, she can work for a California company from here, but wonders: “Can we build the innovation centers, the technology, the things that I crave and love and am great at here in Upstate New York?”

Matt is busy promoting the book, teaching first-year med students at Upstate, consulting with startups, mentoring entrepreneurs at UT-Austin and seeing patients at an Oneida charity clinic. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your decision to “scale yourself” by leaving medicine for the tech sector. Was there a specific turning point?

I will never leave medicine. For me, it was really about how could I make a huge impact in health care. And for me, it just wasn’t at the bedside. I still love seeing patients. I still do internal medicine at a clinic in Oneida. But when you’re in a hospital day in, day out, especially as a surgeon, your customers — your patients — they die. You have hard days. You don’t feel like you have a lot of control over what you can and cannot do. It can be difficult. The folks who do that, day in and day out, I’m excited that we have them. For me, it felt rather confining. How could I impact hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of patients on a daily basis? For me, it wasn’t at the bedside.

You see technology’s potential to improve health care access. Patients are often frustrated by it. How do we get better at making medical technology work for people?

I’ve been at NextGen, I’ve been at Oracle, several startups. From a product perspective, we are building new features to make things better. … You’re constantly trying to keep up with policy and regulation to stay certified or sellable, oftentimes at the expense of usability.

What providers, nurses, doctors and patients see is a very fragmented and siloed system. Maybe [it] made sense a long time ago because the various organizations making the tech were trying to keep it proprietary or grow a business. Today, the need for interoperability is more important than ever. So, you go to one hospital, you give them all your information, you go to what you think is the same hospital, but it’s the doctor’s office now, you give them all the same information and it happens again and again and again. Everyone has a terrible taste in their mouth around the tech side of health care.

I don’t think the tech per se is going to be our limiting factor moving forward. It’s the trust. We’ve broken trust with the health care system in lots of ways … Now with AI, providers, administrators and patients are nervous because if you can’t see and explain it, then how can you build that trust?

Where do you see AI making an impact on health care?

As a builder and technologist, the administrative aspects of health care are the low-hanging fruit. We still have lots of areas where we can do more automation and more predictive work: billing, prior authorization, all the crazy intake forms. It’s low risk, high reward, decreasing the burden on providers and administrators.

When we see all the shiny stuff online around health care AI, it’s often about diagnosing cancer or being an AI doctor. I appreciate the messaging and marketing in the industry; it is interesting and exciting and there is absolutely huge potential. However, I don’t think the technology is the hard part. It’s everything around it.

How do we make this safe? How do we make this something everyone trusts? How can we make this so that it can be adopted in a reasonable fashion? How can we make sure this is not inaccessible to certain populations? Have we invited the right people to the table to understand everyone’s needs?

You’ve talked about health care governance — leadership — not keeping up with technology. How would you fix it?

It’s important to have different voices coming in. … In health care, it’s not just doctors, hospitals, and nurses, it’s a whole ecosystem. There are people discovering pharmaceuticals, there are folks building AI for X, Y or Z. There are people in the waste management system. There are people all over this entire ecosystem that are contributing and we could learn from each other a lot more.

If we’re only looking inward toward our own team, our own little spot, our own little bubble, we’re only going to come up with so many solutions. Instead, [they should] push that barrier and ask: How is this being done in other industries? How would a vendor do this? How would the nurses do this differently than the doctors? There are lots of thoughts that might come up that would be different and perhaps better.

Were you in leadership roles growing up? Who and what influenced you in developing your leadership abilities?

I grew up here in Fayetteville. My parents [Mark and Cheryl Matt] still live here in the village. I went to F-M schools. I was in a ton of clubs. I was on a ton of sports teams. I had frizzy hair, I got made fun of and took the bus. I had roles on the Science Olympiad team and I was in school play. I did lead in different ways, for sure.

I am the first doctor in my family. From a health care leadership perspective, I didn’t have a ton of great models, but my mother was a postmaster, at a time and a field where you didn’t see a lot of women lead. She excelled to very high levels in the U.S. Postal Service. I saw her put in the work and manage lots of different kinds of people.

You’ve worked at big companies and startups. Do you have a theory of leadership that applies to both?

In any organization, solve real problems, work with good people. That’s ultimately my path to career happiness. Wherever I go, I want to do something impactful. Teams that are doing impactful work [tend to work] harder, work together, do better work.

As a manager or leader, understand and message why your team’s work is so important, whether that’s to a project, to a greater cause. The vision is necessary. I saw this a lot, especially when I was at Oracle. Engineers who knew that health care was a hot place to be didn’t quite understand why it was so important because their only experience with the health care system was being born in a hospital. How could you help them understand the impact they were making, how important this work was, how real people were going to be positively impacted from a diagnosis perspective, from an ease of access perspective?

I enjoy leading people because I like people and I like to see people grow. I’m not afraid of not being the smartest person in the room and I love to grow myself. By helping others grow, they’re helping me grow.

Do you consider yourself a visionary? Do you see things other people don’t?

Visionary is a big term. I like to think that I’m a systems thinker. It’s easy for folks to get stuck looking at the tree instead of the forest. One of my superpowers is seeing how things are connected and asking why, again and again, even if it’s just in my mind.

How does a leader spark innovation in an organization?

By allowing people to try and fail. And I know that sounds very cliche, but if there’s no room for experimentation, no room for new ideas, you’re not going to get anything new. If there’s room for real discussion, real debate and for trying actually new things, then you’re going to spark innovation. But as a leader, you have to make space for it. It has to be intentional.

What’s the best piece of advice that a parent, a mentor or a boss ever gave to you?

Just say “yes.” When given an interesting opportunity, instead of thinking about all the reasons why you shouldn’t do it or can’t do it or are not the right person to do it, just a “yes.”

What advice would you give for effective leadership, especially for a new leader or for someone aspiring to take on leadership responsibilities?

Communication is the biggest thing. If you’re working with people, for people or have people working for you, understanding them as people is very important. Everyone who works for me, I’d love to know a little bit more about them, because then we have more in common, then we can have more flexibility when they’re having a crisis or if there’s a problem.

Make deeper relationships with colleagues. Collaboration and trust are the new currency in business. Relationships matter. They’re what’s going to get you your next job, they’re what’s going to get you your next deal, and they’re what’s going to keep you in an industry, out of an industry, promoted or not promoted. Building those relationships is absolutely the key to doing all of that. …

Anyone who says they’re a good leader probably has a blind spot. As a leader, you should always be evolving in some fashion because you’ve never figured it out. You’ll always have new employees, you’ll always have new projects, you’ll always have new barriers, forces that will be coming at you. If you continue to lead the exact same way every day, year after year, you’re going to become the problem.

What career advice would you give a young person starting out?

I struggle with how to give advice to high school kids, college kids, because the world is changing so fast. Being willing to learn new things, to pivot, to be OK with uncertainty and to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable are really important traits right now. When I was younger, I felt like I could plan 10 years in advance and now I’m just looking at the next six months ahead of me. The tech is going to evolve at an exponential rate; the political environment is changing at an exponential pace; the economy is changing at an exponential pace and they’re all connected. What are the opportunities going to be in six months? I don’t really know. But I do know that I could probably learn. And I do know that I have a lot of different skills.

No matter what you’re doing, if it’s something that you enjoy, you’ll always find a place to monetize that and serve yourself in some fashion. If you’re doing things you hate, it’s not going to work out well for anybody. Find what you like and keep learning.

You’ve lived in big cities and came back to Central New York. Why do you stay?

I came here for my family, I stayed here for me.

What I love about the Syracuse area and Upstate New York is that I can actually form community. In large cities where I’ve lived in the past, you could go for days without seeing someone you knew if you weren’t intentional about it. Everyone’s all over the place. They’re 10 miles away, but they’re several hours away. Here, I feel like I have the ability to be a part of events in the community. I have the ability to be a mile from Target. I have the ability to enjoy the city and enjoy the community.

Austin is a great example. Everyone was like, you must be seeing music and this and that. I have four little kids. We’re not going anywhere! I have to park, I have to go through crowds. It became inaccessible to families. Here, I know there are things going on and I know I’ll be able to park a couple blocks that way and it’s no problem. I appreciate that.

If I handed you a magic wand, what is the one thing you change about Syracuse?

I see some of the other big cities in Upstate New York, like Rochester and Buffalo, growing at a bit more rapid pace from an innovation perspective, from a technology perspective. I hope that Syracuse finds ways to reduce unemployment for people at all levels. My concern, especially with the way the economy is going right now throughout the United States, is that folks that are in lower income areas will continue to have less. And if we could provide ways for everyone have more, it would bring more to Syracuse.

There are a lot of people like me who are happy to be here and would rather not live in a big city. How can we bring that expertise together and incentivize other people to come to the area to build something interesting for the future?

The weekly “Conversation on Leadership” features Q&A interviews about leadership, success and innovation. Next week: Barb Karper, assistant vice president of the Grace Center for Faith and Community at Le Moyne College.

To suggest a candidate for Conversations on Leadership, email Marie Morelli at mmorelli@syracuse.com. Read previous entries in the series.