Leveraging Digital Innovations and Data-Driven Insights to Improve Consumer Experience with Rajeev Ronanki, Chief Digital Officer at Anthem, Inc. was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2020. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Saul Marquez:
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket, Saul Marquez here. Today, I have the privilege of hosting Rajeev Ronanki. He is the Chief Digital Officer at Anthem. He is leading the transformation of Anthem to become a digital AI-first enterprise through driving the vision, strategy, and execution of Anthem’s digital artificial intelligence, exponential technology service experience, and innovation portfolios. Through these efforts, Mr. Ronanki is enabling Anthem to harness the power of artificial intelligence and data to better understand health care consumers and provide tailored personalized care. His experience spans over twenty years of innovation-driven industry and social change across health care and technology. Prior to joining Anthem, Mr. Ronanki was a partner at Deloitte Consulting LLP, where he established and led Deloitte, the life sciences and health care, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and innovation practices. Additionally, he was instrumental in shaping Deloitte’s blockchain and cryptocurrency solutions and authored pieces on various exponential technology topics. He also led Deloitte’s strategic partnerships across a wide range of innovation programs such as DocAI, Singularity University, Exponential Conference Series, and many more. I’m really excited to have an interesting conversation with Rajeev and with that, Rajeev, I want to give you a warm welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Thanks, Saul. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. And so before we dive into the interesting work that you guys are up to at Anthem, I love to really just focus on your interests and what inspires you in the health care business.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, I mean, my background’s in technology and the application of technology in various parts of our business, but in terms of what inspires my work in health care, it’s really the impact that our work can have on the lives of our members and our communities. And I think one of the greatest applications of artificial intelligence and digital technologies is in improving the lives of our consumers in the US. And that’s the inspiration really, is that Anthem provides a great platform for creating that impact. And the work we do, we can see the results of that in terms of how it improves people’s lives.
Saul Marquez:
I feel you there. And so, you know, the reach and the platform that you referenced there is such a powerful one with Anthem. And so talk to us about how you guys are adding value to the health care ecosystem today.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, I mean, to your point around the breadth and depth of our reach, we serve over forty-three million consumers. We have several million providers that are part of our network. And so everything we do is at scale. It’s not a pilot in a state or to impacting a small size population. But really everything we do has to account for that tremendous scale across the country. So what we’re doing is really looking at health care and saying what could we do to make it more predictive, proactive, and personalized and use our technologies and our artificial intelligence capabilities and our investments in digital technologies to really make that change happen. And as you know, Saul, today, health care is mostly reactive retrospective in some ways. We could call it sick care. We have an issue and we resolve that issue through the systems that we have in place. But the power of what we can do tomorrow is really to predict in advance of a sickness or an illness happening and taking proactive steps to mitigate that issue from happening in the first place and keeping people healthy. So this is the first time ever I think we can flip the paradigm from treating people who are sick to focusing on keeping people healthy.
Saul Marquez:
And that’s super important, especially now where we’re in this in the middle of the pandemic. And those potential things that you could have discovered with the regular visits aren’t really being discovered. Right. we’re not providing the appropriate level of care in some instances where it could be. So how does Anthem fit into the picture there and taking care of some of these obstacles? And specifically, how do you think you guys are doing things differently and maybe better?
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yes, Anthem’s in a unique position where we sit sort of at the intersection that connects our consumers, our members to the care that they need. But because we have such a vast amount of data, we have small claims data for over 70 million lives. We have clinical data for tens of millions of lives. And keeping in mind all of the security and privacy concerns that are paramount to all of our consumers, we use that data to create unique insights and are able to then make those insights available at the right time, at the right place to all of our stakeholders. And in so doing, I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier, which is we can predict what might happen in a person’s health care future and then proactively steps to address it and then ultimately personalize that care for an individual as well as the community and the caregivers. And what makes Anthems unique is that we sit in a position where we can integrate solutions across the healthcare ecosystem and make those integrated solutions available to all of our consumers. I think one of the issues that you’re aware of certainly is that health care has as many good solutions. But most of these solutions tend to be fragmented. There are solutions for diabetes. There are solutions for managing chronic conditions, but there isn’t anything that integrates it seamlessly and makes it so that it’s simple and easy to use. And that’s what we’re up to, that which is given our unique ability to harness our data and make the data, turn the data into insights and make those insights available to all of our stakeholders, we’re able to integrate all these solutions and make them simple to use and ultimately our mission of simplifying health care. And that’s what this is all about.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, I think that’s wonderful. And, you know, you think about improving the consumer experience. There’s a lot of things that could fall through the cracks. And how often does one of the things that is a hot topic now is mental health and what are we doing and how do we know? I’m curious what things could be done in that respect Rajeev around things like maybe voice and AI when you’re having a conversation with somebody or keywords and text interactions around mental health. Any thoughts around there?
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, great question. Also, mental health for us is. We just simply called it health, and it’s part of a strategy at Anthem that we call Total Health, which looks at behavioral health, mental health, medical health, social, financial, puts all of this together and says across all of these dimensions of health, what could we do to improve outcomes? What could we do to make total population health better? And mental health, certainly in today’s era of the pandemic is supercritical. And what we’re doing is we’re making a number of digital resources available for mental health. So we have to harness our data created artificial intelligence and other digital capabilities that are available as guides for our consumers and our members. And then from that resource, you could escalate the care up to a therapist and then seamlessly connect in other factors that may influence your health and bring it all together into the total health picture. So as regards to use of voice technologies and if, let’s say someone is calling us and we detect a certain amount of inflection, a certain amount of inferences from the tone and inflection of that voice we then are able to direct that at a member or consumer to the appropriate mental health resource in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy or security. So it’s another great application of how technology is really kind of being integrated into everything we do to improve the health and lives of our consumers.
Saul Marquez:
And so absolutely right. I mean, we’re looking at mental health. It’s part of the entire health care picture. So why isolate it? And then beyond that, you’re layering in the scale and the digital innovations to give us the best experience, which is wonderful. And so Rajeev talked to us a little bit about how you believe Anthem is improving outcomes or making business better. Feel free to focus on either or both of the outcomes or the making business better part.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, great question. And it’s really it’s the application of exponential technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other advanced technologies to improve both our core business as well as improving outcomes. From a core business standpoint Saul, it’s how do we make customer service better? How do we make claims processing better? How do we make care management better? Everything that’s part of the core function of a health plan could all be done better with higher quality and with more automation so that we can free up our human capacity to focus on the things that truly matter to our customers, which is how do we improve their health and how do we become better advocates for their health. So that’s a key part of our strategy. It is the application of technology at scale to automate and make capacity available to really, truly be health advocates. And then in terms of outcomes, it goes back to this notion of having data at scale and applying artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technologies like that to create insights from that data and then making those insights available to our providers and our members or communities or employers to enable them to then understand the true picture of health and then measuring that rigorously every month, every quarter, every year, understanding what’s working and what isn’t, and showing a baseline at a population level to say year over year we’re improving the health of the population and the ability to slice and dice that to any sort of demographic zipcode, geography, what have you to be able to show that improvement. But ultimately, it’s translated to what matters, which is to that population of one. And are we making every single one of our members’ lives better? And are we able to do that by quantifying their health and showing how that could be improved?
Rajeev Ronanki:
And that’s essentially what we’re up to, which is having a baseline of everyone’s health and having a trajectory of what optimal health could be and then showing how using the appropriate interventions that are integrated across this notion of health and then improving that systematically over time.
Saul Marquez:
And then out of the work that you guys do and the insights that you gain, is there a lot of this that you know of what you guys learn that you could share with large employers, for example, that they then could apply not necessarily core business stuff, but more so around population health and employee health. Is there some sort of exchange there that you guys participate in?
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, we, in fact, make all of that information available through our employers via advanced analytics and reporting and lots of insights that are available and close to real-time. And employers can and understand the health of their employees relative to the health of communities, the health of the areas in which their employees live, work, and play. And then we provide them with insights on how they can tailor their benefits, whether that’s mental health or physical, mental health, financial, social, and other facts. Do to drive for that optimal performance and optimal health for all of their employees and in fact, that’s why it’s become so intertwined in what we do, is that it’s something that we made with our employers weekly, monthly to discuss and benefits, which today are, for the most part, defined and changed maybe once a year. We’re looking at which ways in which it could be done much more frequently. So could we run promotions, change incentives, create new ways in which people are aware of all the programs that employers have and utilize them much better and much more optimally so that employers sort of design benefits is better and ultimately employee productivity and performance is aligned with the design of that benefit.
Saul Marquez:
That’s critical. And I think it’s great that you guys have it built-in and there are a lot of businesses, especially right now, they’re struggling to figure things out during the pandemic. And on top of that, having to take care of employees and their health. It a challenge. And it’s good to know that it’s at the core of what you guys are offering. During the pandemic Rajeev, there’s been a lot of, as you well know, acceleration of the adoption of technologies, digital technologies, and health care. But there’s also been a lot of setbacks. And so what types of setbacks would you say or maybe one setback that you could point to as one that has taught you a lot?
Rajeev Ronanki:
You know, I’ll take you back to perhaps my days a few years ago were a startup that I had co-founded and it had a lot of investor enthusiasm. And so we were building a product that, incidentally, was in a completely different industry, which was in real-time sort of tracking of your furniture deliveries. So one of the things that happen today, even today with the furniture, is you buy it and you have to wait for six, 12 weeks, sometimes longer, to get it to your house. And the service essentially was instrumental in that process. So you can understand where and the life cycle of that delivery or your particular item was and seemed like a good concept. And when we focus-grouped it and tested it with consumers, that had a lot of enthusiasm. And so we were setting we set out to build it and we wanted to make this perfect product, the perfect app, the perfect website, the perfect process. And it took us so long that eventually the market crashed and we couldn’t get the product out.
Rajeev Ronanki:
So really, the big learning from there is like in the pursuit of perfection, you don’t ignore the market forces that are around you and hence this notion of aim for what’s minimally viable time out for optimal market timing and iterate from there rather than aiming for perfection out of the gate.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a great message. And I love the phrase perfection is the lowest standard just exactly. And we live by that here at Outcomes Rocket and also just the many other things that we do. It’s a great lesson learned and I’m glad you’re sharing that with us. And actually, interestingly enough, earlier today I had an interesting conversation with the digital health leader at a company called Aero Safe. They do cold supply, cold chain operations, and like talk about interesting right. like the same concept that you were working on for furniture. They’re working on digital integration of these boxes where the covid vaccine is going to be shipped in. And it just is so interesting to think about what an impact digital technology can have on the entire supply chain of health care, from boxes to patients to insights.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, I think it’s we’re truly probably one of the most exciting times. And at the intersection of health care and technology, I think Gordon Moore famously in the early 70s, sort of defined Moore’s Law, which sort of lays out that price performance of technology doubles every 18 months or so.
Rajeev Ronanki:
And that’s remained true to this day. And I think with that type of performance at our fingertips, with health care data doubling every three days or so and computing power sort of, you know, sort of being as cheap that is as it is today and the computing capacity being as fast as it is, we were able to do numerous things in fractions of seconds, in milliseconds and make all of those things available to an integrated suite of stakeholders in near real-time. And that’s never, ever been done before. And we’re truly excited about the possibilities of what that holds for the future, where we can in an instant predict all of the infinite paths that we might foresee in any person’s health care future. And then sort of game out all the things that might work and then just pick the one thing that would be the most effective in keeping someone healthy, and all of that should be done in a very simple, easy to use manner. And I think it’s very much possible, very much sort of a journey that’s that we’re seeing unfold in real-time and very excited about what’s to come.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, well said. And so with that, Rajeev, I just want to say thank you. I mean, it is an exciting time. And if you had to highlight one particular thing that you were most excited about, what would you say that one thing is?
Rajeev Ronanki:
I think for all this talk about technology solved, I think the one thing that I think is most interesting in health care today is this notion of human-centered design, which is how do we create something that’s so simple and easy to use, is that the technology is almost secondary. It’s out of the way and behind the scenes. But whether it’s an app or a portal or it’s the customer service agent that you’re talking to, everything’s got to seem simple as it would in any other kind of modern industry like banking or retail and commerce. Those things are what we need to bring to bear in health care. And that notion of a human-centered design in health care is is what excites me the most.
Saul Marquez:
The promise is huge to get that in health care. I mean, it’s just. Wow. And I think the opportunity for it is probably closer than we can imagine. Right. I mean, having been in health care for a while, you think, oh, gosh, it’s not going to happen. But I don’t know. I feel like it’s closer than maybe a lot of people think. What do you think?
Rajeev Ronanki:
Yeah, I think so, too. I think it’s available in pockets today. And, you know, almost you could call it pockets of greatness. And so how do we scale those pockets into something that’s universally available and that’s very much within our reach. And given the fact that you know, exponential technology has the doubling effect of maturing in price and performance and availability every 18 months or so, I think the future is much closer than we think.
Saul Marquez:
Well, you’ve left us here with optimism and hope for the future. We thank you for that leadership and the work you’re doing with Anthem. Before we conclude, Rajeev, I love it if you could just leave us with a closing thought and then the best place where the listeners can engage with you and Anthem on the work that you guys are doing.
Rajeev Ronanki:
We’re passionate about simplifying healthcare, Saul. So thank you for the opportunity to chat with you about it and stay tuned for more exciting things from Anthem. And I usually post our updates on my LinkedIn down so you can find me at Rajeev Ronanki at LinkedIn or @RajeevRonanki on Twitter and look forward to continue the dialogue.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Thank you, Rajeev. And folks, just go to Outcomes Rocket, type in Rajeev and you guys all know. We got the new search feature on the website is pretty awesome. You’ll be able to pop them right up. Check out the show notes. Different ways to get in touch with them that he just mentioned, it will all be there for you, including a full transcript and show notes of our discussion today. Rajeev, thank you so much. Really appreciate the work you’re doing and the time we spent today.
Rajeev Ronanki:
Thank you, Saul. A pleasure to be here today.
Saul Marquez:
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