Provation's new chief sales officer builds market strategy for new health care software

Bill Franck, Provation Medical's new chief sales officer, is helping to drive the go-to-market strategy for the health care software company and its expanding solutions.

Franck, who has nearly two decades of technology sales, client relations and customer-service experience, most recently was senior vice president and general manager of sales for Elsevier Health Sciences' nursing and allied health division.

Minneapolis-based Provation announced Franck's hiring in December.

Franck said Provation's mission statement — to empower providers to deliver quality health care for all — aligns with his commitment to serve others. That comes from growing up in a family of teachers, nurses, police officers and firefighters and serving seven years in the U.S. Army. He reached the rank of captain before beginning his sales career.

Provation, a leading provider of software and software-as-a-service solutions for clinical productivity, care coordination, quality reporting and billing, has been a market leader in procedure documentation for gastroenterology for 25 years.

Franck said the company is expanding to other clinical specialties, exploring opportunities with international providers and looking at how artificial intelligence and machine learning may help improve patient care. Provation in December launched an online clinical content shop that offers care plans for hundreds of conditions including COVID-19, according to a release.

Last year's acquisition of Santa Monica, Calif.-based ePreop gave Provation a cloud-based solution that Franck said simplifies clinical workflows and covers patient procedures from pre-operation through recovery and follow-up.

"[Franck] will play a vital role as we continue to grow the organization and add clinical productivity solutions to our software suite," Provation CEO Daniel Hamburger said in a release.

Q: How has the pandemic affected the way you and the sales team work?

A: It's changed the way we go to market. Clinical spaces really don't want external people coming in. We did a lot of training on different presentation skills and materials. You've got to be much faster, much more engaging. The way that we're going to sell into the hospital and clinical space for probably the next year or two is probably going to be much more of a virtual setting.

Q: What makes Provation's clinical productivity and other solutions a good choice for providers?

A: First and foremost, we have the deepest medical content behind our technology. The second is the ease of use of our platform for providers, really simple user experiences that we offer. A final thing is the patient focus: Patient-care plans, being able to help with instructions for the patient and the care coordination that ePreop now gives us is a key component of that. We were clinical focused and now we're bringing that patient engagement into the Provation world.

A: It was a good experience to learn leadership in a key way. I worked in special operations and in infantry units where you're constantly challenged with innovative ways to think about problems and solutions. I leveraged that early on. A key tenet that I still rely on is strategic planning, the ability to get everybody aligned, create a prioritization and strategic direction then at the same time be able to be agile and pivot.