Senthil Kumaran - AI & Personalized Healthcare

In this episode, we talk with Senthil Kumaran, CIO/CTO for Virtuwell, a HealthPartners company. He is part of HealthPartners AI and Machine Learning and Enterprise architecture group and a key contributor to the HIPPA/HITEC security and a conference presenter on Predictive Data Analytics, Rules, and Web/Mobile initiatives.

In this episode, we talk about the US Healthcare system and how AI is being used to provide better customer experience, better health outcomes for a lower cost.

"40 years ago, healthcare we 4% of GDP. Now it's 19% of our GDP... The US is rated at number 20 in the world for Healthcare." - Senthil Kumaran

Topics covered:

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Senthil Kumaran : 0:00

Dog you you have to show the empathy to the patient. Then if you go look at today's clinics, most of the doctor time is spent in front of the computer screen and the rabbit like with the patient. I'm trying with a traditional clinic. Right? And so that has to change.

AI Announcer : 0:20

Welcome to the conversations on applied AI podcast where Justin Grammens and the team at emerging technologies North talk with experts in the field of artificial intelligence and deep learning. In each episode, we cut through the hype and dive into how these technologies are being applied to real world problems today. We hope that you find this episode educational and applicable to your industry and connect with us to learn more about our organization at applied ai.mn. Enjoy.

Justin Grammens : 0:50

Welcome everyone to the conversations on applied AI podcast this week. We're lucky enough to have sento kumaran Join us the CIO CTO of virtual For an online medical clinic that provides 24, seven access friendly certified nurse practitioners for common conditions, as you might suspect, they've been using AI and machine learning in a number of ways across their business. And we're thrilled to have him here today to talk not only about the applications of AI, but learn more about his career and current trends in the industry. So welcome, Seto.

Senthil Kumaran : 1:18

Thank you, Justin. Thanks for having me. Yes. Awesome.

Justin Grammens : 1:21

So just as a sort of brief introduction, I guess maybe you want to tell us a little bit about maybe your background, you know, you have any hobbies or sort of things on a personal side that you enjoy doing?

Senthil Kumaran : 1:30

For sure. So vertebrae start. From the beginning, my dad wanted me to become a doc, because I was the studious one in my family. Then the first time when I saw blood, I fainted. So they're in dollars hopes, so then I chose engineering. I grew up in South India plays out of control called euro play small town, went to engineering over there. I did Electronics and Communication. Then immediately afterwards, I did masters and In engineering and applied electronics, believe it or not, I did the microprocessor based programming that I started my career and then small talk and c++. Then I landed a job at Infosys. Back then it was a pretty small firm. So I was like employee number 600, or something like that nice. And I started in Bangalore, and they were just moving to their new office. And from Infosys, I got exposed to Java. And that's why I landed that opportunity at IBM consulting, took a flight all the way from Bangalore landed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa or of all places. IBM put me out there in a project at a publishing company that I had some systems after experience plus Java. So that's how I started my career. Then I came here in two twin cities 20 years ago, and I've consulted a lot of companies around here in Twin Cities, right from Ilex checks to call sun angle to travel to read tech to UnitedHealth Group different divisions of UnitedHealth Group and then from The last 10 plus years I'm at virtual Cool,

Justin Grammens : 3:03

cool, very good. In your consulting is just kind of curious with a lot of it in Java didn't did. Did you find that to be sort of the language of choice?

Senthil Kumaran : 3:09

Yep. Yep. Yep. So it was mostly Java. Then I moved on to a lot of front end tech, some mostly team leading building a team. I like lots of hands on different websites around different Twin Cities companies.

Justin Grammens : 3:24

Cool. Yeah, I've I've told people I mean, I think the smartest thing I did was learn Java, in the sort of mid to late 90s. When it first came out. It's just a great sort of, well, a language to learn. So it's it's all you know, object oriented, but it just it spans so many different industries. So it's really helped me out in my career. Some of you probably saw this name,

Senthil Kumaran : 3:41

for sure.

Justin Grammens : 3:43

So now the new hot term is AI. Right? Yeah. So everyone wants to learn AI maybe just like they everyone wanted to learn Java back in the early days. Everyone's focused on the sort of AI thing and I'm curious, maybe, like, how do you define AI for people that are outside of the field? Idea sort of a layman's terminology on sort of what it is? How would you give my elevator pitch?

Senthil Kumaran : 4:05

This is a life event Before we discuss AI. So if you really look at it, mid 90s to late 90s is when the web came in. So a lot of the top five person companies even amazing at the time, they all had some kind of a precedent. And then everybody else woke up in year 2000 that, oh, we all need a.com actually.com bust happened nothing. But the next 10 years was that late 2017 timeframe, mobile photography, picking up up top 5% of companies paid attention to that then the rest of us after 2020 woke up and said like, oh, it is mobile first. So same thing happened in 2016 17 ai and then Googles and Amazons and Netflix and Facebook. They all ventured in and they are making a huge dough right now. And then rest of us are waking up in year 2020. So every 10 years, this is my story. Every 10 years, there is some new tech isn't it? web was 2000 to 2010. Everybody now has a website, isn't it? Then it was all mobile first. Now it's going to be AI first. Okay? Did you don't have to be a technology company, you have to have some kind of a value add for your customers enhance your customer engagement in AI is the play. So it's a new revenue generation to definitely a cost reduction operational efficiency tech too. So you have to get your feet dirty and sturdy. Get on it. I know a lot of people talk about, oh, it's machines that long. It's going to replace every one of us if loans or tabs and what's going to happen. I think Hollywood has some role to play on that I guess. But if you really look at it, ai to me is the next tech that everybody has to get their hands dirty. And when is the next 10 years is where your dough is going to be made. That's what I believe.

Justin Grammens : 5:57

Do you view that as coming out of just You know, there have been people that have been doing data analytics, you know, there's been dashboards and reporting. There's been all this sort of stuff that's been happening for for quite some time. But, you know, do you think this sort of came out of that this AI x or came out of that field? Or is it a fresh new approach?

Senthil Kumaran : 6:16

Absolutely no, was with the predictive algorithms, there are so many. And then the cloud infrastructure made us achieve all of our data dreams before the data was all in different silos, it took quite a bit of time to like, get everything in one place. Now we have some kind of a cloud environment where you can make it the Data Liberation, and then you can do a lot more analysis and predictions and prescriptions with it. So that's that's why it does become a lot easier today, compared to like 1015 years ago. That's what I believe, isn't it? Like previously that the hardware was a huge challenge? Right and not knowing that that has been liberated. So anybody can do anything. Yeah. So look at the kaggle competitions. See folks are making difference right now all around the world. And so that kind of liberation is definitely helping the community.

Justin Grammens : 7:16

Totally, totally. Yeah, it feels like there's sort of a I guess another word is commoditization things become commoditized. So, like, you say, websites, everyone has a website, because you can literally start up a website for next to nothing. Yes, yeah, mobile is becoming more and more commoditized. Everyone has an app now these days grow now. And, and now anyone can spin up a cloud instance and do whatever they need pretty quickly. It's a commodity.

Senthil Kumaran : 7:39

I still remember. Mid 90s. It was like $40 to do some kind of transactions. So now the tech it's been liberated, isn't it? Everybody can like pick up their phone and like, just do all these financial transactions and no seconds without any fee. And that's what the software and hardware is goddess here.

Justin Grammens : 8:00

So how are you guys then using this new tech ed virtual? If you could speak a little bit about that, you know, or even in the healthcare industry in general, sort of what are what are you seeing?

Senthil Kumaran : 8:10

In general, what I see is that the the, you have to get to some kind of personalized healthcare, definitely the cost is increasing. So the idea behind virtual is giving a better consumer experience. And also better health outcome for the patients with some kind of an improved care provider experience. If you go look at some of the leading hospitals right now, their providers, I mean, when I say providers, it's the physicians and nurse practitioners and clinicians and physician assistants and nurses who work in the system. So all these care provider experience are not all that great, a lot of leading hospitals. So virtual, we want to turn not only for a better consumer experience, but also better health outcome and also good care provider experience and all of this at a lower cost of care because what I believe Leave is when we look at it 40 years ago, I think our healthcare was 5% or 4% of our GDP. And right now it's closer to 20% of our GDP, our 19. And then if you look at a lot of other numbers, we are not the number one healthcare system in the world. Some Raiders says number 18. So some Raiders is number 20. We are like five to eight times expensive than the next best person. So this is like your number 20 in the NFL draft and being purchased 20 times more or 10 times more, and then the next best person so that's all our healthcare system is right now. So I'm not going to comment more on sure. But But the idea behind virtual is to definitely increase a better health outcome, provide free follow up care and also lower cost of care. So versus at $49 flat fee across different treatment plants, and it's one Time up until you get better. So that's a different kind of a model, which started 10 years ago, and we have a lot of traction. That's great. Very,

Justin Grammens : 10:08

very cool. I know, you spoke at our applied AI meetup last month here, and you talked about a number of different, I guess applications, right? There's a number of different people that are trying to use this new technology to, like you say, provide better care, you know, increase patient outcome with maybe better doctor visits, you know, and you know, other things like that. Maybe you could touch on a couple of those, I guess, that are sort of top of mind and we don't need the name of the company. But I don't know if you have any that you sort of like go to they're like, hey, there's a great here's a great way that a company is using AI to sort of improve because like you said, we're not doing very good in the United States, I guess. Right? There's a lot of room for improvement. So what are some areas specifically that maybe you're you've seen on the

Senthil Kumaran : 10:52

healthcare or care delivery Justin so that there are quite a bit like Babylon help us one. I know a lot of the telehealth companies that are working right now they're all doing video visits. But that's only solving a part of the problem. So what we need to do is we need to get some all data digitized, and then analyze the data and create like patients like me and figure out a personalized treatment plan from so so that's where the future is. And then the Internet of Things is also picking up the healthcare things with a lot of new devices popping up. So there are quite a few companies who are trying to integrate like the home healthcare plus AI. So that's where the future is. So what I believe is so there will be some device that you can attach it to your iPhone or your Android phone, and that can take like your all the way from blood pressure to even scans and then it can go against all the radiologists knowledge, and then it can figure out what kind problem you have. So there are quite a few companies out there. So the one thing that is already happening is FDA is approving lot of these autonomous AI solutions. So there is one company right out of Iowa City called a dx Dr. And that company actually is not better paced out of the Bay Area. It's just this out here in the Midwest, and they are creating some good lives. So the one product that is already out there is they're doing diabetic retinopathy treatment. They basically when a patient walks in, so they the eye rutina gets scanned through a machine and then a registered nurse can operate this machine. So you don't need to go to an ophthalmologist. And then the machine does its radiology based algorithm which goes and compares against all these million images and then comes up with what kind of problem you have and you have diabetic retinopathy or not and what's your treatment plan and what path you need to take and all that That happens in less than two minutes. So that just amazes me Because right now, if you have to do this in a traditional setting, it probably takes a month or two to navigate all the healthcare system to get this. And they did a much, much cheaper cost like 300 bucks or 400 bucks. And it's already in place. So FDA has approved this in a year ago, Google's company verily, I mean, alphabets company early, it's also in the same space. So they're doing multiple things along the same lines. But what interests me on ID str is they have like 10 different patterns that are coming up in the pipeline, through rutina scan, they can do liver disease detection, kidney disease deductions, and so they can come up with treatment plans on the fly, and the cost of care is going over significantly. And also there's going to be a better health talk, man, what they're predicting is in the next five to 10 years, you don't even have to walk out to a speciality place to do this kind of routine scan. So you would Take this little thing, attach it to your phone, and then you can get your rutina scanned. And then it's going to come back and tell you Yep, I got your scan, it looks like you haven't done this and this and this. So that's why your liver is getting fatty. So you better start the workout. So it's going to come back and help us out to keep us on track. So that's, that's what the AI systems are doing an ID x, Dr. Kind of companies are already proving it. So they have an FDA approval, they're already operating in three states. And there are many more companies like this space.

Justin Grammens : 14:36

Well, yeah, that's that is fascinating. I mean, it's that I was actually even wondering, as you were talking, if there's a way even with image recognition, you could sense maybe not down to the precision that they're talking about, but just Hey, what if I just pointed this system at all my Google Photos, for example, you know, could it start doing image recognition on people's faces to basically realize that they are coming

Senthil Kumaran : 14:59

with the stressful level? Yes, yes. Just in the that there is a new area called artificial emotional intelligence. Okay, so there are a couple of companies actually, there is a company called Beyond verbal that Mayo Clinic is partnering with out here in Rochester. And there is another company, effective use of effective as a mighty spin off out of Boston. So they both work on the artificial emotional intelligence and they look at your face and based on the last five days of how your face has changed and how your eyes are opening and in fact, effective has a very cool presentation. So if they ask you to read a paragraph on different times, and then based on your tonal quality and how you read and 100 different things, I'm sure it's all hundred different features for them for their model and comes back and says like, Okay, this is your, they can do like quite a few heart disease predictions. Whoa, you're reading this paragraph of info. So it's already there. Neat, neat. All right, good signs anymore. So this is this area is called the artificial, emotional, and that's picking up quite a bit. And that's going to change healthcare. And what I believe is like, we have these tech, which will help our dogs to do their jobs a lot better. As a dog, you, you have to show the empathy to the patient. Then if you go look at today's clinics, most of the doctor time is spent in front of the computer screen. And I'd rather like with the patient. Yeah, and I'm on a traditional clinic right now. And so that has to change. So what virtual for instance, when we created the EHR EMR and so we wanted to make all these documentation, whatever the consumer sees, and so that's what the key differentiator is. So how tech like AI can help him predict The treatment plan and also asking the right kind of questions to consumers and funneling all of this right kind of data to the providers. So it makes their job a lot easier. So if you go read the reviews that virtual for instance, we have like 60,000 plus reviews published a lot of the consumers talk about the empathy and the direct connection, even though it's all virtually delivered. Right? Right. The other ways and if you go to a physical clinic, you should have a lot more better connection, but it's like people get a sore associated, a lot of the amaze ons products isn't gonna get shipped to whom so it's the same way. So

Justin Grammens : 17:38

yeah, you know, it's one of these things where it's like, how can we use computers to do the best thing that they're at? And then how can we use humans to do the best thing that they're at? Right?

Senthil Kumaran : 17:46

Yeah, that is what hopefully able achieve and especially in healthcare, it's definitely so I kind of think it's the marriage happens in the near future, because it has to bring the cost of care down. Hopefully.

Justin Grammens : 18:03

Yeah, I mean, you you said, you know, United States is that 20th in this list of all these various countries, there's obviously access to a lot of these new cool apps that people are going to be having, you know, virtuals, one platform, there's just all these other sort of things that are floating around you. Do you see us making a dent, I guess over the next three to five years to to improve it? Does it look optimistic?

Senthil Kumaran : 18:23

I think so. Yeah, if you go look at the FDA approval list on all these internet of healthcare things plus what is going to come the whole lab could come to your home in the future, there is a company which is waiting right now. And you up on this stick new you send this picture back to the nurse practitioners for analysis and then they come back with different kind of diagnosis for your kidney disease. And, and obviously all of these comes with different safety protocols in place. So the moment it sees something man, it obviously directs you to the right place. So even virtual We don't treat every patient who walks into virtual. We obviously have a lot of safety nets around there. And you answer these questions in this way and say, Well, no, you have to go to a clinic immediately or you have to go to an urgent care or you have to go to the hospital immediately. So we redirect. And sometimes our providers do that, too. Like when it gets all of this information gets funneled to them, and they do the correct care.

Justin Grammens : 19:26

Yeah. kind of curious, I guess, you know, kind of for people that are on the outside of healthcare and all this new smart technology. I mean, what's what's sort of the day in the life of somebody who's the CIO CTO of a healthcare startup like this, and I don't think I still call yourself a startup. Yeah,

Senthil Kumaran : 19:42

we still call us our three to 10 year old company. It's part of hild partners, which is a huge one out here in Twin Cities. Yes, virtual, even though it's 10 plus years. It's a small company. So we are more like the health labs division, I would say not a healthy labs and technical labs. So if you're more on innovation division of health partners, yeah day in my life, we have multiple releases going on at the same time. So we run in a private cloud, okay. Virtual comm is only one small piece of what we do the actual EHR EMR, we do work with training different insurance companies. So the revenue cycle in healthcare, I can talk about it for like two days non stop cycle and how, how we need to do definite improvements and how we work with insurance because almost all of these technology that they use in play is 40 or 30 plus years old. Really. Yeah. And in the current EHR EMR that a lot of hospitals use. It uses the software that was written 20 years ago. Okay, so it had few updates in the last few years. So that's where this problem is and it's a virtual uses its own custom developed EHR EMR and that gets an update every couple of weeks. Sure. It's a lot of feature engineering, working with the product owners. And we are a HIPAA compliant, high tech compliant, and PCI DSS so that takes up some of my time. Sometimes doing a scrum master role, future proofing. The other big thing that takes up my time is known systems engineering, teamwork and cloud infrastructure. And I do a lot of one on ones with my team members. We usually when we are in the office during summertime, we take a little 30 minute walk right around our neighborhood in St. Paul. And right now we are doing virtual walks or sometimes whatever works for everybody. So the one on one I really value. Some folks want to grow their career in this direction, someone growing this and they want to be part of that team. So a couple of data science engineers in virtual so they started their careers as software engineers, and they took different courses in the last three, four years and they became they came into the data science or production data analyst she started her career as a business owner. So now she's she knows more about our data than even some of our data engineers actually. And so she's been at the company for 17 years. So So that's, that's where my most of my time goes. Obviously, our goal at virtual is to minimize meetings. I actually start my conversation and how many emails did you send in the last two weeks, for instance? So we want to minimize the number of emails that floats around us chatroom, but a lot of meaningful discussions and picky and JIRA. I oddly spend my time like maybe 1015 minutes maximum. And my goal before retirement is to spend zero time

Justin Grammens : 22:41

on email. Yeah, just it's just too much of a distraction. You get stuck in a loop. Feels like one comes in. Yeah, I gotta deal with that. Next one comes in you got to deal with it. So that's and then the some of it, I don't even reply. So then it gets into garbageman. So if people really need info, they'll things mean the different chat room? For sure. For sure. Well, yeah, you kind of touched a little bit on ammo as you were, as you were speaking, I was sort of thinking about how people get into this field. Right? It sounds like you have a lot of people that they came to it through software, I guess in some ways or they came to it through data science. Practice. Yes,

Senthil Kumaran : 23:17

yes. Different in of all, but some, like my current product owner on the AI team, actually, she was a rules engineer. So she worked on drools rule engine, a lot of explainable cities, their structural interviewing. And so that's, that's what we started using 1011 years ago. And we do have a lot of play or there so she started her career as a rules content engineer. Yeah, she is doing the product. So as as long as you know what data you're working with, you can get into data science field for sure what people are missing is the they will have to go take something in Coursera or edx.org, or data camp dot r r, they're like five or 15 different places. Very cool. So these are good university programs.

Justin Grammens : 24:17

So you would recommend if somebody were to get into this, they definitely want to take a course get get a certification or something in some way.

Senthil Kumaran : 24:23

Yes, yes. Or like so many good courses out there. In Coursera, edx.org data camp, those are the three that comes to my mind. So they all have good programs. It's a three month program to begin with six months, two years. And so you can strengthen go to kaggle competitions. There are a lot of open source. What are we done in PI torch? Are you working on scratch?

Justin Grammens : 24:48

there? these are these are all questions that you guys asked during your interview process. You look for Yeah, for candidates. Yeah,

Senthil Kumaran : 24:56

yeah, yes, yes, for sure.

Justin Grammens : 24:57

So we've touched a little bit on sort of like the You know, great, I'd be able to pull up my phone and take a take a picture of maybe of my face or like you said, retina scans and stuff like that.

Senthil Kumaran : 25:06

Yeah, Asif, no, you can like a lot of skin conditions, people take pictures and send it to her nurse practitioners. And there is a company that we work with, they have different kinds of pictures for different skin conditions. And the moment you upload this data, it comes back and tells you like 90% confidence level that this person has this specific condition. So there is already proven algorithms to do these kind of predictions on skin conditions. But what the future holds is Justin is taking a retina scan, our people are seeing you can take the whole, the otoscope that we use right now is like 30 years old, and then whatever we use at our clinics. So now you have a much much better resolution camera at your fingertip, and you have to attach a certain thing to your camera. To your cell phone, and then you can take a much better year cannot picture in the future. And what do you do with it? Unfortunately, we are clueless on that center. So the virtual kind of platforms will connect you to the right kind of nurse practitioner or physician to get you to the right kind of treatment plan.

Justin Grammens : 26:21

That's, that's phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not just making the diagnosis, but then also connecting you to the right to the right place as a as a treatment plan.

Senthil Kumaran : 26:29

Yeah, yeah. You want your own personalized care,

Justin Grammens : 26:34

these algorithms and stuff like that. They they still seem very specialized. Yeah. Right. You don't feel like there's basically generally AI going on out there yet. Do you think we'll ever get there or

Senthil Kumaran : 26:45

the lot of the AI systems right now are are very narrow. And that is where a lot of the FDA approvals are also going into that kind of narrow intelligence, but I'm hoping in the next few years Have you seen the google google i o whenever they do the demos, a couple of years ago, there was this Chinese conversation Chinese restaurant conversation with the CEO of Google. So that that's, that's where a lot of the newer AI techniques are coming. So I'm hoping that in the next five years, they really are somebody will come up with some kind of broader intelligence product out there. Excellent. Yeah. Cool.

Justin Grammens : 27:30

Well, you know, your your experience, I think, has been in healthcare, specifically around AI and healthcare. It's, do you, I guess, do you see you see yourself staying in healthcare? I guess, do you see some other other interesting applications? I guess, I mean, gosh, it just spans so many different areas. Health care.

Senthil Kumaran : 27:51

I don't think so. It is in to do with healthcare, as a tech play, whatever you do, to have a better customer. engagement. This is where like, I am sure you you were under this discussion like 2022 years ago, when I was at Deluxe checks, there were quite a few people were a cheque printing company. Right? And so what why do we need to sell all these things? Deluxe had like a lot of business forms and different things. Okay. So a lot of people had Skepticism on why do we need to do this over the internet? People will pick up the phone, they'll order isn't it? as sort of financial institution 30 years ago was probably wondering, like, Oh, we, we all are making transactions through these banking systems. And I'm going to call this broker to do these transfer. Yeah, that industry has changed, isn't it? So what I'm saying is in AI will impact every industry, you can be selling generators, but you have to have some kind of an AI play. Good. Yeah. Five years.

Justin Grammens : 28:52

Yeah. Otherwise, you're just gonna fall behind, right? Yes, you're gonna be you're gonna be printing checks when anybody else has moved online. Exactly. So

Senthil Kumaran : 29:00

Deal access. Yes, they have reinvented themselves and they are there stains in it. I'm sure there are companies like blockbuster they were given couple of opportunities. And even Netflix came to blockbuster but they never listened. And I'm sure there are companies like Sears and JC Penney's, or Macy's, or you could be like, target reinventing themselves every 1520 years. You can survive.

Justin Grammens : 29:28

Yeah. You know, you mentioned target. I was checking out at target the other day doing the self checkout, and they've got a camera there. They're just they're videoing me as I'm doing it, obviously, for more security reasons. But, you know, I don't I don't know what target's doing internally with that. But there, there's got to be something there. Right. They're obviously capturing customer actions as they're checking out. Could they do something around sentiment analysis on people? How happy are the customer? I am? Yeah,

Senthil Kumaran : 29:54

I am sure there is. Go look at Target I'm not related to target Right on, I've never worked there. But if you go look at their data science engineering team, there is a lot of active work going on or their Land O Lakes. There's a lot of work and seeing all these things in different conferences and the kind of data that they come and present. So lambda lakes is a milk and butter company. But, but they have a lot of AI engineers. I was go talk to my health partner CIO, it's like, you know, how many people are there at Cargill, working on these kind of things? Oh, yeah. And optim has a huge division of data science. Hundreds of people working on this kind of stuff, right?

Justin Grammens : 30:37

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, you mentioned mobile first companies. And now people need to be AI first, in a lot of ways. Yes. Feels like yeah, we're in this next phase.

Senthil Kumaran : 30:45

For sure. Otherwise, you good. You'll be a blockbuster,

Justin Grammens : 30:48

right? Yep. For sure. Well, great. This has been it's been a great conversation. I wasn't sure you know, there's anything else that I maybe I didn't I didn't touch on that that you would want to share. Maybe do you have a unit you You mentioned presentations and stuff like that. are you presenting anywhere coming up that you would want to talk about? Do you have a website or anything else that you would want to share, but I'll let you share anything here. As we wrap up.

Senthil Kumaran : 31:09

I'm not very active on any personal websites or just keep my LinkedIn profile there. So your work has to speak for yourself is what I believe in. So a lot of things happen inside virtual but my long term idea is to go back to teaching Justin I don't know, I have a passion for coaching and teaching. So I want to go get back into some kind of adjunct faculty. So I did my MBA from St. Thomas 15 years ago. So I have both engineering and also business and finance master's degree so it's a it is time to give back. So I do go to a lot of conferences Yes, locally and also go to the couple of events. conferences out outside of twin cities, one in the Bay Area and one of them used last year it was in Boston. Sometimes I press and sometimes you go in there to learn and listen kind of refreshes you What is going on?

Justin Grammens : 32:15

Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. It's It's so hard to get. It's so easy, I guess I should say, to get stuck in your own lane and keep your head down. Just be plugging away. And forget about just sometimes it makes sense to pop up. I mean, it'll be interesting to see as conferences continue to become, at least in the short term more and more virtual. But getting that outside perspective can really, really help you. across industries. Hey, I didn't know that these guys were doing this stuff over here. And how could I apply it back to what I'm doing?

Senthil Kumaran : 32:45

Yes. Right. Yes. There are a couple of good good conferences locally here. The Internet of Things conference was in the open source north. These are two tech conferences out here in town, which I attend every year and then the big event in Best Buy mini bar.

Justin Grammens : 33:01

Yep. Yep. A bar is awesome. And they just had a mini mini bar the other the other week.

Senthil Kumaran : 33:08

Yeah, yeah. So the mean, if you haven't been to a mini bar, I would definitely say like, you should be there. If you're a tech person in Twin Cities. I missed the first couple of years, ever since the move to Best Buy. Yeah,

Justin Grammens : 33:23

it's a great event. It's a great event. And it's and it's free, right? So a lot of these things are just, they're just there. It's just it takes your time to go. But if you're something you're passionate about, it's well worth it. Yeah. Well, great. I appreciate your time today stencil and look forward to continuing to follow you and everything that's going on at Virtua Well, I'll be sure to put your LinkedIn obviously in the liner notes and stuff like that for this for this episode, and, and let's for sure, keep in touch. Thank you for being a part of unity.

Senthil Kumaran : 33:55

Thank you, Justin. Thank you so much.

AI Announcer : 34:00

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