Alan, thanks for taking time to talk to us today. How about we start by you sharing with us a little bit of about yourself, your career, what got you here?

Alan Bugos: I’m an engineer at heart and by training, I did my degrees in Electrical Engineering. I was also in the Peace Corps many years ago which sort of drove my passion to think about technology, and how it is applicable and useful for people around the world. When I first moved into industry my background was telecommunications, advanced telecommunications, and did a lot there for many years and took the opportunity to learn and focus on internet-based technologies, which also led to my background in digital systems and thinking about how devices yield data from their sensors, and then how we can drive that into digital backend.

I.E., what’s come out of this now is the Internet of Things (IOT), and thinking about healthcare in health technologies the Internet of Things specific to healthcare is very exciting to me, and that’s sort of how I landed at Philips, to help drive the innovation in thinking around the technology, utilizing IOT, and other types of technologies to drive lower cost solutions for our subscribers.

Philips has been having its own transition from a general appliances company to more of a healthcare company over the last few years. What are the most exciting things you guys are doing at Philips these days?

Alan Bugos: Philips has been innovating in many different areas. Thinking about where our roots are in lighting, we have now invested heavily over the years around healthcare, health technologies and how they’re used globally for our subscribers, our customers. So, some of the things very specific to Philips home monitoring, in the last year we’ve been very busy in the technology and product front, we’ve developed new predictive analytics that runs in our HealthSuite Digital Platform, which is a new innovation.

We’ve launched a Triage Protocol, now known as Care Census, that helps to drive innovation and efficiency in our call centers. We’re looking at our next-gen development of our mobile PERS products, which are soon to launch, in addition to Med. Adherence, a new med management solution. And, we’ve also driven some innovation into the digital excellence around our Senior Living products, which we’re announcing here at LeadingAge this week.

The industry is changing, the regulatory perspective, and political perspective there is a lot of turmoil in the industry right now. What is your advice for the executives in this industry, how do they handle this situation?

Alan Bugos: I think there’s obviously a policy for the policymakers, to listen to their constituents, try to understand you know where their pain points are, and then how do we drive cost-efficiency and savings within the healthcare space. If it’s driven by technology or new solutions that’s where we are focused, but specifically for executives to listen to their subscribers, listen to their patients, listen to their customers, to  figure out what their needs are. If it’s a lower cost, higher quality solution, these are the kinds of things that go into the executive thinking and mindset.

What’s the biggest challenge that Philips is facing, what is it and how are you addressing it?

Alan Bugos: I would not specifically use the word challenge, but opportunity and that’s where we’re focused at Philips is to drive digital excellence, digital innovation, and thinking more about data, and how we leverage data. And that is not only our challenge but our opportunity and that’s where we’re focused. So, thinking about how we can leverage the massive amount of data we get from seniors living in the home, through our home healthcare, Senior Living solutions, our hospital, patient care systems, all this data is very useful.

And that led us to create the HealthSuite Digital Platform, where we could orchestrate data, where we can manage it, where we can connect it through an electronic medical record (EMR) capabilities; so thinking through the data of the analytics and the predictive analytics of this massive dataset is where we’re really focused on. And we’ve built the HealthSuite Digital Platform, we’ve brought in talent to think about data science and data analytics, and that’s where we’re going.

What other ways are you working with CAST, how is CAST helping in your mission?

Alan Bugos: I am a CAST Commissioner have been very focused on looking at forward technologies and innovations, what’s out there on the horizon, how we can use technology to help drive the innovation that we build in our products. And there have been many good examples of white papers and case studies, that have helped us think through the needs for senior safety, for example, data analytics which is now a new topic that CAST is starting to focus on and help drive new innovative thinking amongst the CAST members. And then presenting all that information out to the general population of technologists that are focused on healthcare, to help us really think through what are the next solutions we would leverage.

Young executives who want to follow in your footsteps, what’s an advice that you would give to them.

Alan Bugos: Really thinking through what is it that the customer wants, what are the problems they’re trying to solve, so ensuring that young executive really knows their customer and what to focus on, and to build the right product or solution or service or a device that is keeping in mind what the customer will actually want to buy and use, and help keep them healthy and protected. So, the customer centricity again is the key.

Alan, thank you so much for taking time to share your wonderful insights with us. Really appreciate it, have a wonderful rest of the day.