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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket. I’m so excited you tuned in again. Today, we have the privilege of hosting an incredibly amazing leader in healthcare. His name is Sachin Dev. He’s a former physician and former Gartner analyst currently overseeing innovation and transformation in RGP’s healthcare practice, where he serves as the Vice President of Healthcare (Innovation, Digital Transformation, and Alliance Partnerships). I’m excited to host him here on the podcast today and have a great conversation. Sachin, thanks so much for joining us.
Sachin Dev:
Thanks for having me, Saul.
Saul Marquez:
It’s a pleasure. Now, before we dive into the specifics around what you guys are up to at the firm, RGP, tell us a little bit about you. What inspires your work in healthcare and your journey as a physician to now being in the business world?
Sachin Dev:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, so I started off working as a physician, and not very soon, I got a great opportunity to work on a project with World Health Organization, and that was really my entry door into the admin/management/leadership side of healthcare, gave me a lot of good exposure working on different projects where I can use both my clinical knowledge as well as all the things that I’ve learned working in different facets of the healthcare, and that was really a trigger for me to move into the leadership role on the healthcare side. So since the last 20 years, I’ve worked across many different organizations all the way from the northeast to the south and worked in different capacities, working as a physician advisor, leading a lot of different EMR conversions, managing end-to-end revenue cycle teams, and then any place where, required a combination of physician background or a clinical knowledge as well as non-clinical knowledge. So a number of projects that really gave me a very good exposure to explore more and further grow my career into the, on the management side of healthcare.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, I think it’s fantastic, and oftentimes, physicians that get into the business world make the biggest impact. So really great that you decided to make that move. And so, talk to us a little bit about what RGP’s healthcare practice is doing, about the transformation work you’re up to, the modernization efforts. Love to learn more about that.
Sachin Dev:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think just to set the stage, RGP is a global company. We are a publicly traded company, and we’ve been in the industry for a long time. I think healthcare practice is something that is newest among all the things that we do within the RGP, but within the RGP, as of today, it’s about 25% of our total revenue coming from our healthcare practice. So when we say healthcare practice, we actually just do a lot more in the form of helping payers and provider and life sciences company across their end-to-end transformation, both business process optimization, business process transformation, process management, a lot of consulting and advisory work, and that’s pretty much across all the different areas within the entire healthcare ecosystem. And in my role, I’m primarily responsible for leading some of the innovative changes. So to position ourselves as a hybrid, tech-enabled service, healthcare practice, we’ve been spending a lot of time and putting a lot of resources in understanding where exactly the need is in the market, what our clients are struggling with. Obviously, in addition to the number of consultants, we have about 4500 plus consultants with an average experience of 15 years and plus, what we realized is also the best way to approach in the industry moving forward with all the changes that we have seen since the pandemic is to be able to position ourselves more so in a hybrid fashion where we are leveraging technology and people together to be able to get the best results for our clients.
Saul Marquez:
I think that’s fantastic. And in today’s environment of drastic overspend on labor, highly taxed workforce, we need solutions that can scale because, it’s never been more important than now. What would you say makes the work that you guys do at RGP different and maybe interesting for the folks listening to consider?
Sachin Dev:
Absolutely, I think one of the biggest things that we take part of a big pride is having our consultants that are very experienced. They are not somebody who’s going to learn on our client’s dime. They come very prepared, they are fully trained, they have a lot of experience under their belt, and in addition to having the right skill set within RGP, we also provide flexible staffing models. So, in other words, it’s not like that, the consultant would pretty much be able to drive the specific task, but at the same time, as our client’s needs would shift or change, we do have the flexibility to support our clients in a fashion that is, number one, from a cost advantage perspective, it’s important, today’s economy, but at the same time, we are providing the best of the best talent to our clients as well. So I think those two things I would say, primarily, in addition to a lot of other things that RGP has been successfully providing to its clients.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Yeah, I appreciate you highlighting that for us. And if you think about the different operational areas of a healthcare business or practice, what would you say is a key way that RGP has been able to improve outcomes or make business better?
Sachin Dev:
I think, again, with our talent, with our support, with our flexible model, I think we have accomplished a number of different projects across the entire healthcare ecosystem. And the way we deliver is a very structured approach, we, of course, all the way from providing the advisory services to the consulting services, staff, augmentation services, and even some of the technology transformation. We come with a lot of experience. We want to make sure that we stay honest throughout the process, and if there’s anything that our client may not have been thinking about during those business transformations or business process and optimizations, that we stay very transparent with our clients and help them guide and navigate through all the things that we have captured based on our learning experience and working at other clients. So I think those are some of the things that, again, differentiate ourselves from some of our other vendors in the space.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. No, thank you, thank you for that. And so there’s been a lot of, we got through COVID, and it created a lot of, really, visibility to issues that have already been in place. And now we’re in an environment where you’ve got the workforce hangover from COVID and opportunities to do more. What would you say is a, is one of the biggest setbacks you guys have learned from and a key learning that the listeners could take home with them?
Sachin Dev:
I think, through the course of pandemic, and even now, I think we are more in a post-pandemic phase; I think what we have learned primarily working with the payers provider and life sciences is that most of our clients now, they need to be more strategic. They need to really target high-risk, high-reward opportunities and redefine their mission-critical projects or priorities. Because with a given funding, with a given revenue, with the reimbursements going down, I think the cost is still comparatively high, and being healthcare as a low operating margin industry, it’s not like a manufacturing where we have double-digit margins. I think we just recently did a survey, and it turned out to be that majority of the hospitals across the US market, their operating average operating margins are like 0.5 or less than 1% in that range. So it’s not like, you know, yeah, it’s exactly, and it’s not much buffer there for our clients to be able to try and experiment new things. So again, one of the biggest learning was how we can, number one, assess and identify high-risk, high-reward opportunities. And some of those could be from a perspective that are more at the organizational need level, but some are just regulatory, like the price transparency; you probably heard about that, I think it’s a new regulation. How to improve the experience for the patient, and that’s a must-have, and it does require a lot of investment to be able to get to comply with that regulation. Similarly, there’s a lot of talks about the interoperability. So again, how to assess, analyze and identify those mission-critical projects, that’s going to have a high reward and then will be able to eliminate any high risk involved should those not be done in a timely way or fashion. So that’s number one. Number two, I think what we are thinking from our seeing from the labor shortages perspective, what we have identified from some of our recent surveys, is that adopting a flexible staffing model is really going to yield better return on the investment. So, in other words, I think we have the clients who are trying to find the right skill set, so they have their talent and recruitment process where they are spending a lot of capital to be able to identify and define or bring or onboard the right talent; and at the same time, I think when you look at the retention, it’s not as well or nothing compared to the pre-pandemic levels, so that’s another factor that’s dropping as well, right? So I think to overcome that challenge, we have seen, and matter of fact, conducted another survey which gave us a very good insight. And as per the survey, it’s showing that about 42% of the organizations, they are using some sort of a hybrid staffing model. We call it, as a fusion models, we call it as hybrid model, but what really it is, it’s sort of a combination of your internal workforce combined with some external consulting help or staff augmentation to be able to execute on those mission-critical projects.
Saul Marquez:
That’s a really great call out. And if we unpack that one a little bit, Sachin, are we talking about in care delivery? Are we talking about, in IT and security, financial operations, or is it, is this just across the board?
Sachin Dev:
It’s pretty much a combination, but I think when we look into the clinical side of the aisle, there’s not many options, except we have some travel nurses that can be used as a part of the flexible staffing model. And we do, to some extent, can bring some of the primary care physicians. But I would say for the most part it’s on the non-clinical side, pretty much across the finance, IT, revenue cycle management. And there are a lot of new initiatives in the healthcare, such as value-based care, pop health, genomic medicine, precision medicine, and those are the areas that have already been identified as high-reward areas for the investment, and those are the areas where I think we typically have seen this level of flexible staffing models in the last two years or so, and we do expect that number to actually considerably grow, even in 2024 and beyond.
Saul Marquez:
Thanks for highlighting the specifics there. I think it’s key that we realize it’s more common than we might think, that these hybrid staffing models are a thing. And we, if we’re not considering ways to do it more efficiently or develop standard operating procedures, it’s going to be to our disadvantage. And I think that’s the value you guys offer, right? Sachin, at RGP, you’re able to allow clients to work within this existing reality.
Sachin Dev:
Exactly, and I think when we put the new definition of the critical projects, I mean, they are very complex these days. So today’s critical projects, they involve a lot of intricacies, advanced technology, a lot of interdependencies across multiple teams or departments. Even if some of our clients, they would try to perhaps maybe train the talent or upskill the talent, there is a lag. There is a learning curve to be able to get the talent to that level where they really understand all these different intricacies and advanced technologies and interdependencies to be able to successfully execute on the mission-critical projects. And that’s where us in RGP, I think, so we come into play because we have a team of all the experts, and as opposed to even having a single individual sort of working on a project, we do have the ability to scale it up or scale it down as needed and to be able to bring the talent with a different skill set to be able to meet all the requirements and to be able to really understand all the interdependencies and be able to successfully execute on the projects.
Saul Marquez:
Now that’s fantastic. Sachin, what are you most excited about today?
Sachin Dev:
I am most excited about all the advancements that we’re seeing in the technology, and obviously, I think there’s a lot of hype and media reporting on the ChatGPT, so I’m not going to touch on that. But I think just with my clinical background and number of years of experience, both on the clinical as well as the non-clinical side, I think, and even coming from Gartner, I had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with different vendors and different end users. I was, you know, a global analyst, I was speaking with the, with a lot of clients across the globe, and what excites me most is that, all the advancement that we have seen in the technology. But on the flip side, I think just speaking and having all these discussions with different end-user clients and the vendors, I think there’s still a learning curve. We really need to identify and nail it down to a level where we have identified some really good use cases of generative AI, automation, because when we look into the market, and that was a common theme, I think we used to see even in my previous role working as a Gartner analyst, that there’s a lot of hype around automation and AI, like pretty much every vendor would come and say our solution has those capabilities. But when you really start peeling it down, what you will see is sometimes, in most of the cases, it’s just a simple machine learning that’s involved, right? And then, to some extent, some modeling on top of that machine learning to be able to present it as an AI tool. But again, I think there’s a long way to go, and what I’m excited about the most is, as this technology will continue to mature and advance, and as we will continue to identify more use cases, we can actually have a disruption in our healthcare market, like, I mentioned, some of those things like genomic medicine, precision medicine. Today we are dealing with a problem where we are addressing all these medical conditions after they have occurred, but once we have the right technology in place and once we have identified those right use cases, we should be predicting it the course of events or the medical conditions. Ten years from now, Patient X could potentially have congestive heart failure even, 20 years, based on the history from now, this patient could potentially be at a higher risk of myocardial infarction. So those are the things I think that’s really going to help our entire ecosystem, our entire population health, and will enable us to be able to proactively address some of the potential situations from a medical condition down the road early in the process, rather than, when we look at our numbers today, we, as you probably know, Saul, there’s about, 25% of our total healthcare spend is tagged as a fraud, waste, and abuse. We are still over…
Saul Marquez:
I didn’t know that, that’s a big number. 25%?
Sachin Dev:
… of our, yes, total …
Saul Marquez:
$4 trillion?
Sachin Dev:
I would say probably in that ballpark range. But again, it’s a very significant number there. And to begin with, I think no other developed nation is spending about 20% of their GDP on the healthcare expense. So it’s a pretty high when you compare that to how much we’re putting, spending that on our healthcare, and on top of that, what percentage of that is fraud, waste, and abuse. So again, I think that’s what I’m excited about most as the technology will continue to mature, and hopefully, in the next few years, once we are at a point where we are predicting the events as opposed to treating the events, I think that’s really going to be a game changer for our healthcare, especially in the US market.
Saul Marquez:
Couldn’t agree with you more, Sachin, I love it. And you guys conduct a lot of surveys, do a lot of research, and have a lot of insights. I’d love, and this podcast was only a tip of the iceberg, so I’d love if you could share with the listeners the best place they could learn more, get some of those insights, engage with you in the team, and then we could conclude.
Sachin Dev:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you’re spot on. We actually conduct a lot of surveys, a lot of white papers, and all the listeners actually can go to our website, RGP.Healthcare, and they can reach out to us. And there’s a lot of new content that we are putting on that website very often I would say, you’ll see that changing pretty frequently. So that would be the place where listeners can reach out to us directly or maybe can, if they’re interested, they can access our most recent surveys and white papers and all the research that we do within our company.
Saul Marquez:
That’s beautiful. So I want to thank you, Sachin, for really that resource. We’re all just one insight away to solve a problem. And if you plug yourself into these types of resources like RGP.Healthcare and the work that they’re doing there, those solutions to some of your biggest problems may be closer than you think. So, Sachin, I want to thank you very much for spending time with us today.
Sachin Dev:
Thank you, Saul. Thanks for having me. And it was great meeting with you, and it was great connecting with you. Thank you.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you.
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