“We need to drive down costs while improving patient experience”: Prof Mohanbir Sawhney in candid conversation with Venky Ananth

Venky

Thank you for joining us. First off, how are you doing?

Prof. Sawhney

I'm doing well. Just recovering from travel which has started again after the pandemic. So it's been busy but good.

Venky

Awesome. Always good to be busy. Look, we're in an interesting time in the healthcare industry. Enough has been talked about the constant escalation of cost in health care. Every player in the market and we're looking at a vertical stack from the payer, the provider, PBMs, employers - everybody is working towards how do you drive down cost while enhancing experience for all the patients and members, if you will. And then we have players like Google and Apple and Amazon trying to come at it from a technology perspective, trying to drive that change to make it better. But then reality is that the patient or the consumer is never really having that kind of a true consumer experience that we all have got used to with an Apple or an Amazon kind of an experience. It's still glitchy, it's fragmented, it's frustrating, especially at a time when we are vulnerable. When you're seeking access to healthcare, it's the most frustrating part. And so how do you see this all come together? Because enough has been talked about it. But the pace of change seems to be slow. And while technology exists and seems to exist all around us, it seems to be elusive when we need it the most.

Venky

So I just want to hear from you Dr. Sawhney. What do you think about it?

Prof. Sawhney

I think healthcare is not only the most important industry just from a GDP percentage of GDP standpoint, just a lot of money spent. But it to me is unique in that the returns that we are getting as patients, as providers doesn't match the investments that are being put in. So something's missing between the enormous amount of money being spent by the government and by patients and by employers versus the outcomes that we're getting from a customer experience standpoint. And I really think that this stack that you talked about the patient really is the last leg of this stack and it's almost an afterthought. And I'm truly, as a customer, beginning to appreciate why it's called a patient. Because you have to be very patient to be able to get access to, even to even do primary care. So I think that the customer experience, if you can call it that, is truly broken. Transparency is also missing. We don't know how costs are ultimately reflected and passed on to employers and to customers. So that's the kind of unique challenge of the healthcare industry that on the one hand, it is so important. Every one of us is a customer.

Prof. Sawhney

It's most needed when we are in crisis. And there is a huge promise of technology because ultimately, healthcare, you look at the industry, it is data, it's information, it's workflow, its processes. So theoretically, we should be able to automate and streamline and drive productivity like we've done in other industries. But the institutional complexity, the regulatory complexity, the relationship complex relationships between payers and providers and patients and employers, plus the need for privacy and HIPAA and so on when you put all of this together and add to the fact that the systems that the health care providers and payers have had in place are archaic or monolithic or brutal all this is conspiring to create a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. So that's sort of the glass half empty part of the argument. The glass half full is this tremendous opportunity to innovate, to reimagine what health care delivery could look like, what that experience could look like, to create a truly patient, patient centered outcome. But it's going to take a lot of hard work and heavy lifting and you can't really nibble away at this problem at the edges, which a lot of players have tried to do.

Prof. Sawhney

So you can solve bits and pieces of this problem, but you really, truly need to take an integrated approach. And that requires a lot of deep domain expertise in working through some of the hard problems of infrastructure in order to fix this. It's like rewiring an entire industry. And that takes time, it takes effort, it takes patience, it takes money, and it takes a lot of experience in the industry to do it right.

Venky

So that's a great segue to my next question. Technology platforms, a topic that's very passionate. I've seen you our videos, how you talk about the power of network effects and how you can bring together multiple ecosystems to come together and unlock value. Personally, from my perspective, I'm very passionate about platforms. In fact, at Infosys, we are building our own platform for Helix, for the healthcare industry to essentially drive this network effect, build composable business capabilities that we just spoke about, hard problems to solve, boring problems of the legacy that you need to conquer to actually deliver that experience and effect that we all seek. So I just want to hear from you where you see the applicability of platforms and do you think that's going to accelerate the journey that we are in to see a far better experience in the healthcare industry? From a patient perspective, if you think.

Prof. Sawhney

About technology businesses, they tend to be platform businesses. If you look at some of the major players, whether it's Google or Microsoft or a Facebook or an Apple, there are all platform companies. And the interesting thing about platforms is that platforms and ecosystems are joined at the hip because the reason that a platform exists is because it provides a way to orchestrate multiple ecosystem players, multiple parties on a common workflow, common data, common rules of engagement, contracting standards, and so on. So I think we do need to take a systemic approach to solving the healthcare industry's problem. And a systemic approach means it has to be an ecosystem level approach, means it has to bring all of the parties and stakeholders involved in a unified way. And that requires platform thinking. That really requires sort of a common infrastructure, common workflows, common data models so that we can all sort of plug in and hook up. And we've seen the power of these platforms in the context of, say, ERP, enterprise software, where creating a single version of the truth, creating a kind of a common enterprise architecture, allowed the Sips and Oracles of the world to really build a lot of sort of efficiency at scale.

Prof. Sawhney

But now these platforms need to be reimagined at the industry level because we've talked talk about platforms as horizontals, we've talked about them as sort of capabilities that cut across industries. But now I think customers are saying, listen, I can't eat platforms for lunch. I need a solution to my industry problem. So I see a very big movement on the verticalization of platforms, on building industry specific platforms. And that is something that traditionally the platform technology companies have not been good, I have not been interested in. They say we are arms dealers. We build the basic components, and then you do what you want with them. But I think that the customers are demanding more. So you really need to now build industry logic, industry workflows, and domain expertise, and to build industry specific platforms like transportation industry.

Venky

Would you categorize that the Uber experience that we've all got used to would be a vertical industry platform that's kind.

Prof. Sawhney

Of yeah, I think that starts to get there because they didn't look at transportation in general with the ride sharing experience, and they built a platform around that. They're attempting to do the same thing now in transporting goods with Uber freight, where again, you're bringing shippers and the providers or LTL companies together. So, yeah, I think at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is you're trying to craft an ecosystem. You're trying to build an ecosystem. I think Tesla has been able to do the same thing in the context of electric vehicles. They are really part of the problem systemically between the charging infrastructure, the battery, and all of the elements that need to come together. Because without that, you can have a great electric car, but if you don't know where to charge it, if you don't know where to get it serviced, and if it doesn't go more than 100 miles, then you've got a problem. So that's the approach we need to take. We need to take a systemic approach and we really need to think about the industry workflows in a lot of depth. And I think very few organizations have that depth of industry knowledge and have, you know, I like to say that a lot of people can do brainstorming, but Body Storming is a whole different deal, right?

Prof. Sawhney

Which means you have not only thought about the pain, but you've experienced the pain. So I think that in that context, emphasis has an edge because you've been working with healthcare payers and providers for a long time. They trust you. They have the relationships where the bodies are buried, you know, where the challenges are, what are the nuances and the complexity. Because as they say, that in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. But in practice there is. That is where the rubber meets the road. And that reimagination will require a strong understanding of legacy, but also an innovative point of view about the future.

Venky

Yeah, I mean, that's the capability that we are leaning on, because now we are abstracting all the learnings because the legacy still has a lot of business rules and processes. So you need to abstract them, but then build them as composable business objects. Then you can start putting them together and reimagining how you would want it to be, which is really what you were talking about. Fantastic.

Let me shift gears. Let me talk about we recently announced between Kellogg and Emphasis, a very interesting program, about uplifting about 600 talent from an AI perspective in the context of business. So what's the vision of the program and what do we aim to achieve? And do you think this is something that is scalable? And also we can democratize the power of AI in the context of businesses globally.

Prof. Sawhney

So if you see what is happening in the world of AI, which is a transformative technology, I personally feel that the technology leads or is ahead of the business and organizations. So the gating factor today is not algorithms, it is not computational capacity. It is the ability of large established organizations to change and to really kind of harness the power of this technology. As Einstein said, intellect is a great horse to ride, but somewhere so you're going to have to find the so I think that I created a program about three years ago where the whole intent was AI for business leaders, right? So I'm not going to teach you algorithms. I hope you understand that. But I'm going to speak to business leaders who are asking so what? And now what? How do we actually harness the potential of AI to drive business value, to drive change and to actually drive results? And that requires putting on your strategic hat, that requires understanding the business case for AI and it requires you to understand how to do change management, build the capabilities and so on. So that was a course I designed as well, AI for business leaders.

Prof. Sawhney

Now this is cross industry and we sort of market the course to people who come from different industries, different countries. But then I was approached by Infosys and they wanted they saw value in upskilling their consultants who are going to be in clients facing functions to get a deeper understanding of the business conversation they needed to have and just the technical conversation. However, they wanted a specific spin on it. They wanted some customization to the Infosys contracts. So we came up with a hybrid model where the Cohorts from Infosys go through the general program where they are in touch with other participants from other industries. But we layer on top of that a capstone project that is specific to emphasis which I personally guide the Cohorts through those through live sessions. So it's a combination of asynchronous content, live sessions with the general Cohort, but live sessions with me where we do Sprints and we do Infoys specific clients, specific problems. So now this is scalable because a significant percentage of that content or the experience is still asynchronous and it's video content and so on. So that can scale but at the same time get the benefit of being sort of one on one and live interaction.

Prof. Sawhney

So I believe that this is in some ways the future of executive education where we're getting the best of both worlds, the sort of exposure to the best practices, but then also the industry overlay. And in a funny way it's like the platform conversation we were having because what we have in the general program is the general platform but then we're building the industry specific verticalization, in fact in this company specific verticalization. So I'm pretty excited about this partnership and I think that it can be scaled together.

Venky

It's exciting and like I said, there seems to be the future of education, especially executive education, which education for all of us is a journey, right? It's never that you're done with it. And this seems to be the future.

Prof. Sawhney

In terms of exactly. Because learning is now a lifelong endeavour.

Venky

Exactly.

Prof. Sawhney

And also I think there are two additional things that people are asking for. They're asking for more convenience on demand because I'm working and I can't take two years off and go to an MBA. And also the price points need to be more affordable. So by improving accessibility, by improving convenience, by providing education on demand, by using a combination of the digital and the in person or physical. I think this is an innovative new model, and this is the learning that we took from the pandemic right? And where we were forced to go virtual. So now we're trying to take the best of both worlds and put it together in a way that creates the best learning experience.

Venky

Wonderful. Thank you so much for your thoughts. Clearly, Dr. Sawhney is setting the pace for change, and as in paid sectors, the team is how do you push down, how do you drive innovation, how do you make it real, and how do you get it to the grassroots level so that you drive change at scale? So thank you so much for sharing your thoughts today, and I truly appreciate you coming down here to meet us.

Prof. Sawhney

My pleasure. Look forward to continuing the conversation and the journey together.

Venky

Thank you. Thank you very much. You.