In this HealthImpact Live Podcast episode, Michael Rogozinski, healthcare leader and executive at Vital.io, joins Janae Sharp for a timely conversation about transforming patient experience in real-time. They’ll discuss how Vital’s platform leverages live EHR data and healthcare AI to guide millions of patients through hospital, emergency, and urgent care visits—simplifying complex medical interactions and making care more transparent.
Join us to learn how creating a better healthcare experience isn’t just about convenience—it’s about delivering safer, smarter, and more human-centered care.
Michael A. Rogozinski, Chief Nursing Officer, Vital.io
Megan Antonelli, Founder & CEO, HealthIMPACT Live
0:01 - Narrator: Welcome to Digital Health Talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access, and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't as we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Janae Sharp, and Shahid Shaw for a weekly no BS deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
0:30 - Janae Sharp: Hi. Thrilled to sit down with you today, and I'd love if you could introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little bit more about your journey. And I wanted to talk to you specifically because of your background and your expertise, both in patient experience and in nursing. So you share.
0:47 - Michael Rogozinski: Hi, yeah. So my name is Mike Rogozinski. I'm currently the chief nursing officer for a company called Vital. We are AI powered patient experience platform that helps kind of bridge some of our communication gaps that exist in the hospital space. I have been in healthcare for over 25 years, anywhere from, I'm an RN, but I've been in healthcare for over 25 years. Anywhere in healthcare, clinically, I worked as a critical care, cardiac ICU nurse. I later went on to manage units within the hospital space, so like almost any kind of unit you can think of within a hospital besides an OR I was in charge of at one point. Before becoming a chief nursing officer and probably one of my favorite jobs is I was the director of emergency services for a really large trauma center, outside of Philadelphia, lived in the space for about 5 years during that time, and that was during COVID. So it's one of the most poignant moments of my career. And then later, saw an opportunity to help in the technology field and help give nursing a voice in software development, and really try to guide when we are building things, making sure that the people who build these, the engineers who are building things, understand, would a nurse want this, would a doctor want this? I think it's really important to ask those questions early on, for obvious efficiency reasons, but I mean the problems, build to the problems that exist.
2:24 - Janae Sharp: So what I've seen a lot of clinical leaders who want to get more involved in technology and want to start leading in that way. Is that something that when you're a chief nursing officer, do you feel that tension? Like, is there a need for more interaction, you know what I mean?
2:44 - Michael Rogozinski: I think so. So I've had two very distinct CNO experiences. So I'm a CNO of a software company right now, but I was a CNO of a hospital prior. And when you're the CNO of a hospital, you kind of approach things the same way you would if you have a problem at your house, you might go on Amazon to try to find a product that solves your issue. This is the same thing that happens, right? You're being approached by sales people all the time, but also you might recognize like, oh, we're having an issue with people waiting in our waiting room, how can we better communicate with those folks. And then what do you do? You Google it, you look for what solutions are out there and there's no real way to, and if He is on the line, you know, that's, I'm not getting paid by Google. You can use any internet search platform. But you don't know which one's good and you don't know which ones had clinician input in their development. And what I've also found is almost always there was things I didn't like about it, right? It was like, there was always like, why didn't they ask a nurse about this part of the product? And that's where I found myself. I found myself in this role where I get to kind of do that internally consult like, hey, we want to build this thing, will nurses like it? And I love that my company does that. I love that they keep not only the patients, the patients are the center and as they should be, but also think of the clinicians when they're building these things.
4:12 - Janae Sharp: It's like the quadruple and you want to keep patients happy, everyone happy, like the clinicians matter. What are some of the pain points that you've seen that vital helps with then?
4:23 - Michael Rogozinski: So largely, I think the biggest problem in healthcare right now is, first of all, there's administrative hoops that we have to jump through throughout which makes clinicians' lives harder. They don't get to focus on the reasons and the things that they maybe decided to become a clinician for in the first place. They're strapped to a computer. So now we've built this crazy environment where we've made everything very hard for clinicians and now we're building additional technology to try to help with that, right? So that's the more of the same, they're like, oh, you didn't like this, we're gonna add more.
5:04 - Janae Sharp: Yeah, well, we keep ourselves and then just adding band-aids, right? Like they're doubling down.
5:07 - Michael Rogozinski: Yeah, just stop poking yourself. The second part is that because we are so focused on all these things that accrediting bodies and different things require us to do, certainly we don't want to get sued, so we have to do all this documentation because somebody's gonna sue us inevitably anyway, that we can't spend the time with the patients who are there, who are the clients, right? Like they're there and they're paying for it. They're not, it's not that they just show up and this is not universal healthcare in the United States. This is people pay for insurance. This is money that they spend and they deserve a product that meets their expectation and we can't bridge that gap of communication. There's just too much. So that causes anxiety, that causes people to walk out before their care is completed, it causes anger, we see healthcare people getting assaulted verbally and physically more than ever before, and this is because of frustration and boil over. So, communication is always the key. It always sits at the middle of almost every problem that exists in healthcare. So we try to improve communication for patients, so that they better understand their journey. They're less scared, they're less anxious, they're less angry, and actually follow through and do what they're supposed to be doing, right? So they have a role in this. They need to do their follow-ups. They need to take the medications that have been ordered for them. And by doing that, and plugging into patients and engaging them and empowering them, it has amazing results for the hospital as well, it offload some of that stuff from the clinicians, you have better outcomes, all that stuff.
6:50 - Janae Sharp: I want to go back to something that you said about people going to healthcare and they're paying for it because I think there's a consumer focus in healthcare that kind of balances out with taking care of people and caregiving, and I think it's a hard balance to strike, and we were also talking about technology at the time. Do you feel like technology is letting people become more consumer focused or is it that the consumer focus needs to be there and technology as a tool, like what, maybe you could give us more insight about that perspective.
7:28 - Michael Rogozinski: Yeah, well, that's a really interesting question. I think that there's a little bit coming from both sides there, right? So every year, our patient population gets younger. That's just how this goes, right? So we are a greater percentage of patients that come through your hospital every year are going to be more tech-enabled. They're gonna be able to tap in in a way that traditionally patients might not have been. Even your 75 year old patients are using tech. They have computers, they have smartphones. So we have to surf that wave that's coming, and if you're trying to ignore that or if you're trying to in a paternalistic way, keep information out of the hands of patients, they're gonna find it. And if they can't, it pisses them off and, forgive that, it does, it makes a mess if they can't find it from their healthcare provider, they're going to find it. They are, and oftentimes they're going to find information you don't want them to, like, it's wrong, it's incorrect, right? Doctor Google is helping them, and this is in waiting rooms across every in the nation. So why not provide it, but in the way that you want them to understand it, right? Like everybody's so reticent to make this change. But back to, and then on the other side of that, right, like they're buying this, right? And a lot of people understand what a financial impact just having insurance is. So when they go, they have expectations about what they get, right? This is no longer, hey, I had lab work done and the doctor's gonna tell me about it. Now it is. That's my lab work. I want it. I want it back as soon as it's done, and I wanna start understanding it for myself so that I can ask better questions of my physician when I get back there. That is a shift in who owns what. And again, I think the wave will continue to go in the way of the patients, especially as we get younger. Well, we get older, but we get younger, right? And I think hospitals have to embrace that. They have to understand that their paternalism has to be gone from the way that we provide care to people.
9:39 - Janae Sharp: Right. I think you're right. I think that's one of the things I like about younger people, that they aren't as impressed with titles. They aren't as impressed with the status quo, and I think it's pushing healthcare and us in general, to be better. And it's also putting higher demands on the quality of our technology.
10:07 - Michael Rogozinski: Yeah, so, right, so like, so I thought maybe. No, no, it's, I love what you, I love where you go with your thought process because that's the other thing, right? This is not a slow rolling steam train. This is a bullet train and like with things like AI, AI is iterating on itself constantly and I know that this is AI is a scary thing for a lot of people. They think that it's, I'm still disappointed that it's not like a holographic doctor with a Scottish accent. So like, everyone's in a different place, right? Like I'm like, are we being more like the borg? Like the evil collective, but anyway, AI back to...
10:48 - Janae Sharp: Yeah, I mean, first of all, thanks for the Star Trek references. Like people who grow up with Star Trek, we're a little, we're not as scared, we're more like, OK, well.
11:04 - Michael Rogozinski: Yeah, I'm a next generation kid, so you're, yeah, and those people creating health tech, that's who needs to create the health tech. Yeah, but you know, there's so much cool Star Trek stuff coming. There really is, like CAT scanners, all that stuff gets smaller and smaller before we know it we're gonna have a tricorder that can just scan somebody and tell you what's wrong, right? So that's number one. #2, AI does have potentials to do really powerful things, but really right now, the way that it works with machine learning, and with large language models, what it's really good at is taking lots of text, understanding it, and breaking it down for people. And like, that's what we can use it for right now. You have medical records are ridiculous, like I work on the side. I do legal nurse consulting for law firms, and this is just so I can read and translate medical records for people. Be like, this is what happened based off of what is written. I just watched the funny video on what NPO means, nothing by mouth, but like NPO that doesn't mean nothing by mouth. We're still using Latin. So normal humans don't understand this stuff, right? And we can use AI to easily translate that into digestible, very low reading level ways to help them better understand what's happening to them and not scare them with all of our jargon.
12:30 - Janae Sharp: So that's something vital does really well, like translate those medical records into like human language, right?
12:36 - Michael Rogozinski: Correct, yes, one of the things, yes.
12:38 - Janae Sharp: What else are you guys using AI for?
12:41 - Michael Rogozinski: Well, so we're really supercharging your experience. So you're getting a better understanding of the entire patient journey while you're in the hospital. That starts with making it very easy to access. So you can have the coolest piece of technology on the planet, but if nobody's looking at it, who cares, right? So we have a very low threshold. We make it very easy. There's no app to download. There's no username and password. You don't have to logins that your kid's never going to sign up for, right? And that you're gonna forget the password and all that other stuff, right? So none of that. We take that out of the way so that people can actually use it. We give AI generated wait times. Now, this usually makes people a little nervous, but these things are super cool and maybe if we have a chance to talk again, I can bring in one of my colleagues to talk about how cool these things are. They're individualized. They're based not only on the facility, but the people who are in the facility, what your clinical presentation is in the emergency department. If you have 30 people in your waiting room, 30 different people are gonna see a different wait time based off of their own personal journey. We also help you understand your lab work. We give context. A lot of our EMRs have patient portals and they're great, but really they're just displaying numbers. And most people, again, unless you went to med school or nursing school, you don't know what these lab results mean and it's just red or green and is this bad. So we give you context and we do that in any language as well, which is another big thing, right?
14:12 - Janae Sharp: Oh that's great. That's great, yeah, so if you have a full Spanish speaker in your waiting room and their browser on their phone is set to Spanish, we'll automatically give them their experience in Spanish. They can also toggle between languages within the application. So really again breaking down those walls of communication. We can help translate radiology...
14:28 - Janae Sharp: I feel like we should take a pause for a minute and let's go back to something because I feel like we didn't take enough time to appreciate that. People go to the doctor and you can't be late, and then you wait forever. Right. Like I always say this, like, I don't care about your AI blah, blah, blah. What I wanna do is be able to go to the doctor and have it not be an absolute living nightmare. Like, I don't want you gonna have to wait forever, not know what's gonna happen. And then every step of the way, you're like, OK, what's next? So if you could just see it, just like, imagine scheduling something and it's easy and great, and they actually meet your needs like.
15:17 - Michael Rogozinski: I mean, you nail, you nailed the heart of it, right? Uncertainty is the core of fear. And that's what we do. Luckily, if you're going, if you have a sore throat and you're going to your doctor and you're annoyed that you have to wait cause you know you just need an antibiotic, that's one thing. If you don't know what's wrong with you, and you're waiting, and no one is addressing you, these are compounding factors that drive real fear in people, and that is crazy. People are afraid to go to the doctor because of experience that they had before. Like, we're doing it wrong, if that's how people feel. So again, you have to let them understand what's happening to them in the moment. It has to be real time. This is not go home, log in, and then get to see your lab work in retrospect. This is, you should know what's happening now. Know that they're running tests in the background. That's another thing, right? You sit in your room for two hours and quote unquote, no one has come in to check on me. Meanwhile, they've run 10 different labs on you in the background, but you don't know because no one has come in and told you that. So now you can. Now, you can look at your phone and it says, OK, 4 of your 6 labs are complete. Here are your results. Here's what they could mean. Make sure you don't leave. Just because, and like, there's other things too. Maybe you don't wanna show a patient that they do have cancer. So you can filter results like that, right? Like you don't want anybody, we can be very sensitive and thoughtful about how we do this, how it makes a difference for patients and how it makes a difference for clinicians, and AI helps you. Like, it boils down that ton of information into digestible bites. I mean, that's just, it makes sense.
17:02 - Janae Sharp: So it sounds like you guys started with the patient and then built backwards.
17:07 - Michael Rogozinski: It is the thing, I will tell you I'm not sure, you're right, you're absolutely right. I, you nailed it. It's, you never asked me why I left the hospital space and came back.
17:18 - Janae Sharp: Yeah, tell us about your journey out.
17:20 - Michael Rogozinski: Yeah, well, it wasn't my plan, and there's certain things that I really miss about working in a hospital environment. But when I met this company, I met them at a conference. And I met the founder, who was giving me a demo of this. And I said, out of all the tech that I've seen at this conference, all of it, and I mean all of it, and I saw a lot of it. This is the only one built for patients. Everything else is built for, OK, this is something your nurse can use to make this happen, or this is something that your billing department can use to make sure that whatever they're getting the right insurance or whatever. All great stuff. But it never seemed to have the patient at the center. And it always had revenue at the center or clinician care delivery at the center, all good stuff again, but when you put the patient at the center and engage the patient at the center, it's remarkable what comes out of that. And that really, I was like this is so cool, like this is so cool. I want my family to have something like this. And through a series of very fortunate events for me, I was able to come and work for them and add some of my insight and help spread the word about what kind of cool stuff like this is out there.
18:35 - Janae Sharp: Yeah, I think it's awesome. I like also that focus and I think it's so important to involve clinicians, you know, they seduced you out. They seduced you to the technology side and here we are, with some really smart people, smartest people I've ever met in real life. It's rough. It's remarkable.
19:02 - Michael Rogozinski: Now, we'll send them that clip. Yeah, that's right, right. We'll send them that and be like, well, no pressure, but you're the smartest people. The expectations are way up here. I'm really only talking about like two of them. We won't go over which two those are, but I have one question for you, like as we're wrapping up, like what do you see is like the most exciting advancement to come? Like what do you think is the change that healthcare is looking for? Tell us the good news that's coming.
19:35 - Michael Rogozinski: So, can I answer it in two different ways. I think through again, this rapid iteration and this rapid improvement and these small cycles of improvement on existing technology. We are at a low point for clinicians in how hard their jobs are. We are burning through doctors, nurses, they're all looking to find something else to do, we've made it too hard and it's not sustainable. I think the good news and what's coming. Things will get easier. We're going to have tools that are gonna help leaders understand staffing better, make better staffing decisions. I think we're gonna have tools that help on the diagnostic side of things. They're gonna make a doctor's job a lot easier. See, they have pressure. They wanna run every test on you that they have to make sure that they don't miss anything, but they have other pressure from insurance companies, payers, administration that say you can't just CAT scan everybody, right? So we'll have better, safer and quicker ways to alleviate that worry in the position that they missed something, but also on the financial side of that, be able to like have it be sustainable. I think that future state is coming. I think that on the other side, I think that data is going to be the single biggest and greatest commodity on the planet if it isn't already. When you go to the hospital, you create data, you create a path of data that follows you for your entire life. And what we can do now is we can take that data and we can aggregate it, and we can chop it up and look at it a billion different ways using artificial intelligence and other means. And we can start to make, we can start to see things in certain populations of people. Now we all know that if you're 70 years old and diabetic, these are certain things that can happen to you. But we don't know if you're 70 years old and diabetic and live in Japan versus Moscow versus Austin, Texas. What the differences are, but now we can start to do that. So what we'll be able to do over time is create not a health plan, but a life plan for people. So based off of comparing you across billions of people, you line up with all of these things. This is your age, this is where you live. Take them all like hundreds of thousands of data points and probably be able to predict when you're gonna die. I mean, it's crazy stuff, right? Like this is, now we've moved from Star Trek to Gattaca. We're ready. Yeah, yeah, but it's real. I mean, it's on the horizon and what's really cool about that is if we do it right, and if we care about people, we continue to care about people in the middle of it. We're gonna design health plans or life plans for people that improve wellness. So what I'd love to see is let's move away from hospital care and that kind of traditional model, and let's get people better in their houses, helping them make better decisions from the time they're 13. I mean, kids are on smartphones at 8. Let's help them make better decisions at 8 years old rather than wait until they're 80 and give them a pill. And I think that if and when we do that and if we do it right, we're gonna change the health of the world, of humans as a whole, and I don't know, it's certainly not gonna be in my lifetime, but soon and it's all relative, but soon, that's gonna be, I think the future of health.
23:24 - Janae Sharp: I like that, that's a positive future. It's a good outlook. Well, thank you so much today for sharing your story and your time.
23:32 - Michael Rogozinski: Sure, it's my pleasure.
23:33 - Janae Sharp: Well, I appreciated your insights and your sharing your journey as a nurse leader and now a technology leader, and I'd love for you to share, how can people get in touch with you? What's next? When will we see you next?
23:46 - Michael Rogozinski: Sure, well, Janae, it's lovely talking to you as well. This is a pleasure for me. I do work for vital.io. If you just Google Vital, lots of stuff comes up, but if you type in vital.io, you can see the two of them. I'm not naming names, and I didn't see Duffy. I love her. Yeah, yeah, we have amazing people that work at this company and our website has all the information. My, it's my name, so Michael.Rogozinski@vital.io. Please email me. I'm happy to have more conversations, happy to answer questions for folks. And I just, I really love this. I think it's a company that cares about people and I want that. It's fulfilling and it makes me happy to do it, so.
24:43 - Janae Sharp: Awesome. Well, it's good to see also when technology is meeting the needs of patients and making nurses happy. That's, we didn't touch a lot on it, but that's huge. That's huge. If your technology is cool, but your nurses don't like it, don't matter. So it's great to see you and I want to thank you for your time.
25:06 - Michael Rogozinski: All right, have a great one.
25:07 - Janae Sharp: You too.
25:10 - Narrator: Thank you for joining us on Digital Health Talks, where we explore the intersection of healthcare and technology with leaders who are transforming patient care. This episode was brought to you by our valued program partners. Automation Anywhere, revolutionizing healthcare work flows through intelligent automation. Nara, advancing contactless vital signs monitoring. Elite groups delivering strategic healthcare IT solutions. Cello, securing healthcare identity management and access governance. Your engagement helps drive the future of healthcare innovation. Subscribe to digital Health Talks on your preferred podcast platform. Share these insights with your network and follow us on LinkedIn for exclusive content and updates. Ready to connect with healthcare technology leaders in person? Join us at the next health impact event. Visit Heimpactforum.com for date and registration. Until next time, this is digital Health Talks, where change makers come together to fix healthcare.