Mike Alkire: President of Premier, Inc (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis chief Medical Officer Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government.

And they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well. I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Vani. And today on Raise the line, I'm happy to be joined by Mike Alker, who's president of Premier Incorporated, which helps more than 4000 hospitals and health systems and 100s of thousands of providers improve efficiency and clinical outcomes through supply chain management, pharmacy integration and other strategies.

I would love to hear in your own words about your background and what led you to, to now leading Premier, you know, it's interesting.

So, um I studied computer science in undergrad and then went to business school. Uh and then I got out and worked for Deloitte.

One of my first projects was actually building out the Medicaid system for the state of uh of Arizona. Uh And so obviously that uh continued to uh uh you know, I guess focused my interest in the health care.

And then II left, uh when I left Deloitte, I went to Cap Jim and I kept Jim and I in young. And at that point, II took on more uh higher level roles in terms of, you know, turning business turnarounds.

We did a lot of global supply chain work and those kinds of things. And so when Premier came looking for, you know, some help in terms of uh some turnaround capabilities and some supply chain expertise.

It was really a, a really natural fit for me because Premier is so important in terms of our ability to get access to products for our healthcare systems and also the data and the analytics that we have to help our healthcare systems drive improvements.

Obviously my computer science history uh in, in building out benchmarks and, and artificial intelligence and machine learning to help drive improvements and really to sort of codify or hardwire, you know, how you standardize care and those kinds of things.

I II guess all of that sort of, you know, led to where I am today and, and the the business that, you know, Premier focuses on as a, as an organization, what advice would you give to current or future healthcare professionals considering, you know, staying in healthcare or, or uh pursuing their uh chosen career in healthcare?

Shiv II love the question. So I've always learned, you know, I I've gotten by with my leadership style that uh you know, it involves a couple of words, one is being courageous, the other is being humble, you know, being humble in terms of being open to new ideas and truly listening, not, not listening with an ear to respond, but truly listening.

And then trying to understand what, you know, the other party is actually talking about. So humble and humility is, is number one courage is, you know, it's, it's taking the bold actions, it's persevering when it gets tough, you know, it's following your dreams.

And so, you know, those are the kinds of things that, you know, II sort of think about, I've, I've also added, you know, one last word with all these issues that are happening in our communities around, you know, social injustice and, and you know, uh things of that nature and that's humanity.

You know, we've got to stop this labeling people. We've got to humanity, to me means treat everybody as an individual, don't label somebody because of what you think.

There's an old adage. You know, you can't tell a book by its cover.

Well, let's go back to that old adage and truly appreciate every individual as a unique human. Uh And I think uh if we do that, um we're gonna be far better off in the future.

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