Perfecting the patient, customer, and tech health plan at Ramsay

With hundreds of hospitals, primary care clinics, and mental health services across eight countries, and over 90,000 employees, Ramsay Health Care provides a broad range of healthcare services to millions of patients. Integral to that success is its commitment to utilizing the best technologies to ensure efficiency, accuracy, and safety. Lives are on the line, after all. Spearheading the IT initiatives and planning is global chief digital and data officer Rachna Gandhi, whose team won Team of the Year for customer value at last year’s CIO 50 awards. That recognition illustrates her understanding that nothing is done in isolation, and aligning with the right business partners is integral to success.

“It’s not just about the digital or technology team looking for a partner,” she says. “We’re looking at patient-facing or employee-facing solutions. It’ll be the digital team procurement and the business owner looking to find, identify, and progress partners together. If vendors are good, they’ll deliver what they said they would in a timely way. But partnership is really about having a vested interest in a common outcome.”

Having things in a safe pair of hands is one thing, but making sure that care remains for years to come is in the hands of those not yet in the IT workforce — and those who will look for roles that don’t exist yet. On the other hand, says Gandhi, a lot of important roles a couple of years ago aren’t critical anymore. So having that kind of lens into the future takes a good sense of balance, and a strong sense of belief in the fundamental vision of ambitious and cohesive teams. To Gandhi, having a diverse team is also essential. It’s not only good business and good thought leadership, but it’s a better way to solve problems and be more reflective of patients served, as well as the entire workforce.

“It’s got to be action, not just a plan,” she says. “You have to have diversity embedded in all forms and make sure the people you reach out to, the people you put in front to be role models, are the kind of people you’re shortlisting. For me, the mantra has always been just be the change. Don’t expect everyone else to do it before you follow what you intrinsically believe. It’s about what your values are and what you won’t let happen.”

That said, to get on Gandhi’s team, you still need to pull your weight, since her ambition when recruiting is to bring in business savvy and consumer centric leaders with deep subject matter expertise in how to use technology to solve problems.

“You’re not only looking for an astute solution designer, or someone who understands architecture,” she says. “You want that horizontal thinking, and I think things will head there more because some specialist things will be more easily done with AI. So you want someone who brings the ability to design for the future, not just for what’s needed today.”

Gandhi also spoke about overcoming technical debt to accelerate benefits for patients and staff. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On the digitalization journey: We’ve taken a very considered approach in how we want to architect the future platform because one of my realizations coming into healthcare was it’s an industry with a very low digital maturity setting. So you have an advantage, particularly when you’ve come from a different industry. We don’t really want to play catch up. It’s not about going on the journey everyone else has been through, but you have a late mover advantage. And the benefits come from leapfrogging and learning from what other industries have learned. Architecting for the future isn’t just about throwing a few digital solutions in. We’re building the infrastructure required by creating a single source of truth for our data with a common definitions data model, and strong data governance around it to improve quality and keep it secure. This repository of data is democratized, and we’ve radically uplifted the insights we can produce for the business to create real bottom line impact. There’s also a new experience as our patients go through the administration process, which is completely digital on the app. We’ve seen very high adoption rates. We’ve also moved to digitize, or at least make electronic, a lot of our medical records while we move toward more digital workflows. Plus, we rolled out an HRIS system. Ramsay didn’t have an HR system, so we’re close to rolling out some impactful solutions in procurement. In healthcare, outside of people cost, procurement is the largest cost, so getting good data and systems in that is a huge benefit to the organization.

On patient focus: This has been a cornerstone in any role I’ve had. Patients are at the heart of what you design and where you start from. A key thing we did at Ramsay just after I started was I bought in a team to partner with me to build out some patient journeys for our core therapeutic areas, like cancer or mental health. We mapped out the entire journey from a patient, doctor, and administrative team perspective, and the systems and data underlying it. Usually a good place to start is to understand the experience your patients are having today and what the vision is for where you want to go with that experience. That way, even when you’re thinking about the architecture, you’re thinking about solutions. You keep coming back to what the holistic experience is you’re trying to create for the patient as opposed to wanting to put a widget in here, take cost out of there. You can achieve all of that, but you’re coming at it from a better way. That becomes your North Star. The other aspect is making sure the patient and consumer experience is embedded in any product design in a tangible way throughout the entire product’s life. Not just when you’re designing it but when you’re maintaining it, taking it to market, upgrading it — whatever it is, you know you have the consumer of that experience embedded in the design.

On AI: There’s a lot of conversation about scaling and creating value. My perspective is you have to get in early because this isn’t just about the solutions you roll out. It’s about creating AI literacy in the business. That means the sooner you securely get AI in the hands of operations, HR, finance, and the tech team, the sooner you’re educating and bringing them on the tech journey that’s relevant and will remain so. Also, you’re starting to build the confidence and literacy levels of how to interact with this technology in a secure way. The great thing about generative AI is it’s very user centric and easy to use, so it’s not hard to get people to adopt it, unlike other technologies. The team is starting to test and learn quickly, because we’re likely to have more learnings. And that’s the only way to scale is to fail fast, to fail forward. We have prototypes we’re actively pursuing and scaling, and the challenge isn’t adoption, it’s being able to securely scale and manage the inconsistencies of the output. At the same time, with generative AI, you still need a good foundation. People seem to think it just works, but for it to actually deliver real value, there’s an iceberg effect. There are a whole bunch of things underneath, like good data and security, that have to be in place. It’s not a plug and play that people might think sometimes, at least not in a scalable way. Its impact in healthcare will be profound in the long term, but the runway required to prepare for it has to be in place now.

On balancing legacy with emerging technology: It’s a constant question. The challenge we’ve had in healthcare is so many foundations are lacking because of under investment in the past. It’s not just about maintaining but you’re actually still building some foundational things. So it’s a balance between constantly innovating and playing catch up on building your foundation so you can innovate more sustainably. You have to be clear you’re never going to close your entire tech debt, but know what the most critical pieces are needed to innovate and create value. Prioritize that and find two views you can partner with to help you accelerate innovation. Not everything needs to be built and rediscovered internally. You have to find the right partners to help you get out the door quicker. And then, what are the pieces of innovation you want to drive. Because that IP is critical to your way of doing business, your digital ethos, and your strategy, so we constantly deliberate on that and how things could change.