Health Tech: Atul Kaushal On How NTT DATA Services’ Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

Allowing technology to take over the clinical and administrative aspects of their work. — Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff are overworked. Elegant solutions that build a modern dynamic workplace solution leveraging AI, automation and analytics technologies will improve a clinician’s daily workflow. Companies should adopt an empathy-based approach to redesigning their employee experience journey, using technology to remove IT friction factors and reduce time on monotonous tasks.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Atul Kaushal, MD MBA

Atul Kaushal, MD MBA, Clinical Innovation Consulting Lead at NTT DATA Services, is a strategy and operations professional with 20+ years of experience in a variety of roles for health care providers, payors, and life science organizations. He is an innovative leader who is passionate about solving complex challenges, creating impact, and the ‘Future of Health’. As a young clinician, he struggled to understand why the system wasn’t proactively caring for people’s health. He believes there was a better way to engage patients and help manage their health instead of their disease, which is where his passion for healthcare innovation stems from. Before joining NTT DATA Services he worked at Horizon, AvatarMEDIC Inc, and Deloitte. He’s currently based in Chicago where he enjoys spending time with wife and two young children.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

My parents were true pioneers. They both left India to pursue their studies when they were young. They left the safety and security of their families at a time when you couldn’t simply pick up a phone to make an international call — you had to book a reservation and an international operator would ring your phone in a day or two when a line was available. They met in England, where I was born, and we emigrated to the U.S. when I was very young. We didn’t have a social safety net to fall back on, and I remember feeling like we were explorers. My father loved gadgets and science fiction, both of which he enthusiastically shared with me from a young age. I grew up tinkering with radios, dreaming of space travel, and fascinated with new technologies. Looking back, I guess this was a recipe for what became my passion for innovation: the courage to walk away from the safety of “the known” and to explore technology as a tool to improve the future.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

In the early 2000’s the paradigm in healthcare was reactive, meaning the system would only get involved when someone was sick. It was quite literally a model of “sick care” and not “health care”. Around 2005 I co-founded a startup with the idea that it would be better for patients and for the economy if we used a preventative approach and showed people how to care for their health. We had a multi-specialty clinic that focused on a holistic approach to healthcare including nutrition, exercise, meditation, and mental health in addition to traditional ‘allopathic’ care. Somehow an executive in a famous Hollywood production company heard about our project and thought it would make a good TV show. Soon after, we found ourselves filming the pilot episode of The Clinic TV show. Cameras, wardrobe, makeup, and the rest of the TV studio experience is something I’ll never forget!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Not to sound cliché, but I’d like to recognize my wife. Having someone who loves and accepts your faults as well as successes, is an incredibly powerful thing. Having a safe place to be me, within the construct of this relationship, has given me courage to face my fears and become a better person. I feel I have grown more in the eight years we’ve been married than the 20 years prior.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“There are some people who live in a dream world; and there are some who face reality and then there are those who turn one into the other.” — Douglas Everett

This thought has given me strength to persevere despite all the setbacks that come with being someone who has new ideas and a different approach to solving problems. As a child I was told there are dreamers and there are doers. This quote helped me recognize there is a very important third category, and that I could strive to be that third type of person.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Empathy. I try to keep other’s perspectives and feelings in mind as I go about my day — both professionally and personally. I learn more and get more done in cooperation with others, and I’m grateful to find myself in an organization that stresses this value.
2. Humility. I’m always on a learning curve. I accept that I am often in situations where there is a lot I don’t know. I’m grateful for the patience my colleagues have shown me over the years when explaining and instructing me on filling gaps in my knowledge.
3. Perseverance. I don’t give up easily. I have found that this trait has been one of the most valuable — more than intellect or ability or talent. By forcing myself to face difficult situations, I am able to learn really hard lessons, and achieve things in my life I had not imagined could be possible.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the complex problem of how to help people to live healthier, happier lives. In one dimension, that involves daily maintenance of physical and mental health, early intervention, acute care, or post-acute follow-up — and there is room for improvement at every step in the continuum. In the other dimension it is how to be sure everyone has equitable access to the value our solutions create (i.e., How successful would the smartphone industry be if they only created technology for one or two segments of the population? Not very. They build for everyone. We in healthcare would do well to follow that paradigm. The stakes are higher in more ways than one).

How do you think your technology can address this?

At NTT DATA Services, we are exploring the ability of technology to do some heavy lifting in the form of automating certain tasks and crunching data to help us predict and prevent disease. We are also looking carefully at technology design at all the points that humans interact with the systems — the user experience, or UX.

This requires engaging with and understanding the different users including individuals, health systems, payers, device companies, software companies, community health organizations, and other organizations that are inherently pieces of this puzzle.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

Early in my clinical career, I noticed there were many patients who routinely visited the office every few weeks — and usually for the same reason every time. I knew that some of these patients had diseases (e.g., diabetes, hypertension, etc.) that were manageable and couldn’t understand why they came back to clinic or hospital so often. What I discovered was there was very little emphasis on patient education, care management, or health equity. Strange as it may sound, because of the fee-for-service reimbursement system, healthcare providers were not incentivized to care for people’s health — they only cared for people when they were sick.

It didn’t make sense to me. Healthcare should improve a patient’s health. But as a clinician, I was just seeing sick care — not what I considered to be true healthcare. That’s when I made the hard choice of leaving clinical practice to fully dedicate my time to fixing the system. Little did I know how complex, entrenched, and intertwined the problems were. Beginning with our wellness clinic startup and still persevering today, I believe that staying true to patients’ and clinicians’ needs will eventually get us to the solutions that really work.

How do you think this might change the world?

Reducing preventable illness and providing everyone equitable access to healthcare (physical, mental, and emotional) is a moral imperative. If we are to evolve as one humankind, this is an essential step along the path.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I think privacy and security concerns must be addressed. Authorities already have their hands full combatting cybercrime and we regularly hear about data breaches in major companies and organizations in the news. If we are to trust technology to have an even bigger role in the care of our friends, communities, and families, we need to build systems with solid safety protocols and redundancies.

Another thing we must keep in our sights is that there is already a digital divide between certain segments of society. While younger and affluent segments have better access to technology and tend to be more tech literate, seniors and those from impoverished communities are not as tech savvy and have less access (e.g., high-end hardware, unlimited wifi, and mobile data plans). If we are not careful in designing and implementing these technologies, we may exacerbate the digital divide instead of reducng it.

Lastly, technology shouldn’t be the end-goal of the process. Technology should facilitate a way for people to communicate naturally, create and maintain support systems, provide innovative ways to mitigate social determinants of health, consume educational materials, and access the care they need. In the end, technology connects PEOPLE and it is people who CREATE the things other people need.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. Why accessibility is key for health maintenance tech — Technology should be woven into a person’s daily activity for maximum effect. One example is smart fabrics, like in a t-shirt, that can monitor body temperature, heart rate, and even sweat composition — and send the information to your smartwatch which will alert you if it detects readings outside normal ranges. An example of more near-term innovation is the concept of ‘hospital at home’ where a combination of remote monitoring, digital pharmacy, and hybrid virtual and in-person clinician visits allow a patient to get hospital-quality care in the comfort and security of their own home. Ease of use and access may make patients more inclined to keep up with their health.
2. Allowing technology to take over the clinical and administrative aspects of their work. — Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff are overworked. Elegant solutions that build a modern dynamic workplace solution leveraging AI, automation and analytics technologies will improve a clinician’s daily workflow. Companies should adopt an empathy-based approach to redesigning their employee experience journey, using technology to remove IT friction factors and reduce time on monotonous tasks.
3. Where technology fits into getting family and community involved in wellness If you rely on hospital care when you are sick, you also must put in the work outside of the hospital to maintain your health. Health maintenance begins within families and extends to communities and even to employers. Education and access play a huge role. Everyone benefits when people are healthy.
4. Deploying technology as a great equalizer in patient care — Keeping in mind the increasing age of the population, disparities in tech savviness, and socioeconomic inequities to access, we must nevertheless find ways to maximize efficiency in the healthcare system. We don’t want to send people for expensive exams and procedures unless they need them — and we also want to be able to provide care for those who need it. It’s a balancing act between timing and the care setting for each patient, which can be solved with a thoughtful and collaborative approach.
5. People may be hesitant to embrace technology — and that’s okay! — New technologies tend to create feelings of distrust, and new paradigms are often met with pushback. One summer when I came home from college in 1991 after creating a Hotmail account and using Telnet to chat with friends at other institutions, I tried to explain the concepts of instant messaging, email, and multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons to my parents: “Dad, you can send mail to someone over the computer and they get it right away! And you can ‘talk’ to someone by typing and they can type right back! And you can go to a ‘place’ in the internet and play a game with all your friends and be talking and laughing and fighting monsters together!” They thought I was out of my mind. A few years later, America Online figured out how to make it easy for people and, BOOM! You’ve got mail.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Think of each human footprint (economic, carbon, food, waste, etc.) as a puzzle piece on a large beach ball. Global resources are limited, so the ball doesn’t get any bigger. As you add more pieces (population growth) and bigger footprints (corporate greed, expansionism, imperialism, etc.), they begin to crowd each other, eventually pushing each other out of the way. Some pieces get marginalized, some get buried.

To address this, one frame of thought is to find a way to succeed as an individual — to find a way to the ‘top’. But even today, those on the “top” can’t go far from their homes without seeing the chaos and destruction around them.

The other perspective is to put all one’s energy into finding a way to arrange the footprints so they fit together and all the pieces are able to exist comfortably and minimize the number of pieces that get crushed.

Considering human psychology, politics, and society, I feel the best answer lies somewhere in the middle. It is honorable and dutiful to push yourself to be the best you can be. At the same time, it helps everyone (and thereby helps you indirectly) to contribute to solving society’s problems. Many great leaders have paraphrased the idea that the true measure of a nation is not the wealth of its treasury, nor the strength of its army, but how well it fulfills the promise of a better life for each of its members.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

I’d like to meet Priscilla Chan, cofounder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The foundation’s goal is to apply technology to address some of the biggest issues of our time including but not limited to complex challenges in healthcare and education — both of which are close to my heart.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.