Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, jokes that he was a disappointment to his parents. He went to college at the University of Texas with the goal of becoming a doctor. Instead, he was dazzled by technology.

"What I had was a real passion for how technology was impacting the world, and it was very exciting to me," Dell told Mark Barner, SVP and CIO of St. Louis-based Ascension in a keynote exchange before a packed ballroom at HIMSS16 earlier this month. "I think it’s more exciting now than it was then."

[Also: Dell buys EMC in $67B mega merger]

At the age of 19, Dell founded the company in his college dorm room with $1,000. Seven years later he became the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500.

Today, the company ranks No. 3 on Forbes list of America’s largest companies, with 100,000 employees and $59 billion a year in revenue.

Dell announced a few months ago its planned $67 billion acquisition of EMC -- billed as the largest technology deal ever -- and with it, control of VMware.

"That’s allowing us to create an even more impactful company," he told the audience at HIMSS16. "We’ll be able not only to address the IT of today, the data centers, the servers, the storage and virtualization, the PCs, the cloud software, but also the software of tomorrow."

Here are seven key takeaways we gleaned from Dell’s conversation with Barner.

On being ready for IT’s role in the future

"There’s something very big going on here. If you think about IT, for a long time it was, ‘how do you automate and make efficient existing processes.’ That’s really good. You have to do that. Put a checkmark next to that, it’s super important. However, with the explosion in the number of devices and in the amount of data that is now available from those devices, the real challenge is, how do you use that data in real time to make the product or the services better. In healthcare, that takes the form of genomics and molecular diagnostics and immunotherapy and all sorts of new areas that are targeted therapies that are affecting patient outcomes."

On how to fund digital transformation

"In every sector of the economy, there is that digital transformation that is going on. To fund that, you have to make the infrastructure more efficient to get to that innovation – and, of course, there’s kind of a parallel problem, which is as you create all these new devices, the attack surface from a security standpoint gets greater. What I see in terms of the innovation, the evolution is very much how does it become a digital industry.  And, how is all this information, data translated into better outcomes, better patient success."

On nurturing a culture of innovation

"At the core, it is culture. Innovation means accepting risk. Experiment. It means failure – and learning. So, you have to be able to not have everything succeed. So, you have to be careful when and where you apply that, because certainly in a care-giving environment, you don’t want to have everybody innovating on everything. But, there is a time and a place for smart risk-taking that allows for innovation. To be able to drive innovation, you have to embrace risk in a positive way."

On how to fund innovation

"One of the big challenges is how do you create a funding mechanism for these new areas. All organizations face this. The only answer we found is you’ve got to make the existing infrastructure more efficient to create a funding mechanism. It’s not easy in healthcare. I think you have to go back and look at the infrastructure – and squeeze cost out of the existing infrastructure to fund the future. "

On the alchemy of creating new products

"It comes in large measure in listening and learning. We have about 2 billion conversations a year with customers in a variety of formats. The challenge for us – as it is for any organization – is how do you take those 2 billion interactions and turn them into actionable data that allow us to make our products and services better. And, increasingly, how do we do it in real time.

[Also: See our big gallery of HIMSS16 photos]

"The sort of magic in creating new solutions is you have to understand everything that you’re interpreting from the customers, but also – at the ingredient level – what’s happening. The magic is putting those together and creating the winning solution for the future."

On keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive

"I think you have to inspire with the exciting vision and mission of what you want to accomplish and engage them in the awesomeness of what you want to achieve on behalf of customers in the world. When you’re in the technology sector, we’re pretty fortunate to be enabling some pretty incredible things. That in itself is very inspiring. Our culture is fast-paced. It’s results-oriented, customer-oriented. It kind of listens and learns."

On data security

"Every device in the hospital is a digitally connected device. The attack surface grows exponentially. A lot of these attacks will come in via a fairly innocuous email that somebody clicks on. We see many organizations pretty unprepared for this. There’s been a rise in ransomware attacks. I think you’re going to see technologies like micro-segmentation – how you can micro-segment your network so you don’t have vulnerability across your entire network. With micro-segmentation, you can tremendously increase your security."

Twitter: @Bernie_HITN