Gaurav Khanna’s Journey to Becoming a Digital Transformation Leader

On his street to turning into vice president and main information officer of CenterWell Pharmacy for Humana Inc., Gaurav Khanna took a fortuitous route that commenced with a various profession in brain upon entering Lehigh College.

“I went to faculty for IT, executing computer system engineering in faculty,” he shares. From there, he labored as a expert for providers in the architecture, capital jobs, and infrastructure spaces.

“Healthcare transpired by probability,” Khanna clarifies. “I was on the lookout to make a geographic adjust to get nearer to family in the Northeast and an chance arrived up that permitted me to keep on accomplishing the very same kind of do the job I had been performing on a shopper partnership management (CRM) technique, and it just took place to be for health care.”

Khanna joined Medco Health and fitness Remedies (now Express Scripts) in New Jersey in 2005, and he’s caught with the business for nearly two many years.

“In this region, we converse about how fragmented our health care procedure is. Enduring the troubles of that procedure has revealed me where and how it impacts patients and what it does to a community,” he notes. “I wished to detect opportunities to make an impact. My job in health care IT has supplied me a platform to accomplish this.”

He obtained elementary know-how in two pivotal aspects of the healthcare market, namely pharmacy, from his time at Medco, and health-related added benefits from a afterwards stint at EviCore. 

“I did not know significantly about pharmacy advantage managers in advance of I commenced at Medco,” Khanna suggests. “I uncovered how a pharmacy assert gets processed, how people use pharmacy added benefits, how claims are adjudicated, and, ultimately, how medications are dispensed.”

Following 9 several years at Medco, he went on to be a part of EviCore, where he gained an appreciation for how pharmacy and medical positive aspects occur alongside one another.

“I uncovered about prior authorization and the several parts of healthcare that interact so a individual can get the correct care—the ideal exams and labs—and in the end the right prescriptions,” he shares. “I saw very first-hand the importance of [how technology and automation are] transforming the healthcare process and client encounter and the a lot of relationships that have to be cast to empower that transformation.

“One of the important matters I realized being uncovered to this work was why the health care process to the outside the house environment appeared so disjointed, and it is since it seriously is,” Khanna says. “Historically, there hasn’t been a good deal of interoperability and integration between the unique gamers in the room.”

The subsequent stop on his journey was at the Nashville-based mostly startup Contessa Well being, a clinic-at-household care service provider.

“We had been building and implementing what genuine clinic care at household could search like,” Khanna states. “We had a really substantial technologies stack and processes in place to bring treatment to our individuals exactly where they want to be—at home. We had been wanting to convert healthcare on its aspect, and it turned an extremely crucial standpoint throughout COVID.”

Photograph by Mark Mosrie

Right after the firm was acquired, in 2021, Khanna was provided the opportunity to come to be vice president and chief info officer of pharmacy at Humana, an marketplace chief in the delivery of senior-targeted, built-in, price-primarily based care aiming to produce improved wellbeing results for its patients and associates. The firm currently contains both of those Humana Insurance policies services and CenterWell healthcare services, the latter offering senior-concentrated principal care, property overall health, and pharmacy companies. Humana has 17.1 million members across fifty states and Puerto Rico, which contains 5.1 million Medicare Gain users and 3.6 million prescription drug program customers.

“When I joined Humana, it was an firm focused on bringing a actually built-in wellness standpoint to the marketplace and expanding its recently shaped CenterWell healthcare expert services arm [including the mail-order pharmacy fully owned and operated by Humana],” Khanna suggests. “Getting into that in the early levels was appealing to me.”

Humana also was a organization that Khanna experienced seen make daring moves and alterations through his career, and he was amazed that it was always eager to innovate to make issues much better for shoppers. Likely digital was a critical section of that strategy.

In Khanna’s feeling, it is important to prioritize engineering to greatly enhance patient care in a 2024 earth.

“We are living in a day and age where by every thing is technological innovation-pushed, and more than the last 10 a long time, we have observed that the populace of seniors we provide is a hugely tech-savvy generation,” he describes. “You have individuals using smartphones, applications, and the world-wide-web who are quite cozy with all those channels. If we really do not cater to how the affected person wishes to interact, we are going to be still left powering.”

As a result, he is aware of that know-how must be an enabler at every phase of the way for a patient’s journey.

“We’ve performed a large amount of do the job all-around that electronic observe,” Khanna delivers.

Because signing up for Humana, he has served CenterWell Pharmacy relaunch and revamp its net and cell existence, making it additional consumer-helpful and relying on info to make it far more uniform and handy for all people.

“We are reimagining our electronic assets, not just in pharmacy, but across CenterWell. From building new cell applications and internet experiences to a sizeable target on interoperability with the intention of starting to be a one point of conversation for people who want to interact with us in that way,” Khanna states. “The digitization [of pharmacies] will allow people to interact extra intently with their care—information this sort of as car-refills, order status, prior authorization, and shipment methods—all which are critical factors to ensuring people have the suitable remedies at the correct time.”

Khanna, who has been main teams for additional than twenty years, believes that to be effective as a leader, one particular have to be a servant leader, empowering teams to be prosperous.

“If you are there to serve the requirements of your teams, it will go a extended way,” he notes. “You must also make positive there is transparency, accountability, and believe in throughout the board. That’s how I clearly show up, and how I count on my teams to demonstrate up.”

Khanna feels as if he’s building a distinction, and that’s what has held him in health care for the earlier two decades. As with his career’s fortuitus starting, his open up brain and inclination to seize opportunities will proceed to serve him very well, taking into consideration the velocity of technologies change.

“It’s been amazing to me how much healthcare tech has developed, and but there is nonetheless so significantly chance for innovation in our industry,” he notes. “And when you appear at AI and GenAI and how they will enjoy a role in the health care ecosystem, it’s pretty enjoyable and a remarkable time to be in this market.”

The Wipro Health care practice features payer and supplier corporations, with in excess of one particular hundred shoppers in North The usa. Wipro features AI and analytics-dependent healthcare platforms across the healthcare benefit chain. Dedicated to building personalised member and affected individual ordeals for payers and companies, Wipro aims to be a neighborhood health care hub providing large-value care at competitive expenses.

Proudly partnering with Gaurav Khanna, Wipro’s partnership with Humana focuses on optimizing, modernizing, and reworking their healthcare systems and business processes. This collaboration exemplifies Wipro’s devotion to advancing healthcare solutions, highlighting its pivotal function in shaping the upcoming of health care together with Humana.

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