- This is Laura Dedo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr.
Tarun Kaur, senior Vice President
and Chief Transformation Officer at Virtual Health.
Dr. Kaur, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- Hi. Thank you very much, Laura.
A pleasure to be here with you and with the audience.
- Now, I know we've got a lot to talk about,
and I'm excited to learn more about your
transformation portfolio at vir.
But before we dive into my questions,
can you tell me a little bit more
about yourself and your background?
- Absolutely. So to Kaur tk for short,
I'm an internal medicine hospitalist by training.
Um, and, uh, I'll just say it's, it's, if I had probably had
to look back 20 years ago when I started this journey,
I would've never planned this journey out, uh, on purpose.
It's one of those things where
wherever you go, there you are.
So I, um, I've had opportunities to,
to be a working hospitalist.
I've, uh, had roles inside of our informatics team.
I was actually the chief medical officer
of our, our medical group.
I had a stint in population health.
And then in 2019, I was asked to take on digital health
as a stretch assignment.
And, uh, the best career advice I can give to anyone is,
it's always better to be lucky than good
because March, 2020 comes along, uh,
covid pandemic accelerates digital health in a way we could
have never even fathom.
So, um, as such, uh, we at ua, which is in the southern part
of New Jersey, just right on that same latitude
as Philadelphia, uh, uh, we, um,
we created a digital transformation office right,
coming out of the second wave of covid.
And, um, glad to share more about our, our,
our office and our portfolio.
- Well, fantastic. That's great to hear it
and absolutely looking forward to it.
So, will you tell me a little bit about
that transformation portfolio?
What's unique about it in your program at Virtua?
- So, the reason we created a digital transformation office
was to,
because we, we were recognizing, my goodness, look at this
astounding rate of change that occurred
during the first couple ways of, of the pandemic.
I remember there was this headline in,
in the New York Times talking about the adoption
of telehealth in the United Kingdom,
and they said 10 years of change in one week.
And that's exactly what we saw.
And I, I think a lot of organizations were seeing levels
of change that they had never anticipated before.
And the question we, we knew that the pen,
so the pendulum never swings back to the middle.
It always tends to swing back to the other direction.
So we knew that once the, some of the urgency
of the pandemic were starting to would, would ease.
We knew some of those transformative energies
would start to ease as well.
And people potentially could go
back to doing it the old way.
And we as such created a digital transformation office and,
and took a model off of Silicon Valley
incubator accelerator model,
what we believe transformative things,
especially digital transformative things can happen
organically inside of an organization.
But what would normally take two
or three years to happen, we try to help accelerate
that process and do it in six months.
And, and the reason is, is
'cause the operators are constantly having to put out fires.
Uh, you know, today we're, we're recording this
and there's a pretty,
there's a pretty big breach happening at Change Healthcare.
Well, if I'm running a transformation off
or if I'm an operator, I gotta take care of that breach.
And, and so there's always an opportunity
for a fire to take over.
A transformation office lets a group of people continue
to move the transformation forward even when immediate
emergencies come up, uh, and could
otherwise distract people.
And that's what we did. So, uh,
that's the idea behind the office.
The office does not own any form
of transformation by itself.
It always partners with an operating unit.
We have a deep partnership
with our information technology team.
'cause we need, we need the digital
underpinnings to get it done.
And then the other piece of the transformation portfolio,
which, you know, we think is a little bit different than
typical projects in a health system,
is we don't rebalance it on an annual basis.
We rebalance the portfolio two, three,
sometimes four times a year
because the needs of healthcare are
changing faster than ever before.
You can't be on annual planning cycles for this stuff.
So I think that's where there's been some adaptability.
- Absolutely. That's just so fascinating.
And certainly as you mentioned, the pace
and rate of change in healthcare sped up so much
during the pandemic and it continues to seem like, you know,
there is a, a pretty fast rate of change
with new digital technologies
and artificial intelligence and so many other things.
And like you mentioned, needing to be nimble if there is a,
a cybersecurity incident
or something else impacting the system
or a, a business partner, um, I can imagine
that's just such a challenge when you look at, um, you know,
being able to make that pivot and,
and have teams go from what it used to be in or, and,
and now into a space where you can
be more nimble, make changes quickly.
What does that take culturally
and how do you make sure you keep
that momentum going even if there's not a
global pandemic going on?
- Yeah, so, uh, boy, I wish I had a, uh,
a simple answer for that.
And I don't because I'm constantly learning.
I think one of the important pieces though,
that we've learned here is,
and even though the word transformation is in my title,
not everything can nor should be transformative
and learning how to iterate, even if it's relatively simple
iterations and, you know, say, well this,
there's nothing transformative about that.
There are learnings that come along the way.
Uh, so I, you know, I'm, I'm a, a big, uh, believer in,
in reader of Hendrick Berg's work from his time back at, uh,
Spotify and Lego.
And, you know, he, he talks about not building
in a waterfall mechanism, but truly an agile methodology.
And what we try to do here is someone
says, I think I need a car.
And we go back to them and say, for what?
And that's a awkward question sometimes
to ask in healthcare, especially if you're talking
to other professionals, like physicians
who are extremely well trained.
Why do you need a car? I say, well, I want it
to get from point A to point B.
And you say, okay, well here's a skateboard.
Give that a try for a week.
And that's just a different way of thinking.
But a couple things happen along the way.
You learn sometimes that, well,
maybe a skateboard isn't good enough,
but maybe you can stop at a bicycle.
And you know, what we say is, well,
if you're designing transportation in, in the Netherlands,
in Amsterdam specifically,
you would always stop at a bicycle
'cause there's nowhere to park the car.
And it's just a different mindset
because in in healthcare, you know,
when we take the Hippocratic oath, we say premium numb,
necessary, first of all, do no harm.
That doesn't really sit well with a transformative mindset.
It's only if you're making mistakes
that you learn something.
And so what we had to find in balance is
we do make mistakes, but we will make sure we are safe.
Safety and, and learning
or making mistakes are two different things.
We can be safe and still make mistakes as we learn.
And I think that that's the mindset
and the cultureship change that,
that we we're still going under here at Virtual.
- That makes a lot of sense.
And you know, I love that analogy
and the way you explained it in thinking about
transformation and understanding, you know, what needs
to be iterative and how you can really approach some
of those things versus some
of the bigger transformation as well.
What are some of your top priorities
over the next 12 months?
What do you have top of mind and what are you focused on?
- We manage our portfolio in, in domains.
So we have consumer financial journey, digital doors,
uh, alternative term is digital front doors.
I'm not a big fan of the term digital front door.
When's the last time you went to the
front door of your own house?
Uh, so I think you have multiple doors into a,
in a house you should have multiple
doors into your health system.
What I would say if, you know, with all of our,
and I would, I be careful here, I sometimes say projects,
but in reality it's products.
And that's an entire mindset shift in, in healthcare.
But within our products,
if I just talk about three global themes,
we are talking about digital resiliency,
digital outcomes.
And perhaps most important right now is digital access.
Uh, there is an access crisis in the United States
and uh, it's not gonna go away for the next 10 years.
And so if we do not come up with alternative ways
of thinking about this, it's gonna be a rough 10 years.
- I think that's such a great point.
And definitely, you know, looking at, as you mentioned,
trying to solve some of those big problems, big challenges,
whether it's access
or other issues using some of the digital technologies in,
in places available, um, I really, you know, like you said,
think that it's so paramount
and can certainly make a big difference, difference
for the communities that you serve.
Is there anything that you're doing now looking ahead that,
um, you really feel like is going to be helpful
and beneficial, um, as you're making that transition
and really ensuring that you've got digital health access
and, and can improve that for
the whole community that you serve?
- Well, you know, I think this is one of those, uh,
an opportunity, one of those learnings.
We, um, we came along the way
and you remember I asked, I said about you asked,
someone says, I want a car.
It's like, to do what I,
I think a lesson we've learned along the way.
We've, we've had a lot of success with online scheduling.
We have really substantial numbers
of online scheduling appointments
that occur in the organization.
And if you think about all the phone calls that are saved,
both from the convenience to the patient, consumer,
but also to the operators, uh, the operations team, that
that can be avoided because of digital scheduling.
But I actually looking back
and kind of realizing, you know what, maybe we are,
we didn't ask enough of to do what I didn't ask enough of
what do you want the online schedule to do?
And so for example, way we've been thinking about it is
patients, do they really want an appointment?
Does anyone really want an appointment?
And I think, yes, there are some people
who absolutely just want an appointment,
but most people actually just want an
answer to their problem.
They're willing to make an appointment
as a mechanism to get the answer.
Are there other ways we can get them their answer without
them having to have an appointment?
And if we are talking about scarcity of resources
and our clinicians are probably our most scarce and, and,
and, and precious resource,
does every question need an appointment to get answered
or are there other ways we can do that?
And that's where we were talking, we're thinking
through some of the digital tools, et cetera.
You know, the reality though is, is that the structure of
how billing works is going to have
to be looked at differently.
What are, you know, what are consumers comfort levels
of getting their answers through digital means?
When is something appropriate for a digital answer
and when is something appropriate for an analog answer when,
you know, meaning in person with your clinician?
I think those are all the things we're trying to solve for.
And uh, you know,
I think we just recognize if you look at the numbers,
the population numbers in the United States,
you're not gonna recruit your way out of this problem.
We're all competing to have clinicians
and the pipeline will just not come fast enough.
So we're going to have
to think about other ways of doing this.
- That's a really excellent point. Thank you so much.
Now before we wrap up here, I'm wondering,
given everything we've talked about looking at
transformation, digital technologies, access to care,
how do you anticipate your role in teams will change
in the next year and beyond?
- Yeah, we think about this a lot.
I, um, you know, I, I think we we're spending a lot
of time here as mentioned we were a digital transformation
office, so it's a little bit more of a centralized function
function when we started, what I'd love to see is more
of a federated model or approach.
And, and that meaning like for example,
when Excel first came out, yeah,
the finance people use it a lot.
You, everyone uses Excel across an organization.
You don't say, well, only finance gets to use Excel. Right?
It's just, it's just not the way the world works.
I think similarly around digital, while there have
to be guardrails around digital guardrails
around artificial intelligence, how do you get these tools
into the hands of the front end users?
Because that's where the true innovation occurs. Yes.
You know, we have innovation labs where we experiment
saying, I, you know, I put out there is
that innovation without adoption is experimentation,
but innovation with adoption is true transformation.
And we have to spend a lot of time, we are spending a lot
of time around literacy, digital literacy, AI literacy,
explaining to our, our colleagues, our employees, these
what these tools can do.
These is what these tools can't currently do
and this is how these tools can be abused.
And, uh, so I'm spending a lot
of time on the education front
because, you know, these tools are not gonna be able
to be kept in a, in a bottle, the genie's out.
So we want to educate the people
around us in our organization how to
effectively use the tools,
but also be aware of where,
where there could be shortcomings.
- That makes a lot of sense. Dr.
Kaur, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
This has been such a fascinating conversation
and really covered a lot of ground,
so I appreciate your time here
and looking forward to connecting with you again soon.
- Appreciate your time and uh, the questions
and, uh, thank you to the audience
for giving the opportunity to share of some
of the things we're thinking about here at Virtua.