Nick Stepro | 2024 Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

Nick Stepro

I grew up just north of Manchester, New Hampshire. I have bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Tufts University. Before stepping into my current role, I held multiple positions at Arcadia, including senior vice president of product management and vice president of product development.

I work with large health systems and payers to design, implement and execute innovative clinical integration and business intelligence strategies to drive improved health outcomes and reduced system costs. I also work with leading technology service organizations, such as Amazon Web Services, on initiatives that enable healthcare transformation at cutting-edge scale and pace. I am currently focused on evolving the architecture of Arcadia’s next-generation healthcare data platform to simplify the continuous acquisition and orchestration of petabytes of data and millions of patient records across the modern healthcare enterprise.

Please describe a turning point in your career — an event, a eureka moment, an encounter or a salient piece of advice from someone.

Early in my career, I devoted much of my time to implementing digital systems, like electronic health records. The industry converted paper work flows into digitized work flows but overindexed on putting data in, not getting insight out. Eventually, I helped customers figure out how to unlock data at scale and discovered amazing yields in terms of productivity improvements, identifying health disparities and creating long-term financial sustainability. Working closely with Michael Meucci, Arcadia’s current president and CEO, I led efforts to incubate an idea that would eventually become the company’s data analytics software platform.

What are your top two priorities as a leader in your organization and healthcare?

With 30% of all data coming from the healthcare industry — an amount that’s increased 5,000% since 2010 — efforts to harness, normalize and analyze vast volumes of health information require innovation beyond traditional tools. Under my leadership, Arcadia launched a next-generation healthcare data analytics platform in March of 2024 to further enhance healthcare organizations’ abilities to harness big data, accelerate digital transformation and more rapidly adopt generative AI solutions.

Second, as an innovative leader dedicated to fostering a culture of innovation, I have championed the creation of the organization’s AI innovation principles and rolled out foundational tooling across the business. My vision is to enable employees to focus on what matters most and use available tools and technology to increase productivity and reduce the time spent on repetitive
administrative tasks.

If you could change one thing about U.S. healthcare, what would it be?

Without question, reducing regulatory complexity and mandating meaningful data sharing. The pandemic put the industry closer to both, as an eye-opening moment that showed how quickly the industry can move when it needs to. However, too many innovators still face high barriers to entry and scale. Data is too siloed, and well-meaning regulations of quality and patient safety add friction.

Name a book or article that everyone working in healthcare should read.

“Stories From the Shadows: Reflections of a Street Doctor” by Jim O’Connell. One of my first customers was Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, an organization led by O’Connell that provides healthcare with humanity to some of the community’s most forgotten people. It’s easy to get lost in the complexities of the U.S. healthcare system and forget the people it’s built to serve. This collection of stories serves as a moving and inspiring reminder of
healthcare’s purpose.

How do you strike the right work-life balance?

I strive to stay flexible and listen and respond to how my brain is feeling. Instead of creating a strict on/off schedule, I listen closely to impulses and trust and respect that things will balance out. For example, I sometimes wake up on a Saturday morning itching to create new things and plug in to work. Other times, I find my mind tired and will take the afternoon off to work out, take a walk, or read the paper.

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why?

Many of history’s brilliant people did a pretty good job at writing stuff down. Instead of the opportunity to dine with a celebrity genius (Mozart, Einstein, etc.), I’d opt to get a bite with my late grandfather or grandmother and enjoy love-filled conversation.