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Automating Healthcare Compliance | Steve Flynn, Surglogs | The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast

  • Acy Rodriguez
  • Feb 1
  • 31 min read

Updated: Mar 8

On this episode of The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast by Left Brain AI, we sit down with Steve Flynn, VP of Client Relations at Surglogs, to explore how AI is transforming compliance and client relations in healthcare - helping small, mighty teams do more with less, without losing the human touch.


Steve shares how Surglogs uses AI to streamline compliance, save administrators up to 15 hours a week, and prevent costly accreditation risks - all while giving clinicians more time to lead, care, and connect.


He breaks down how Surglogs’ Compliance Assistant and AI-powered support systems are reshaping healthcare operations - proving that automation doesn’t replace people, it amplifies them.


From healthcare burnout to the future of AI-assisted regulation, Steve’s insights reveal how technology and empathy can work hand in hand to build stronger, safer organizations.


Full transcript below.


🎧 Watch or listen to The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast:

Apple Connect: https://bit.ly/3VMNtlH 


⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

 00:00 – Intro

 03:25 – What AI really means for healthcare teams

 06:00 – How Surglogs helps administrators stay inspection-ready

 10:30 – The rise of AI-powered compliance assistants

 17:50 – Saving 15+ hours a week and reducing burnout

 31:10 – Balancing AI efficiency with human care

 42:00 – The future of AI as a “force multiplier” in healthcare


🔗 Steve Flynn 


Surglogs 


📲 Connect with Left Brain AI


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 If this episode inspired you, taught you something new, or gave you a different lens on AI in healthcare, share it, leave a comment, or tag us.


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Episode Full Transcript:


Kyle: All right, welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint, where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm Kyle Lambert, founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing. Today's episode discusses client relations and effective ways for automating compliance in the healthcare industry. With that being said, today's Brainiac is Steve Flynn. Welcome to the show, Steve.


Steve: Thanks so much, Kyle.


Kyle: How are you today? Doing all right?


Steve: Yeah, doing well. Doing well. Looking forward to Thanksgiving.


Kyle: 100%. Yeah. Going to be stuffing myself as always. Well, cool, Steve. I appreciate you taking some time out to share some of your insights today. So you are the VP of Client Relations at Surglogs. That's Surglogs, S-U-R-G-L-O-G-S.com. You can see the logo up there. If you don't mind, tell everybody a little bit about you, your experience, your role, who Surglogs is, all that good stuff.


Steve: I've been with Surglogs for five years now. I started in sales and an individual contributor role. Then as we started to grow as a company, we realized that we needed to build out our customer success and customer support functions a little bit more. I helped grow the team from a team of two customer success managers to a team of five with over 900 customers across the country.


In my current role, I lead all of our customer experience and go-to-market functions with our strategic accounts and partnerships. It's a lot of collaboration with sales, customer success, product development, marketing. I just manage and own the relationships with all of our strategic accounts and partnerships.


Kyle: 900 partners. That's a number right there. Do you already have plans for 1,000? How are you guys going to celebrate 1,000 partners?


Steve: That's a great question. I think we'll probably hit that sometime next quarter. Our team's spread out across the country. Our go-to-market team has folks on the East Coast, West Coast. So I don't know, maybe we'll get a chance to meet up somewhere in the middle. Then our product team's over in Europe as well. Trying to find a middle ground where we can all get together might be difficult, but maybe we can all celebrate over Zoom like this.


Kyle: You should be pushing for a Euro trip. That would be awesome.


Steve: We actually, as a team, went to Bratislava a few years ago and it was great to just get everyone together in one space. It was really awesome.


Kyle: Is that where your team is or do you have a big client there? Why Bratislava?


Steve: Our founder and most of the executive team, they're all from that area. So that's where our European office is located in Bratislava. That was why.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. That was fun. So all right, a lot of stuff for us to dive into. But as you know, I gave you a little bit of homework to think about what you think about AI. So please finish the prompt. I think AI is.


Steve: I think AI is really exciting in not replacing humans, but just finding ways to augment the team you have. I think we're going to start to see a lot of small and mighty teams being able to do things that used to take so much more manpower to do. So I think it's really exciting.


Even just in my personal experience, I've been able to use it a lot. I think a lot of people know how you can use it to help write an email and that's just scratching the surface, but even just helping to organize thoughts. I'm not so great with a blank canvas. I need some help with organizing my thoughts.


It's great how you can really just input a lot of information and it's really good at doing the things we as humans are not so good at- creating an outline, helping match different inputs to help correlate different outputs. Even just when we're talking about how we can meet the needs of customers, just giving it some problem statements and asking it to help connect the dots has been really powerful.


Kyle: I love the way that you think about that. It's very cool to hear about the small and mighty aspect. I think you're right. It is a game changer in terms of evening the playing field a little bit. I could be way off here- I'm guilty of headline reading right now- but literally earlier today, I saw an article that Mark Cuban was saying that there's going to be a trillionaire someday who is just sitting in his basement and just really good at AI. He's not even a part of an organization, just knows how to use it. It's a very interesting concept to think about, just being able to empower yourself and get a lot done with these tools.


Steve: Yeah, I think I read something similar where someone was predicting the first billion-dollar company run by one person already exists. It just needs to grow to that point. It's crazy to think about.


Kyle: Break down Surglogs a little bit for me. I mentioned it in the opener- you guys are in the healthcare, health tech space and you help to automate compliance projects. I know that's obviously an oversimplification. So just give us a little rundown of what your offer looks like, where your expertise lies, and then we'll jump into your role and how you help to manage the clients.


Steve: At Surglogs, we believe every administrator of every healthcare facility should feel confident and prepared for any inspection or what's called a survey that they're held accountable for. Our customers are mainly ambulatory surgery center administrators. These typically aren't folks who sought out administrative leadership roles. They probably started as a nurse within the OR and became a nursing supervisor. They worked their way up and eventually found themselves as being responsible for running not only the clinical, but the business operations of a surgery center.


Part of that is maintaining your accreditation status. These surgery centers seek accreditation from various agencies. The reason for that is they get higher reimbursements from CMS and Medicare for maintaining that accreditation status. But what that means is they get an inspection or what's called a survey every three years from those major accrediting bodies. It can be stressful, especially if it's the first time you're responsible for making sure you pass that survey.


If you're brand new to the role, all of a sudden you're in charge of hiring staff and managing them and managing a P&L. This accreditation stuff is at the bottom of the list, but can be very detrimental if things don't pass or meet the standards. Surglogs started about 10 years ago. You can probably guess the origin of the platform was Surgery Logs. We were an alternative to pen and paper and all these binders which can get messy and disorganized throughout a center for all this important documentation to prove to an inspector or surveyor that you are meeting the requirements.


Some common things are you have a refrigerator that houses all of your important medications that have to be maintained at a certain temperature. They cannot fall below and they cannot go above a certain range. Documenting that on pen and paper has its shortcomings, especially if you're an administrator overseeing a larger facility. How do you know that that refrigerator temp hasn't varied without actually walking over to the clipboard and looking at somebody's handwritten notes which could be a little messy? And then knowing well, who wrote this down? That's a very simplified example, but just to provide some context.


Now scale that up to a center that maybe has five, six, seven operating rooms. Every single room has its own refrigerator. It just becomes unmanageable. Surglogs started by providing a platform to house all of this documentation. Over the past few years, what we've started to do is integrate those standards that they're held accountable for directly into our platform. Now that nurse or technician who's doing those daily and weekly tasks isn't just following orders and saying, "Okay, well, I've got to do the temperature and humidity checks because I guess my boss really wants me to."


Now we can actually see it's because we need to show and demonstrate that we're maintaining the appropriate standards of the accrediting body that we're a part of. What we're doing is now providing one platform that houses the standards along with the supporting evidence like logs, policies, credentialing files, all those different types of records under one place.


That's where we saw the vacuum in the market. There's a disparate experience here for these facilities in that you're held accountable to these standards, but all of your supporting evidence could be all in a filing cabinet on the other side of the building or in a binder under somebody's desk. Now we're just providing one centralized place for all this stuff.


To take it one step further, in the past couple of months, we are starting to get these questions from customers of "Do I have all the logs I'm supposed to have?" or "Are my policies up to date? Do they meet all the standards?" It's a really exciting position to be in because your customers are coming to you and asking for help and advice. But we kind of have to say, well, we're software folks, we're not clinical folks. I actually don't have a great answer for you there.


That's when we started to work with some outside consultants to build out our latest solution, which is our first step towards AI, which is our compliance assistant module. Now there's a compliance assistant within our platform that you can go to and get clear direction on if you're missing policies, if you're missing documentation, if your documentation isn't complete. "Hey, once a quarter, we practice CPR. We do a simulated CPR drill." A lot of customers maybe just aren't actually doing that drill correctly.


They might not be documenting all the things they need to in order to consider that a good or complete CPR drill. Our software is providing some of that guidance. We're going to put our consultants' hats on a little bit, which is really exciting. I think it's elevated the conversation from where we were when we started.


Kyle: That is so gold to be getting that feedback and be able to, again, you have the trust that they're going to come to you for something so serious and important, and then you can start building out some more solutions to get a little more sticky with these guys and provide more value in the market. That's very, very cool. I also appreciate your analogy about the refrigerator.


When you were talking about things early on when we originally connected, I was picturing like a food inspector walking around in the kitchen and it's like, what digital cockroaches do you have in your logs here that we need to be finding?


Steve: What's exciting, too, is as we've worked with some of our larger strategic accounts who maybe have a whole network of hundreds of centers across the country, we've started to realize that there's a need for those compliance reports at a regional level where you're looking at, okay, where are we starting to see that everyone keeps missing this one thing on their survey? Now we need to deploy resources because we know we have gaps in knowledge or we need to do a better job of educating and training our staff and employees at the center level to make sure we don't do an incorrect CPR drill, or we have a good emergency preparedness plan that's complete and has all the things that actually simulate the experience. It's really exciting. It's elevated the conversation a little bit too.


Kyle: Very interesting. You mentioned that the leadership team is based out of Europe. Do you guys operate globally or are you typically just in the United States?


Steve: We are in the US right now. I'll say right now. Our US office is here in Coronado, California. Our CEO is here and our go-to-market team is here in the US. A lot of our engineering and product development team is over in Europe.


Kyle: Okay. I was going to say, I have to assume compliance is extremely different from country to country, meeting those rules and regulations.


Steve: We have explored other territories. It's probably in the next few, maybe in the next year or so, something we can start branching out to. But right now, it's just fully U.S.-based.


Kyle: In terms of your current clients or current compliance and regulations, how often do these standards change? Obviously, we've seen a lot of change with elections, new presidents, new lawmakers. Is there change locally and with states constantly happening or is it relatively consistent when that kind of stuff is going to happen?


Steve: There's definitely some headwinds and you can tell things are coming before they go live. Definitely there's been some federal legislation passed this year that is really exciting for the ASC space. It's just going to basically mean more different types of procedures can be done in an outpatient setting that weren't previously allowed to be done in an outpatient setting, which is exciting. It means there's a lot of opportunity for growth.


But to the other point of when things change, that really throws a wrench in the gears for our customers because they build their policies and procedures based off of the current standards. But when that book of standards- just last year we had an accrediting organization that completely reorganized their standards book. What used to be chapter seven is now part of chapter eight, or chapters eight, nine, 10 are now chapter three. All of your policies and procedures that used to reference the standards now have to- somebody has to go back and update the footnotes or make sure everything is still meeting the most current and up-to-date standards.


That's where AI has been helpful as well in just being able to leverage some of that, obviously with a human touch as well. We don't just leave things to AI without reviewing it first, but it's really helped us as we start to get into the policy management consulting side of things. It's really helped us leverage a small team to be able to provide a lot of value to customers to say, "Okay, when version 44 comes out in a few months, here's the different pieces of evidence within your center, whether it's a policy or logs that need to be updated to match the latest standards."


Kyle: Great. That's awesome. Well, that's a great segue and a great tee up there, bringing up AI. I did want to pivot there. I think there's a lot of different directions that we can go. I know that when you and I originally connected, you guys were testing out even just some chatbots and things like that on your website. There's obviously AI used to review the compliance and the current regulations that are in place. I think that you might even do some policy and procedure generation. Am I making that up?


Steve: It's possible. We haven't quite said 100 percent we're comfortable with AI's ability to write a policy from scratch, but certainly helping reference policy to whatever the current standards are. Some of these centers have a policy library of 400, 500 policies. You can have a dedicated person just for managing that library and making sure it's always up to date and distributing it to staff.


Once a year, all these policies have to be reviewed and approved by that center's governing board. It's usually the physicians who are the owners of that surgery center. It's required that they review their policies once a year and make sure that they're still up to date.


We've started to leverage AI to basically compare the standards to that person's policy library and figure out where those gaps are. Our compliance team is great at picking up the slack of where maybe we reach the limits of what AI can do right now. Then some other things we've done too, just for the analogy I use- the survey is like the SATs. You want to do a mock survey before the actual survey. It's like you want to do the PSATs before you take the actual test to figure out where your gaps in knowledge might be.


Another product we've put together is as you're doing your facility walkthrough as that practice survey before the real thing, as you document findings. I can say, "Hey, I've got some boxes that are blocking an emergency exit." That's a big no-no from a fire marshal perspective. You can't have a blocked egress or there's dust on the sprinkler heads. We don't want that. It can drop the sensors and delay the irrigation system in an emergency.


It's really cool in that we can just use our app to document those things really quickly, just by using speech to text, or it can even transcribe some handwritten notes for you. What it's going to do is automatically start outlining which standards those findings relate to.


Feedback we've heard is that from a clinical director's perspective who's conducting that mock survey, it's a huge time saver. I used to write these things down on paper, go back to my hotel room that night and transcribe it and put it into a system. Or even if they were using Excel, I have to do a book report at the end of the night and be like, "Okay, well, which standards does this finding relate to or reference to so that I can educate my staff as I deliver this report that says here's all the things we found that are deficient." Just leveraging AI in that sense can save upwards of eight hours of time.


Kyle: That's a whole day. That's crazy.


Steve: Because what they're doing is getting into the center first thing in the morning, doing that walkthrough, going back to their hotel maybe later that night and having to transcribe notes if they were handwritten, and then also doing that book report of documenting all the different regulations or standards it relates to. So that's really exciting.


Kyle: Being so well-versed and deep into the digital age today, the idea of pen and paper just makes me laugh. Obviously, there was no other option back in the day, and that's just what it was. But just sitting there with your notepad or whatever it is, it drives me up a wall. 


Steve: Healthcare specifically, I think, is maybe the last to adopt technology. Probably for good reason, too. Most clinicians and folks who have any sort of medical training are trained to be skeptical because you're dealing with people's lives. You can't just test out every new piece of technology that comes your way because it's going to have a direct impact on patient care. It has to work. It has to be tested thoroughly.


It has to be put through its paces. I think that's probably why we see healthcare and health tech usually being the last to adopt any sort of new technology and why sometimes you still see paper. But it's great when some of the best onboardings we've had is with those folks who are maybe a little more tenured in their career and adverse to technology at first, but once they start to see the value of it, either the time saving or just more accountability, they embrace it fully.


Kyle: I wanted to jump into that. One of the reasons that I enjoy these healthcare conversations is exactly what you're talking about. It's highly regulated. It's slow to adopt sometimes. These people that you're working with are highly educated and know what they're doing and are very well versed in their processes.


So you're being disruptive in a lot of different ways. You are VP of Client Relations. You have to really understand them and have these conversations and convince them that look, we're good for you. We're staying compliant and we're helping you to do your job better. What do some of those conversations look like? What does client relation mean to you to get them to adopt this type of stuff?


Steve: Our customers can smell bullshit from a mile away. It's okay. They know I don't have a nursing degree. I don't have a medical degree. I'm a software person, so I don't mind saying, "I'm sorry, could you just walk me through that? I actually don't know what a code blue drill is." I found out that's when a patient's coding. If you try to just flub your way through it, I think it's never a good look.


Managing the relationship is all about providing that value and being able to measure it upfront. When we onboard a customer, what we want to do is go for those early low-hanging fruit quick wins so that we're delivering value on day one. But we know that sometimes an implementation could take three, four, or five months depending on the staffing levels of that facility and where this project is falling in their priority list. It's really just about collaborating with them on a timeline that they think is realistic that we can stick to.


It's about providing that value. We had a case study conducted through a third-party market research firm at the beginning of the year to really start to quantify what value Surglogs provides. What we were able to come up with was from an administrative perspective for that administrator in the facility, it saves at least 15 hours per week for an administrator. That's huge.


Kyle: That's an insane number. 


Steve: That's more time spent with patients, more time spent with their staff, being leaders. Accreditation is just a small part of their overall responsibility. They're also responsible for all their patients that come through and the financial health of that center.


Across the team, we calculated out that we were saving about 50 hours per month, just in not writing something down on a clipboard then putting it into an Excel spreadsheet. You never want to do duplicate data entry. Being able to do it on a tablet versus walking around with a big chunky binder is a lot better too. Then with the policies, it's rare that they have someone dedicated specifically to managing their policy library. They just don't have the resources for it.


Our compliance team is able to provide a lot of value in saying, "Hey, we crosswalked your policies to your accrediting body and here's where you have the gaps. You need to write a policy for this. You need to revise this policy. You need to start documenting your monthly infection control walkthrough." Just getting some of that direction is where I think a lot of the value comes from. That's my main job too, just in demonstrating that value quarter over quarter as they invest into Surglogs.


Kyle: Sure. You kind of read my mind there. I was going to ask about case studies and KPIs. The hours makes perfect sense. I have to assume- I don't know if this is as easily measurable- but there's almost probably an employee satisfaction or maybe even less burnout when you're using your solutions. That probably indirectly translates into patient satisfaction, long-term financial growth, and even client retention. It seems like it would be a compounding effect. Getting that time back just allows you to work on stuff that really moves the needle for you.


Steve: Absolutely. I think the healthcare industry is still feeling the burnout from COVID. I know we're five years behind us at this point, but so many people, there's so much turnover, people just took early retirements because it was just so overwhelming. A lot of knowledge transferred with people leaving the industry. There's a little bit of a knowledge vacuum of folks who are just so tenured.

I think there's still an issue of turnover within the industry. Rates are more competitive.


There's rising costs across the board, not just from suppliers, but anesthesiologists and things like that as well. Costs are rising and we have to figure out ways to work more effectively. Tools like Surglogs is how we can leverage technology to make sure that we mitigate any risk. There's a time savings day to day of, "Hey, we're just using a tool that's more efficient than we were using before," which is great. But then there's the larger risk, which is if you don't pass your survey, there's costs associated with having to get re-surveyed 30 days later. Maybe they've identified some critical things that were missing and you have 30 days to correct them.


There's a cost associated with getting re-surveyed. Then if you have some severe issues, you could just actually face closure. You could just get told, "Hey, immediately we're closing doors until these problems are fixed." If the doors aren't open, you're not seeing patients, that's revenue loss. Those are some of the more tangible things we can attach to in mitigating risk. It can definitely add up pretty quickly once you start to get into those severe deficiencies.


Kyle: I feel like you're hooked up into my brain right now. You're anticipating my questions. I was going to ask- I assumed that there was a financial penalty for lacking compliance. Then again, I figured a door-closing situation if it was extreme. Do you guys have numbers that say organizations that use Surglogs see a percentage increase, or can you say your clients are 100% compliant? Do you have those metrics?


Steve: I think we've looked at some case studies before and there's white papers out there that speak to the benefits of using a software platform versus pen and paper, which is really archaic, but even Excel spreadsheets and emails are messy. I don't know about you, but I can't find half my Excel reports half the time because they live in an inbox or somewhere on a SharePoint or Google Drive.


It's just not a great way to track and update progress on stuff. If you have to go dig through your inbox and then if that person leaves the organization unexpectedly, access to that data can get lost as well. I think some of the value we provide too is just some consistency in the operations of the center so that if one person leaves, their processes and knowledge don't leave with them. We've got a platform in place that standardizes the way those things get done.


There's some white papers out there that speak to the efficacy of using a software platform versus other methods and how that directly either reduces the chances of severe incidents that could lead to a closure. There was a study done on surgical site infections. You're getting surgery in a center and sometimes there's a risk of wherever it's being operated on could get an infection as well. If you're still using pen and paper to document who's the last person to clean this instrument or who's the last person to sterilize whatever we're using here, things get lost in translation very easily.


But if you have a software platform that just keeps everyone accountable, keeps everyone doing things the same way, and then alerts you if an important check gets missed, you mitigate the chances of those never-events happening.


Kyle: Gotta love those alerts. 


So I want to jump in a little bit more about you and your role specifically. I'm curious. When we originally connected, I know that you have a very specific ICP. They're not necessarily sitting on LinkedIn or on their email. I'm curious how you find these people, how you connect with them. Once you're engaged, how do you stay engaged with them? Is AI a part of all of that? I'm curious as to what your adoption personally into your day-to-day looks like into client relations.


Steve: I think our outbound sales motion still is using traditional methods. I seem to get a bot reaching out to me trying to sell bots once a day on LinkedIn. Bots trying to sell bots. But the way we capture business right now is attending trade shows and conferences and getting to meet people face to face. I think you're probably never going to replace the value behind that and building a genuine human connection. Usually what we'll do is reach out to the administrator of that facility, either via email or just calling and getting through the front desk. We'll set up an introductory call, do an in-depth software demo.


They'll get to see the platform. We've done some trials as well so they can try it out for 14 days, 30 days if they want to first. That's where we can demonstrate that value up front.


That's how the company started. It was just hitting the pavement and making phone calls and meeting people face to face, and we built it into what it is today. In my role specifically, I manage our relationships with some of the larger organizations that have, let's say, 500 surgery centers across the country. What I'm doing is managing that relationship at the top level, speaking with the regional leadership and market leadership within all of those organizations.

How we've used AI more so on the back end is when you talk about support. We onboard folks with a customer success manager, we come up with an onboarding plan for the next 30, 60, 90 days, some milestones we want to hit.


Once they're up and running, what we've done is we use Intercom for chat support and we've been able to keep the team pretty lean over the past few years by leveraging their AI chatbot. It was a little scary at first because we love our support team and our customers love all the reps we have. Some of them know customers by name. "Hey, can I talk to so-and-so? I really like working with them." And we have a really great response time.


We started to test out the AI bot just so that we could keep the team lean as our customer base grew. Intercom's put out some good strategy guides on how to introduce AI into your support team if you've never used it before. We had always avoided bots before because you can never really get the same level of service as a human. But I've been really impressed with their product, the Fin support agent. It takes some training up front. What we did was we segmented our customer base a little bit and slowly introduced it.


We weren't going to have our VIP clients talking to an AI bot in the first 30 days when we were testing it out. You never talk to an AI bot during your first 90 days at Surglogs either. You always go straight to a person for support because that's really critical. You have to make sure that experience is right from the get-go. There's no margin for error.


As customers are more comfortable with the system, it's really great. We've been surprised at some of the responses it's been able to give. As you can imagine in healthcare, permission settings can be really advanced. We've been impressed by the level of detail it's been able to provide customers on a step-by-step guide on how to adjust permission settings for specific parts of the system to the point where sometimes our staff has said, "I would have provided the same answer, but I wouldn't have done it in 15 seconds." It would have taken me maybe 10 minutes to think of the right way to write this or to write it in a way that a customer with less knowledge could follow.


It's been really cool. Some of the other tools we've used there is it's kind of cool- customers can take a screenshot and upload it and be like, "This is what I'm seeing." The bot can understand and interpret what the screenshot is saying. That's awesome. I really love the predictive tools that are in there too. Intercom scans your conversations and will say, "Hey, this topic seems to keep coming up. You should write an article for it."


That's what I love about proactive customer support- really educating customers to find their own answers or not just necessarily doing everything they ask, but also showing them how they can self-serve. That's really been powerful in helping us write the right content articles that our customers seem to be asking about consistently.


Kyle: So I want to make sure I understood you there because I didn't realize that. So Intercom can automatically say, "Hey, in the last week, I've gotten 10 questions about X." And then you need to put this into your service or create a blog or whatever it is.


Steve: Yeah, we'd suggest writing an article. Intercom has customer-facing articles and then your internal reference library where it's like, reference this content when answering customer questions. You can just add more internal content for the bot to reference. But it's also helped with writing customer-facing articles too. "You should really do a step-by-step on how to do this activity in your system." It's been awesome.


Kyle: That's great. I know you mentioned you were getting some feedback directly from customers in your conversations to help you build out the product, but it's great when Intercom can be helping you out here for content too. That's a nice little value-add for you guys. Super cool. When you were talking about outbound and everything, I almost forgot to mention to you after our original conversation, I was knocking around Surglogs.


The next week I got Instagram remarketing and streaming TV. There was the blue commercial popping up on my TV. I was like, oh, Steve's getting into my house here, penetrating all my devices. It's so funny. It's good to see that stuff working.


Steve: Yeah, I know, right?


Kyle: Awesome. That's super cool stuff. I feel like I know what this answer is going to be, but I think it's worth asking anyway. We're talking about AI and we're talking about compliance and healthcare. So there's always that risk. How do you guys build in- is it in your culture? Are there strict guidelines? What is it that you're doing to make sure that AI is 100% adhering to things before you're starting to talk to people and it's giving incorrect information, or maybe it's the product? There's a lot of risk built into it. I'm curious from your guy's standpoint, how do you make sure that it's consistently giving the right experience and not violating anything?


Steve: We're SOC 2 compliant, HIPAA compliant. Our platform goes through rigorous- our own version of a survey every single year where we get audited to make sure we're compliant with everything we need to be. That's step one. With our compliance team, as we work with AI, again, I'll say we're humans augmented by the power of AI, but we're always double-checking things. An actual human is reviewing any suggestions or connections that are being made between this standard and this policy. There's always a human element where we're going to review that first, but it's great to leverage the power of AI to maybe do some of the heavy lifting or to get us off on the right foot.


With the support bot too, it's continuous improvement. It's not just something you set up one time and never come back to. It's something you review on a regular basis to make sure all the knowledge that that particular chatbot is referencing is still up to date or providing the best experience possible. AI is just like another member of your team. You just treat it as something that needs to be checked up on and evaluated just as regularly as everything else within your organization.


Kyle: In a weird way, it's a human that just needs ongoing education, right? Just continue to learn and grow.


Steve: Absolutely.


Kyle: Cool. So I have two more questions that are kind of basically the same thing, but a little bit different. What's on the horizon for Surglogs? How are you guys expanding? I know we talked potentially geographically. But I'm curious, is there more features, more products? I don't know if you're able to share this kind of stuff, but I'm curious as to what the direction is for the organization.


Steve: As we look into 2026 and beyond, again, just putting on more of that consultative hat. It's one thing to have the standards that we're all held accountable for and all the documentation that is required. But maybe we can start to get a little bit more predictive of that. "Okay, well, here's a new log we suggest adding to your centers to correlate with this new standard that's been introduced or this edited standard that's been revised in the latest release."


Maybe actually doing some of the heavy lifting there and saying, "Would you like to revise these logs or these policies automatically?" I think probably we'll just start to leverage a little bit more of that, again, with always keeping a human touch involved.


As we look into 2026, looking right now, we only focus on ambulatory surgery centers, but there's a whole world of healthcare out there. I think we'll probably look at some adjacencies and different types of outpatient settings that are out there and then expanding into hospital systems as well.


Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. Similar question. Where do you see AI growing in the industry or where do you hope it grows in healthcare and health tech? Whether it's with you guys or just elsewhere. Put on your tinfoil hat. What do you think AI is going to be doing for you guys in the future?


Steve: It's probably a common theme of this talk- I don't think it's ever going to replace human beings or jobs, but it can make one person- it's like a force multiplier. It just makes- if one person is 10 percent more efficient or can get 10 percent more done, it just helps sell the use case for AI. With the rising costs of pretty much everything in the world right now, everyone's trying to do more with less. If we can help augment what people are capable of doing in their day-to-day role, I think that'll be really exciting.


You'll just see a compounding effect across your organization. Ultimately that just translates into a better patient experience as well. If everyone's just not as burnt out or if we can find gaps that can cause risk earlier, that just leads to a better patient experience.


Kyle: That's very cool. Through a lot of these healthcare conversations I've been having, the burnout concept has come up a lot and the better patient experience, even outside of the hospital, continues to come up. It's going to be interesting to see how that all continues to evolve. Cool. All right. So we're in the last 10 minutes here, Steve, which means we are in the rapid fire section. I've got five quick questions that I'm going to throw at you.


First one, I always like to ask this one to everybody- I find it to be interesting. If you could put on your ruby slippers and click your heels three times and have a fully automated process just built out for you right now, what would that process be?


Steve: Oh geez. Like in healthcare or anything?


Kyle: No restrictions. Something's fully automated for you. What would that be?


Steve: Oh geez. What was I just doing the other day? I was updating my passport and I was checking to see when it was going to get delivered. I needed to go into my inbox, find my application ID for the passport, put that into the website to track it. Then that provided a tracking number for the actual USPS mail service. I had to go to that website. I was trying to refresh all these things and they're all different. Basically, I would just love it if I just had one button to push to automate that whole process. I was just so into it, going into my inbox and just grabbing different verification and application numbers. It was just a big pain in the butt.


Kyle: I have been delaying going- you just reminded me- I've been delaying going to the DMV. I just wish someone could just do all that for me. Like all the travel stuff. Especially right now, things are getting crazy with it all. So that would be nice to have.


Question number two, I know that you go to a lot of events. It's a great way for you to get in front of a lot of people. As an expert event goer, what is your advice to people how to get the most out of it?


Steve: Definitely don't just show up on the day of without a plan. You want to make sure you're priming the event before you go. Doing plenty of marketing beforehand to make sure everyone's aware you're going to be there, setting up meetings ahead of time. And then the follow-up. Too many people are just focused on the event, but there's so much you can do prior and after to really create a good experience for not just attendees but exhibitors and everyone who goes to these events too. It's just making sure you have a full experience planned out for those events and that doesn't just happen while you're on site. It's the before and after, that planning and prep that goes into it, and the follow-up as well.


Kyle: The follow-up drives me crazy. I'm just like, oh, I now have 50 business cards and I have to reach out and remember the conversations that I had. It's tough to keep it all organized.


Steve: I've done it enough that I have a system and every time I go to a conference with someone, they think I'm slightly crazy. But I have a system now for just making sure I don't forget who's who when I go to those conferences. It's good to have.


Kyle: Question number three, would you consider yourself an early bird or a night owl?


Steve: Well, we just got two dogs recently. One of them is a husky. She's beautiful, but she does howl every morning. We call it her vocal warmups. With the time change, it's now at 5:30 in the morning. She'll just get up and howl. I think I'm now a morning person by day, just being forced to. But no, I think I like mornings. My brain's a little bit clearer. I don't have the day's worth of activities cloudy. You're just like a fresh start every morning. I think I prefer mornings versus nights.


Kyle: I agree. I think there's something nice about that fresh start and just starting your day on the right foot. I have a cat that wakes me up every morning. I mean, I have a dog too, but the cat is what wakes me up. So I get it. I know you are a San Diego guy. What's your go-to taco spot?


Steve: Oh man, this is very controversial. Anyone from San Diego who is listening, I'm sure. You know, I read an article the other day about our generation caring too much about the best experience for everything and lining up for stuff. "Where's the best bagel in New York?" or "Where's the best deep dish in Chicago?" Somebody finally just said the reason these food items are associated with these cities is because you can't go wrong.


It's the taco capital of the world. They're all great. I have some that maybe just for nostalgia purposes that I like going to because it's the first one I went to when I moved here. I really like La Puerta on 4th, downtown in Gaslamp. When I first moved here, I lived downtown. That was just one of the first places I went to and had really good Taco Tuesday deals. That's probably my favorite go-to spot if I had to be pressed for an answer. But what I'll say is don't get hung up on whatever's trending for the best spot at the moment because it changes every week.


Kyle: I couldn't agree more. I lived downtown for a while and it was either The Taco Stand or Taco El Gordo was right there and it was like, we're having a good taco either way. So it didn't matter. Last question, staying on the food theme here, is a hot dog a sandwich?


Steve: Oh, great question. I'll say no, because I think a sandwich has to be open on all sides. I could argue maybe even a hamburger is a sandwich because it's two slices of bread with stuff in between. The hot dog is only open on one end. I would say the hot dog is closer to a taco than it is a sandwich because it's a closed end on one side.


Kyle: I want to see you at a baseball game being like, "I'm eating my hot dog taco with mustard and relish." 


Steve: That's a good question though. 


Kyle: Awesome.


Steve, we are now at the open forum section. Is there anything that you're super passionate about or maybe something that we just didn't discuss that you want to share with everybody?


Steve: What I'll say is I think the best customer relationships I've ever had have always just been built around providing value and having a good customer experience all around. You might not have the best, you might not be the cheapest option, you might not have all the features of something that's more advanced, but I think what I've always tried to prioritize is just building a good relationship and experience for the customer. That probably comes from my background of having previously worked in hospitality. I was in hotel settings a lot. I've just seen what great service can do for a brand or for an organization- people will come back because you treat them right or because you provide a really great experience.


Everyone talks about their "amazing world-class customer service." What does that mean, really? One of my favorite things is hotels don't advertise clean bed sheets, because that's just a bare-minimum expectation. What do you do that differentiates you? I think that is how to be successful. At Surglogs, a lot of what we do is just listening to customers and iterating on the feedback that they give us and then always putting that experience first and foremost. Anyone can build a software platform, but you like to put yourself in the shoes of that customer and figure out, well, in this specific setting with a specific person, does this make sense? We put a lot of time and effort into that. I think that's what has led to our success.


Kyle: Awesome. I love that. One of my favorite quotes of all time is Maya Angelou: "You may not remember what someone said to you or you may not remember what you guys did together, but you're always going to remember how they made you feel." I think that is so true, whether it's a personal relationship, professional, a business or anything like that. If they feel like, "Oh, Surglogs has my best interest and they're helping me to do my thing," that's almost more important than anything else.


Steve: Exactly.


Kyle: Awesome. Well, Steve, I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to come share some of your insights. Everybody can find you, Steve Flynn, on LinkedIn. Surglogs is again, Surglogs.com. Anything else you want to plug, anywhere else people can find you if they want to reach out?


Steve: No, I think that's it. But if you're ever in San Diego, let me know and I would love to go grab a taco.


Kyle: I will be back out in March, so I'll give you a shout.


Steve: All right. Thanks, Kyle.


Kyle: Awesome. Well, Steve, thanks again. Do me a favor and just look at the camera and say, "Stay brilliant, Brainiacs."


Steve: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs.


Kyle: Awesome. Thanks, Steve. 


Steve: Cheers. Take care.


 
 
 

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