Jon McNeill speaks at HIMSS26.
Photo: Jessica Hagen/MobiHealthNews
LAS VEGAS – At the 2026 HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exposition on Tuesday here, keynote speaker Jon McNeill, CEO of DVx Ventures, former president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, discussed mastering both scaling and innovation even when the ecosystem is stacked against you.
McNeill said that although the healthcare sector is different from the car industry, the framework, principles and processes are still valuable in the space.
"At Tesla, there's no center of innovation. There are no innovation teams. The belief is that everybody is innovation, but innovation is a framework. There's a framework that drives it, and internally that framework is called the algorithm. It's an always-on systems driven by leadership, and you practice this weekly," McNeill said.
The framework of changing starts with simplification. He said complexity is not the same as necessity, and simplification is synonymous with innovation because innovators are always uncovering new ways of doing things.
Humans naturally complicate, McNeill said. Simplicity takes work.
When changes haven't been made in decades in an industry, such as healthcare or the car industry, it can be difficult to make changes, McNeill said.
"Your goal shouldn't be to improve patient satisfaction. It shouldn't be to deploy AI. Instead, it should be to reduce diagnosis by 50%, diagnosis cycle times. It should be to cut patient throughput time in half. Occupation through quick time impact," he said.
A company has to have clear and aggressive metrics and must know that everyone understands both, he said. Simplify the goal and what problem you are trying to solve.
Understanding where the friction exists in a process pertaining to a specific sector is essential as well.
McNeill said Tesla focused on the software aspect of the car rather than the hardware, and the motto was "Make it simple, question every requirement and ask why."
"You've got to question every requirement, even if it's offensive. I put [a] question on for weeks and probably cost us weeks of being up to the edge of going bankrupt. But the first step of the algorithm is just that question. You have to remove and relentlessly take these requirements out, and once you do that, you're on your way to simplification," McNeill said.
Removing requirements helps you simplify, he said. Once that happens, delete every step possible in the process and automate last.
McNeill said he has a controversial belief that you have to cut aggressively and then you can add back 10% of the steps you cut in order to turn things into a simple process.
After clarifying and questioning, optimize the manual process. He said good, fast and cheap are important. You can't get speed without quality.
Next comes automation. If you do automation first, it slows the process down, McNeill said.
Therefore, there is a framework one should follow, he said. The first step is to expand the definition of a product to include the customer's definition from the beginning to the outcome, McNeill said. The next steps are to inject urgency and accountability.
Lastly, "eat your own dog food," McNeill said. Experience firsthand what you are offering with a feedback loop, as "feedback is extremely important."
