Kent Gale, Founder and Chairman, KLAS Enterprises, Chapter 1

If you ask Kent Gale what he thought KLAS would look like in 2016, he envisioned a room with 10 people “high-fiving each other after we got some great information.” What he never imagined was having the CEOs of the top health IT companies flying into town in corporate jets for a summit, or lawyers threatening to shut down his shop. No doubt it’s been quite a ride for the founder of KLAS, has has become an industry presence that is looked upon to rate the best vendors. In this interview, Gale talks about how KLAS was conceptualized, the early tweaks that ended up being game-changers, and how he leveraged his relationships to get providers talking. He also discusses his passion for interoperability, what he loves most about his job, and the role that mission work plays in his life.

Chapter 1



* Working with Sunquest in the mid-90s

* The concept: “A company that transparently measured how well vendors kept their promises.”

* Recruiting Leonard Black & Scott Holbrook

* Building a provider database — “It’s a great symbiotic relationship.”

* From 130 questions to 30

* Vendor pushback — “This data has absolutely no value if there’s bias.”



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Bold Statements

I wondered if other companies made decisions that were poor for the customer, and nobody knew it until it actually hit the customer. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a company that monitored whether companies kept their commitments to their customers.

They were not getting anything out of this initially, but I promised them that as we gathered research, we would turn around and give it back to them. And that model works really well today where we have tens and thousands of providers who share with us their opinions, and in return, we give them free access to what we’ve found.

There is no lack of energy in this industry for us to go measure, and we’re just sprinting. It’s probably one of the more thrilling times that I’ve ever known and I’ve been in the industry for almost 40 years.

Some of the vendors that have paid KLAS by far the most money have never scored very well. And that’s not good news because I’d rather that everybody up their game and do a great job, but at least it validates that you can pay a lot of money and it won’t move your score.

When they come and sit down with us, we are brutally honest with them about what we’ve found. We watch for the vendors who have an appetite to get better to help their customers succeed.

Gamble:  What I’d like to do first is get into the history of KLAS and talk about how this came about. So first, can you talk about what you had been doing at the time that this came together?

Gale:  Back in the mid-1990s, I was working for a company called Sunquest. We had over 1,000 hospitals — most of the larger hospitals had Sunquest for their lab system, and Sunquest was expanding into orders, physician orders, clinical event monitoring and stuff like that. So it was an exciting future. At the same time, there was a move inside of Sunquest where the owner was going to take the company public and divest himself of the company.

As that was transpiring, I was on the management team, and we were debating how do you structure the financial side of the company so it’s as healthy as possible, and what could be done to make it look even healthier. And as part of conversation, there was a discussion that maybe there were some things we ought to stop doing, and some of those things I thought related to quality. As we had that conversation, I wondered if other companies made decisions that were poor for the customer, and nobody knew it until it actually hit the customer. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a company that monitored whether companies kept their c...