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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Harshal Shah, Director of Virtual Care at Hackensack Meridian Health
00:09:45
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Transcript18 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader. We're joined today by Harshal Shah. Harshal is the director of Virtual Care at Hackensack Meridian Healthcare. He's had a brilliant career and he's going to talk, say, about what he's seeing in virtual care, what the trends are, what he's most excited about, and a lot more. Harshal, can you take a moment and welcome back. Can you take a moment to tell the audience about yourself, to introduce yourself and about Hack Attack Meridian?
- [00:33]
B
Sure. Thanks, Scott, for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation last time, so I said, why not to join the podcast again? My name is Hershel Shah. I serve as the system director of Virtual Care at Hackenstock Meridian Health. Hackensack Meridian Health is New Jersey's largest and most comprehensive health system. It has a total of 18 hospitals, more than 500 patient care locations across the state. This includes everything from physician practices to urgent care centers to rehab facilities, and even our own medical school and research institutes.
- [01:05]
A
It's amazing the growth of Hackentech Meridian over the years. You were about to tell us what makes Hacketech Meridian unique and also tell us about your background, if you don't mind.
- [01:14]
B
Yeah. Well, one of the things that makes Hack Attack so unique is that we are recognized as the leader of positive change in healthcare, really focusing on that high quality, human centric, accessible and affordable care that we're providing our patients. In my role, I oversee and lead our virtual health care strategy, making sure patients can connect with us anytime, anywhere, whether it's through video visits, throughout patient monitoring and other digital tools that we have that make it more seamless. Throughout my career, I've been a very patient focused and experience focused kind of advocate for health care. I drive kind of my career on how beneficial we can make tools that provide the care that is delivered to the patient essential for us and vital for the patient at any time.
- [02:03]
A
Talk a little bit about the evolution of your career itself because you've had this great career that's gone in the right direction. Just gone tremendously. Well, talk about that for a moment.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, so I mean, you know, I started my career in when I guess digital health, virtual care was very early on stages and I kind of engaged in that. And I did a lot of my chart support, patient call centers, I did a lot of patient portal implementations. You know, I worked at a great health system and I came to a point where I really wanted to kind of engage that digital aspect of it. So throughout my career I've really been technical focused initially and now, you know, I have strategy to implement and to do better with our patients across the state. And it's really creating that internal partnership and which relationship buildings I've learned over the past years of my career. I think getting that general change to really important for our clinicians and patients to really drive that positivity that we do.
- [03:02]
A
Absolutely. And where are the big trends in telehealth and virtual care? Obviously a couple years television during the COVID period of time really accelerated. What are you seeing today? What are the big trends? You're watching virtual care in telehealth today.
- [03:19]
B
One of the things that I really emphasize is I always remind myself and the teams that I worked with, you know, we can't really be fearful of the disruptors. Right. We work with companies like One Medical. Even we have our own platform with HMH24. 7. We work with K Health are showing us what is possible. The opportunity to partner with and collaborate with rather than seeing just them as a threat is very essential. But you have to really watch closely on how big everything better working with these partners that we have. And that's what really kind of initiated my conversation with this trend. Because once the technical, we have to look at technical, but technical and how do we expand that to be more apt and beneficial for our patients? I think the trends that I really, you know, focus on is really how do we partner better with our partners like One Medical HMH 247K Health. And you know, we just started a new partnership and we're engaging that and really fully utilizing our partnership capabilities with other vendors and partners.
- [04:28]
A
Thank you. When you look at success, success factors for partnerships like the One Medical partnership, what does it take to have a successful partnership? How much time and effort needs to be allocated to it? You can't just plug a switch. It takes a lot of work, doesn't it? What are some of the pieces of advice you have for making these kinds of partnerships work?
- [04:47]
B
I think, you know, the dedication on both sides is very essential. You know, what is our goal at the end of the day with a partnership like this? How do we make it better? And I think once a partner and our health system see that common goal and move toward that goal is very essential. And a lot of, you know, relationships that we have internally, externally, with these partners are really built on transparency and being, you know, what do we do best and how do we approach it the best way? And they may have best scenarios, lessons learned that we may Learn from. They may work with us a little bit better. Because we are a health system. We have gone through really creating a dynamic partnership where we can work with each other through common goal. Thank you.
- [05:32]
A
And what are you most focused on and excited about? As we get to the last part of this year and start next year, what are you most focused and excited about?
- [05:39]
B
What I'm most excited about is the work we're doing isn't really just about technology for technology's sake. Right. These aren't just IT projects. These aren't just technical projects. They're really projects and partners and products that are essential for our patient and clinical population. We are very intentional about how we make sure that all stakeholders are part of the process from the very beginning. Just to make this real, kind of, I built a whole centralized governance structure at Hackensack and this is very recently that I've kind of come up with this idea and concept. But really engaging our providers, our staff and those folks that are actually working with the patients on a day to day basis and utilizing some of their feedback, their voices and shaping the tools that we're rolling out. It really kind of means so much to me that we are really putting out that intentional and vital to our clinicians, our staff, that because they're doing it day to day and you know, how do you make an improvement on the process? It's really important. So that governance council really, you know, is an advisory council that really provides that insight.
- [06:51]
A
No, that's fantastic. And the more that you're developing with your people, with your teams, with your consumers, the more likely it is to be used. So that seems like to me a fantastic strategy. And talk a bit about harshly, you moved up the ranks to further, further leadership around virtual health. What advice would you have to other emerging leaders?
- [07:10]
B
Three, I guess, three things, right? So we have. First, we have to be humble. Healthcare is a very complex environment and no one, no one person has all the answers. Like the best leaders listen first and make room for other expertise. Second, you have to be hungry. You're in a very changing environment and you know, you have to stay curious. You have to keep learning for the status quo because the needs of vocation in our communities are constantly going to change. Third thing is don't settle. It's easy to simply fall back. And this is how we've always done it. You know, this is what, it's working well. But it's really about that transformation when you challenge yourself and your teams to aim higher. As always. Now that I was saying in My kind of general career, you know, we're never going to get to a hundred percent out of anything. Right. We're always going to be at 99, 99, 99. Because there's always, always room for improvement and there's room for growth. The last thing is finally kind of finding that good internal partner or partners. Right. Some of the most important work I've done is really been from partnering across multiple domains like clinical, operational and technical. When you align with all these partners that you cannot be kind of strong bonded in relationship with, you can make that change that really sticks and it's really kind of a positive change that you're making. And it's going to stick and it's going to make this whole process a little bit better.
- [08:39]
A
No, thank you. I think that's right. On this concept that the more you do this in alignment with others. You mentioned that a couple different ways, a couple different times. But, but how important it is to actually have success with this versus it being something that a technologist or technology company pushes down, which doesn't really work that well. Far better. It's done in alignment and collaboration with the different organizations, the different sort of constituents within the health system and the different patients and other constituents that you have as well. I love that, Harshell. Love that. Exactly. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience today?
- [09:13]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things is that I want to say is, you know, technology is always changing and the communities and patients, what they're facing is always going to change. So it's our job as leaders to ensure that we're keeping up with the change. We're learning a lot. We're staying engaged in what's happening and what's changing.
- [09:33]
A
Harshal, as always, thank you for joining us on the Beckers Healthcare podcast. What a remarkable career, remarkable leadership. Thank you for joining us today.
- [09:41]
B
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.