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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Ashok Chennuru, Chief Data & Digital Transformation Officer at Elevance Health
00:16:37
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Transcript9 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker's Healthcare podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by somebody who's had an extraordinary leadership career. We're joined today by Ashok Chenaroo. And Ashok has he had this career at Elevance Health that is unparalleled in today's world. He's been there for about 20 years now, I think. He serves currently as the Chief Data and Digital Transformation Officer but but is really part of the integral to everything leadership yet Elevance. Ashok, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Elevance and what you do?
- [00:37]
B
Yeah. Great. Thank you Scott. Really appreciate having me today on your show. It's a pleasure to be here. So, yeah, like you said, I serve as the Chief Data and Digital Transformation Officer at Elevance Health. We support consumers, families and communities across the healthcare journey through our care lawn and our health plan divisions. We touch over 115 million members, including about 45 million through our health plans. As you can imagine, that means anything we build or operate, we have to do it at scale. Our focus is we connect our members to care and support and the resources they need to lead better lives. At Elevance, I am focused on leading the transformation of healthcare through data, digital innovation and intelligent platforms. My work centers on appropriately unlocking the power of real time data driven insights, automation and interoperability to drive better health for the people we serve, while keeping the privacy and the security of the data as a top priority. I'm also passionate about building scalable, secure solutions that connect data to action, whether that's enabling more proactive care, improving risk and cost management, and enhancing the member and provider experience while providing the best quality of care in partnership with our providers. At the core of our strategy is a shift from retrospective data and insights to real time on near real time AI driven decision making through platforms like HELP OS and other enterprise initiatives. My goal is to ensure that the data and the insights we produce are done in an appropriately and secure manner and truly used to make health care smarter, faster and more human centered to enhance the health care experience and help people to lead healthier lives.
- [02:58]
A
Thank you. And talk about in the peer world and what you do, some of the key trends that you're watching currently. Talk a little bit about some of the key trends that you're watching.
- [03:09]
B
Yeah, absolutely Scott. Part of sitting in my role, I get to see the industry trends, whether it's from a payer lens or a provider lens because as you know, it's a connected ecosystem. And one of the exciting parts of my work is to see how we are helping to make healthcare simpler, more connected and more personalized. Our goal is to help people to get care they need, when they need it, without unnecessary complexity. Because finding care and getting care approved or making sure that our members, that we understand the holistic view of the members is very critical. One of the, at least the aspect of that, very proud of building is our core cloud native AI driven data platform that hosts over 220 million lives of rich data. And when you have data that is of such scale, we can enable AI or digital tools on the data to help navigate from finding the right doctor to understanding the cost. We are helping members make informed choices. We are also using these tools to support care providers. We work to reduce paperwork and streamline processes so care providers can focus more on patient care. I know Scott, with all the connections and the different leaders you bring to the table, focusing on admin burden and how can we streamline a lot of those capabilities is something that's a very high priority for us. But making it more transparent, making it more through partnerships is something that we are working very closely with. Care providers, digital tools and AI are helping us to personalize experiences more for consumers. And data driven insights helps us to connect people with care that fits into their unique needs. What I mean by that is because we have so much data that's structured and unstructured and we can create these insights and personalize them for that particular member and then push it into the workflow, whether it's our Sydney app which is consumer facing or even integrate with other third party apps, but also push the same insights into the EMR workflow too. Because our goal is because we have more data from a whole person perspective and we can generate insights, gaps in care, drug, drug interactions, all of those and push them back into the EMR workflow so the providers can leverage the data to make the right decisions as they are taking care of the patient. And through these tools we are helping proactively, like I mentioned, close gaps in care and AI is helping us to identify opportunities to support healthier outcomes earlier through a lot of our disease progression models. So we can provide this proactive insights, you know, both to our consumers and the providers. By securely bringing this data together, we can build robust systems and appropriately deliver these insights into the right stakeholders. And that should include like our care providers and consumers, but also to our internal associates, including our care managers and our call center representatives who are also interacting with the members. So, so all of them are looking at the same data and insights so we are consistent across the ecosystem. The combination of strong and secure data infrastructure and responsible application of AI helps to improve access to care, address affordability and deliver better and more connected care experiences. We apply strict standards to maintain confidentiality of personal information and we use physical, technological and administrative safeguards to protect it. PHI is governed by HIPAA and will be handled in accordance with all the applicable privacy and security rules related to use and storage. Then finally, as it relates to AI, we have implemented a responsible AI program informed by NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the national association of Insurance Commissioners designated to mitigate harmful bias and promote accuracy, security and transparency. Thank you.
- [08:07]
A
Thank you. And Ashok tell us you've built this great, great career at Elevance. I'm going to ask you two questions. One, what are you most excited about currently and focused on currently? And then second, advice you would give to emerging leaders on building great careers. I know you're part of a family where your wife is also a brilliant oncologist, has also built a brilliant career. What advice would you give to emerging leaders and people trying to have great careers? And then what are you most focused on and excited about this year?
- [08:41]
B
Yeah, thank you Scott. I'll start with what I'm most focused and excited about and also what we have delivered in the last six to 18 months and definitely have a lot of advice to the evolving leaders. So thank you for the question. Over the last few months we have been building an innovative platform that brings data and when I say data it's the administrative data, the clinical medical records data. It's also data like behavioral health, pharmacy, even some of the emerging data sets like genomics, like social data, which is very critical for us and bring it all together. So it's not just all these data silos and create what we are calling a longitudinal member record that helps us with real time decisioning into one unified system. What makes this different is that it's not just about like creating dashboards or retrospective reporting. It's how we can generate actionable and next level insights and even with the enablement of agentic frameworks, how to connect the dots and take those insights and automate through workflows where you're taking human out of the loop, at least in certain aspects where you can simplify the system to system automation through agents, things like surfacing the right insights that help lead to the right interventions at the right time, addressing affordability drivers and providing information that helps to deliver more proactive healthcare services. Because we do have the insights that can do early interventions, you know, before you know, somebody has to get admitted to ER because we have that holistic view of that person based on, you know, all the data and the insights that we know about the member. But the key is how do you surface this to the right care team at the right time so they can take actions. What I'm especially proud of is how this has been a true cross enterprise effort because large companies like us, it's about how we bring different teams together, whether it's our clinical team or our claims operation team, or the provider operations team, our data science teams and all the core technology platform teams and solve one of the biggest challenges in healthcare and how to sustainably address affordability and help improve health outcomes. We are, at least with the data we have, with all the infrastructure, we feel we can truly impact our consumers at scale because we can streamline their admin needs but also help with their affordability aspects on what is the care and the right care physician for the right cost because we have a lot of that data. And, and more importantly, when they have a surgery and get back home, it's not just like taking care of them when they're in a hospital, but also when they come back home, helping them with post discharge care or helping them with food transportation aspects, helping them with getting follow up appointments with their pcp. We focus on the whole person, both when they're at home and when they're in the hospital. It's not easy, but when you have that level of collaboration and shared purpose, this momentum is powerful. To me this is not just a technology project or a data project. It's about transformation of healthcare and helping people lead healthier lives. And we are just getting started. So that's something I really looking forward to, you know, and this is something we could truly impact, you know, millions of lives. So, coming to answer your other question on what advice would you give to evolving leaders now? I would always start with now you have to. Being in healthcare, it's about a purpose, it's about a mission and you have to always stay grounded, empathetic and you have to be deeply curious because healthcare is evolving so much and stay close to the problem. It's easy as you grow in the leadership roles to drift from day to day. But the best ideas often come from being hands on, asking great questions and listening closely to your team, your partners and the people you serve. I also believe that you have to be surrounded by right thought leaders who, who keep you grounded, also making sure that you are Learning and reflecting on any decisions you make, because there are certain decisions that, when you reflect upon, may not be the right ones, and there may be a lot of decisions that were the right. So how do you build on that momentum in this age of where AI is writing code? Just having technology skills is. Is not good enough. But you do have to stay abreast with the technology. It's about bringing people together who think differently, who speak different languages and measure success in different ways. I've also seen evolving leaders need to be connectors who create clarity in that complexity. And, Scott, you are, I think, one of the shining examples there in terms of bringing, you know, not just our internal teams, which we do, but connecting with the provider thought leaders, you know, with, you know, government thought leaders, you know, with pharma thought leaders, because it's becoming more a connected, you know, enterprise, and even learning from other industries like financial services in some cases, you know, who have, you know, dealt with fraud, waste, and abuse in a more, you know, like an advanced way. And finally, invest in your adaptability, because you have to learn to adapt to the different changing scenarios, whether it is new technology or new ways of providing care. Because one thing Covid has taught us is digital is here to stay. And what works until now will not be something that will work in the future. And there'll be a lot of technology that will be part of every healthcare organization. But the leaders who thrive will be the ones who can successfully navigate ambiguity, shift gears when needed, and keeping their teams aligned without losing sight of the bigger picture. Thank you, Scott.
- [15:52]
A
Ashok, I want to thank you for joining us. You've had this just remarkable leadership career. We're also a huge fan of Elevance Health. We thank you so much for taking the time with us today on the Beckers Healthcare podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [16:07]
B
Yeah, thank you for having me, Scott. It's a pleasure talking to you and giving me the forum to talk about all the great work we have done here at Elevance Health. Thank you.
- [16:16]
A
Thank you. Remarkable organization. Thank you. SA.