How symplr’s Chief Product Officer is driving smarter, more connected healthcare operations
When Scott Sbihli reflects on his career in healthcare technology, one principle stands out: the patient experience should never require filling out the same form ten times. It’s a simple frustration that reveals a complex problem—one that has defined his journey to becoming Chief Product Officer at symplr, where he’s focused on transforming healthcare operations through more connected, standardized ways of working.
“Even if you go in for something simple, like you think you sprained your ankle, you end up seeing four different providers in four different departments within just a few hours,” Scott explains, drawing from his own recent experience. “That continuity of care—when you walk into the next appointment and they already know who you are, your history, your allergies—becomes really, really important.”
This patient-centered perspective fuels symplr’s mission to bring essential operational workflows together, so healthcare organizations can reduce fragmentation and make better decisions.
The Journey to Unify Healthcare Operations
Scott’s path to symplr represents decades of experience across the healthcare technology landscape—from medical devices with GE Healthcare to serving provider and payer organizations. Throughout his career, he’s focused on solving meaningful business problems through product management and innovation.
What drew him to symplr was its unique focus on healthcare operations—the critical workflows that keep hospitals and health systems running efficiently. About seven years ago, Scott made a defining career decision: he would dedicate the rest of his professional life to healthcare technology. That commitment brought him to symplr, where he saw an opportunity to tackle operational challenges that span teams, systems, and facilities—problems other companies weren’t addressing at scale.
Innovation Through AI and Solution Integration
For Scott, innovation in healthcare technology isn’t about buzzwords—it’s about solving real problems with the right tools. Today, those tools are more powerful than ever.
“The combination of cloud computing and integration between all these different systems is getting better and better,” he notes. “It allows you to create workflows and data sharing in a way that makes healthcare easier to provide to patients.”
Scott is particularly excited about agentic AI—artificial intelligence that can assist across multiple systems, help identify operation patterns, and support better decision-making. He offers a concrete example: “If you have a series of systems whose data is exposed, agentic AI could assist a risk manager at a hospital. If something that happened to a patient—a slip and fall—is actually part of a broader pattern, the AI agent helps discover those patterns so they get to a better outcome and spend less time with the computer.”
However, Scott remains realistic about timelines. “People say AI is going to revolutionize everything in the next two years. That might be true, but I think the time span is actually going to be longer.”
What makes symplr’s approach different is how it connects workflows and data across healthcare operations, rather than optimizing one isolated application at a time. Traditional healthcare technology companies focus on single-purpose tools, while symplr focuses on how work gets done end to end.
“I don’t think you can be successful anymore by saying you have a single application that doesn’t talk to other applications,” Scott explains. “One of the things that makes symplr unique is instead of just being an expert in one area, we have a suite of products that, when combined through the platform, create better outcomes for our customers.”
This integrated approach addresses real-world challenges like workforce management for nurses and physicians—a critical issue intensified since COVID-19. “If you don’t optimize it, you end up paying too much over time, or you have to go to an agency, and the agency supplies somebody who’s much more expensive,” Scott explains. “Through AI and algorithms and our partnerships with customers, we’re finding ways to really reduce those costs.”
Strategic Decisions: Building from the Outside In
Transforming into a platform company requires more than technology—it demands cultural change. At symplr, that means becoming truly product-led.
“We’re product-led. We’re not product management-led,” Scott emphasizes. “When I think about a product-led company, I think about the product and the related customer experience as exactly the same thing.”
A product might have the best features and cutting-edge AI, but if it’s not coupled with excellent implementation, effective training, and responsive support, customers will consider it a failure.
“My teams are responsible for working cross-functionally to make sure the product features, the product marketing, how we price and package, how we deploy, configure, train, and support, create an awesome experience for our customers,” Scott explains.
This outside-in approach extends to product development itself. symplr maintains customer advisory boards for each product line and partners directly with customers during requirements gathering, user experience design, and testing.
“By getting your organization focused from the outside in and spending time with customers, co-creating and co-developing with them, you’re going to get to either the root of the problem or the solution much faster,” Scott says.
Preparing Teams for the Future
As symplr transforms, Scott is equally focused on transforming his teams. In a product-led company, product managers need more than technical skills—they need business acumen.
“In a product-led company, your responsibility level goes up. You are responsible for the business side of your product,” Scott notes. That includes pricing and packaging, growth targets, marketing collateral, and operational best practices.
To build these capabilities, symplr invests heavily in training. In 2026, teams will go through comprehensive courses on creating SaaS subscription models and developing pricing based on customer value.
But Scott also recognizes that no one stays at a single company for their entire career anymore. His goal is to ensure that everyone who works at symplr builds skills that will serve them long-term.
“We want to make sure that the people we’re building are getting opportunities to build their skill sets,” he says.
That includes hands-on experience with AI and large language models. Product teams use AI to develop better requirements and test cases. Technical writers use AI to generate first drafts of documentation. UX teams use tools that can sketch a design on paper and automatically generate wireframes or code.
“I think about all these modern skills and tools and making sure that our teams are not only doing this on behalf of symplr to have the best products, but also building their own skill sets to become better product leaders,” Scott says.
Advice for Future Healthcare Technology Leaders
When asked what advice he’d give to future leaders in healthcare technology, Scott doesn’t mince words.
“As people get older, they tend to change less,” he observes. “A mark of whether somebody is progressive at any age is how much they can adapt to what’s changing.”
Healthcare may change slowly due to regulation, but technology and its ability to solve problems is changing rapidly. Scott’s advice: don’t get so caught up in the business that you fail to understand fundamental new technologies.
“A lot of people are walking around saying ‘agentic AI’ and they have no idea what they’re talking about,” he notes. “For a healthcare leader, make sure you understand the technology and how it can apply to the problems you’re trying to solve as deeply as you think you understand your customers or the markets. You just have to keep up.”
Why symplr Offers Unique Opportunities
For professionals considering where to build their careers in healthcare technology, Scott believes symplr offers something competitors can’t match: the opportunity to solve bigger, more meaningful problems.
“We’re pretty unique in the industry at solving these healthcare operation problems,” he explains. “Given the fact that we have products that span payers and providers, credentialing, quality, workforce, contracting, and compliance—if you want to solve a bigger and more meaningful problem, you have to go to a company with some sense of scale and data.”
While many companies focus on electronic health records or revenue cycle management, symplr addresses challenges that are sometimes overlooked but critically important. The company’s partnerships with large hospital systems on workforce management exemplify this approach—tackling complex problems that require coordinated workflows, strong visibility, and trusted collaboration.
“It’s a pretty meaningful problem to solve because people like to have a great work-life balance,” Scott says. “We’ve got the right products, the right technology, and the right data sets to help automate and simplify that entire process.”
Building Healthcare’s Digital Future
As symplr continues to transform healthcare operations, Scott remains focused on the fundamentals: understanding customers deeply, applying technology thoughtfully, and building teams that can adapt to whatever comes next.
The challenges facing healthcare are immense—workforce shortages, rising costs, regulatory complexity, and the need to deliver better patient experiences. But Scott sees these challenges as opportunities for innovation and growth.
“At the end of the day, if we’re a healthcare technology company, all that matters is can you apply—and how do you apply—new technology to solve a novel healthcare problem,” he reflects.
For Scott Sbihli and the teams at symplr, that question guides the work they do every day: simplifying operations, reducing complexity, and helping healthcare organizations make meaningful progress at scale.
