Podcast Episode 19 - Holland Hubert Interviews Radnet President Steve Forthuber

Thank you, Holland. Very pleased to be here.

Well, you hit all the high notes. Steve Forthuber. I work at RadNet, and we're based in Los Angeles, California, and our Eastern headquarters is here in Baltimore, Maryland. We're on based.

My title is President and Chief Operating Officer of the East Region for RadNet. I'm obviously responsible for running all of our Eastern operations, which today are in Florida, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York, and it represents about 60% of the revenue for our company. So I'm ultimately accountable for everything that goes on there: our financial results, our quality, our patient satisfaction. But I spend most of my time with team building, strategy, direction, and vision for where we're heading with the Eastern Division of the company, and obviously for the overall company as well.

Well, my road map was somewhat accidental because I'm a business finance major out of college originally and didn't know much about the field of radiology when I started out. But I was hired by a company that did a lot of what's called practice management for radiologists, so that got me into the field. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to do more than the business side and wanted to understand more about the clinical side, and that's when I became involved with RadNet many, many years ago. It's been a very fulfilling career, not necessarily based on the same direction that your STEM students might follow, but it's again a very rewarding and fulfilling career knowing that you're helping to build and run a company that can have such a great impact on the lives of our patients and really be life-changing. So it's been a lot of fun.

Well, for me, again, a little different. I was in school in Virginia and I wanted to ideally live back up in Maryland where the rest of my family was. At that time, things were a lot different. Indeed, all these other things didn't exist back in the day. So I was working through some placement firms and headhunters, and they originally connected me with another company, a predecessor of RadNet. I really hit it off with them, liked the people, thought it was a great opportunity for me in my case to get into management at a very young age coming right out of school, and took the job and have loved it ever since. I was fortunate to have a lot of very influential mentors through my career as well.

Mentorship is vital. I'm worried that the younger generation, if I can say that being decidedly from an older generation, with remote working and even a little bit of hybrid working, more so the pure remote, I worry a lot that younger folks won't get that kind of mentoring that I think you need so much when you're first coming out of school, whatever type of school and education you're getting. So I do worry that folks that are completely remote might be missing out on that. I think even if it's just learning how to conduct yourself in the workforce, but certainly for me, I was much more fortunate both to have that but also people that were mentoring me in my chosen career path. I learned so much from them, even if it was just going out to lunch or going out to dinner and not when I was at work. So I think it's a very critical part. I would encourage everyone to seek out mentors, ask, spend time networking, getting to know people that can help you in life and in your career. Very, very valuable.

There are a number of things. A radiologist is the physician, so if somebody wants to follow the program and become a radiologist, that's the toughest path that we have in the sense that not only are you going to get your undergraduate degree, you're going to go to medical school, you're going to get a residency, probably a fellowship in this day and age. So it's a long path, but it's a very rewarding path. We think, maybe we're a little biased because we're in the field, that imaging radiology, what we call outpatient imaging, is the gateway to population health in terms of trying to treat broad populations, identify diseases early, preferably screen people early, particularly for cancers like breast cancer or prostate cancer, lung cancer. So if you can get to a large population, screen, diagnose disease early, it's much more treatable, better outcomes and quality of life, brings down the cost of care to our entire health systems. So we think radiology and radiologists play a critical role in the health system. I think with the advent of artificial intelligence, the field of radiology has become even more meaningful. But beyond being a radiologist, if you don't want to go all that way and become a physician, there are a lot of ways to go. Whether it's a technologist — you know, someone who actually does the scan. If you go to the doctor and need to have an X-ray, it's the technologist that's actually doing your scan. Later down the road, the radiologist is the person that's going to interpret that image and they're the ones then that will dictate a report of their findings that'll go to your referring physicians so that they can continue your course of treatment. But the technologist is critical to that whole process, and that is a fabulous career path that I think most younger people really don't know about. It's a very stable career, it's very fulfilling, it's very rewarding in terms of the earnings potential, the patient interaction, again the feeling that you're doing good for the community that you live in and that you work in. So that's a great career path. Our company actually owns three artificial intelligence companies doing clinical research with breast, lung, and prostate cancer as I mentioned earlier. So you can follow a path for a data scientist, you can get into data analytics. There are all sorts of jobs that aren't directly in the clinical side of medicine that can be pursued as well, whether it's in HR or marketing or patient-facing roles. So there's really a whole range of careers that again are very stable. Healthcare is not going away. It's a vital part of what we do, a huge part of our economy. So again, a stable career that's in demand, that you can have great earnings and a lot of career satisfaction knowing that again you're doing good for the community.

Wow.

Well, we are thrilled to be involved with Patriot. And as I understand it, we're going to have 30 students from Prince George's County. They're going to be involved in this program, and they're going to work with a whole range of team members here at RadNet that go across that whole spectrum of some of the career paths that I just mentioned. So they'll be mentored by these folks, and they'll learn a little bit more about those career paths. And at the end of that journey, each of these 30 students will present a five-minute presentation, and that'll be a little bit of a competition among the folks, and a nice dinner at the end of it. Our hope is that they will have learned a lot not only about that particular career path but again about themselves and where they want to take their lives.

I'm looking forward to it.

No problem, Holland. This is a wonderful, full use of my time. Very pleased that you asked me to participate.