Health Tech: Dhaval Shah Of CitiusTech on How Their Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Jake Frankel

Identify Real-World Needs: Engage with healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders to gain insights into where technology can make a meaningful difference.

As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dhaval Shah.

Dhaval Shah is the Executive Vice President & Market Head, MedTech at CitiusTech. With more than 23 years of healthcare technology experience, he is responsible for overall strategy, and vision for the MedTech business at CitiusTech. As part of his role, he works closely with large healthcare and life sciences organizations. Dhaval has an extensive background in the healthcare domain and academically he holds a Master’s degree in Bio-Medical Engineering.

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?

I have been in healthcare technology for more than 23 years. I did my bachelor’s and master’s in biomedical engineering and was always fascinated by the use of technology in healthcare. After completing my education, I spent a lot of my time working with health systems doing research in medical imaging and interoperability.

Before I joined CitiusTech, I spent nearly a decade at leading healthcare organizations where I was able to gain extremely valuable experiences working across multiple technologies and different healthcare segments. I joined CitiusTech in 2007, and today, I am responsible for developing the vision, capabilities, and solutions to partner with leading healthcare and life sciences organizations.

Growing up, I have always had a deep passion for technology, and I vividly remember the 1990s when technology was just emerging. It was an exciting time when the internet and personal computers were changing the world. In fact, my career journey began in the early 2000s working on IT solutions at a health system. Right from the start, my heart was set on using technology to improve healthcare.

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

One of my first roles was that of a research engineer at a health system. I got the opportunity to work within the health system on modalities. Seeing how technology could transform lives amazed me. I also saw the daily struggles of healthcare professionals, juggling patient records, medical images, and administrative tasks. This ignited my passion to leverage technology to make an impact on the lives of caregivers and patients.

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?

I am incredibly grateful for the support and guidance I received from two remarkable individuals, Rizwan Koita and Jagdish Moorjani. They are the co-founders of CitiusTech and I had the privilege of working alongside them right from the company’s inception. Their resilience, innovative thinking, humility, and unwavering dedication to their vision for CitiusTech have been a driving force in my career. They not only provided me with knowledge and unwavering support, but also instilled in me the importance of giving back and mentoring others, just as they had done for me.

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

“I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance.”

This quote by John D. Rockefeller captures the essence of tenacity and its role in achieving any form of success, whether in business or personal endeavors. In my own experience, I have learned that long-term success depends on one’s ability to keep moving forward, adapt to changing circumstances, and always remain grounded.

At one point in my career, I made a significant shift. I was in a very successful technology-focused role, but I decided to transition to a business-focused role to make a greater impact. I went on to become the head of that business vertical purely because of my ability to persevere, never stop learning, and stay grounded. I believe that perseverance is not just a quality; it’s a relentless mindset that propels us forward to achieve our goals and lead fulfilling lives.

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?

If I had to attribute my success to three trait it would be -

1. Ethics: Upholding strong ethical standards is non-negotiable in my leadership style. This has helped me establish trust with clients, partners and my teams. Making ethical decisions, even when it’s difficult, has been integral to my long-term success.
2. Resilience: The ability to bounce back from setbacks, be creative and adapt in the face of challenges are crucial. This has allowed me to stay focused on long-term goals despite short-term obstacles.
3. Empathy: I have always led with a people-centric approach, and that has helped me build loyalty and trust with my teams, peers and clients.

While these traits have undoubtedly been the cornerstones of my success as a business leader, one thing is for sure: a good dose of humor certainly helps! :)

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the technology or medical devices 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?

We stand at the forefront of a new direction in the healthcare industry — one that is collaborative, digitized, accelerated, and fundamentally human-centric. This technology-fueled shift is reshaping our perspective on healthcare, redirecting the spotlight towards patient-centricity.

For the first time, preventive health surpassed disease management as the central focus of healthcare delivery, with patients engaging in a much more active role in the management of their health and well-being. This development has left payers, providers, and med techs searching for the solution that will drive better patient outcomes and reduce costs for the entire system. Additionally, they want to successfully provide convenient, transparent, and personalized care attuned to individualized needs. Therefore, embracing a full digital transformation with technology modernization, connected care technologies, democratization of data, and patient engagement, is essential.

At CitiusTech, we aim to solve those problems by serving as a dedicated technology partner for the world’s leading healthcare, med tech and life sciences organizations. With end-to-end offerings across consulting, engineering, healthcare solutions, products, analytics and AI, we enable organizations to reinvent themselves, deliver better outcomes, keep pace with evolving industry needs and have a meaningful positive impact on patients.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Technology is fueling a paradigm-altering leap in patient care; however, true transformation requires an architectural overhaul, which means embracing interoperability. By making medical devices and healthcare systems connect to “speak the same language,” ensuring the secure, standardized, and efficient exchange of data, we unlock a multitude of benefits.

Our incredible team is able to address the data convergence, interoperability and connected health needs of healthcare organizations by delivering technology expertise, 100+ prebuilt accelerators and specialized solutions across connected health, patient and physician engagement, AI-assisted health, predictive analytics, SaMD / digital therapeutics, and process transformation.

These solutions accelerate digital transformation and improve quality of care for patients by enabling:

• Connected enterprise with a centralized hub for the seamless exchange and flow of healthcare data accessible to their care team.
• Interoperability to streamline healthcare processes, reduce costs, and enhance patient care.
• Elimination of data silos, reducing manual data exchange and errors.

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

Highlighting what I mentioned earlier, seeing how technology could transform lives and improve the daily struggles of healthcare professionals amazed me. This ignited my passion to leverage technology to make an impact on the lives of caregivers and patients.

How do you think this might change the world?

Our solutions enable healthcare and life sciences organizations to better serve their patients and achieve success for their organization by:

• Empowering the patient to make better decisions about their health.
• Helping healthcare providers to make hyper-personalized treatment plans and provide precision medicine with proactive health support.
• Enabling Value-Based Care (VBC) to deliver high-quality care at lower costs.
• Helping build a healthcare system where preventing disease would be more profitable than treating one.

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?

There is a lot of media “noise” around the potential negative consequences of AI technology, and technology advancements in general. Advancements in digitizing healthcare records and patient portals to enhance patient engagement and support, are good for everyone involved in the process. However, security for the provider and privacy protection for the patient will always be a concern.

In addition to following all industry regulations, we also have our own internal standard security process and tools for data, application, and infrastructure. This is the same for most med-tech customers, and life sciences organizations as it is for payers and providers.

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”?

From the perspective of technology in the healthcare industry, it should always come back to how this technology benefits the delivery of patient care. To do that, you must be willing to embrace the constant change and evolution that exists within the industry. Always think about how your technology can better meet patient needs to improve their care experience. However, creating healthcare technology with a positive social impact is complex. Here are key insights to successfully build healthcare technology that can make a positive social impact:

1. Identify Real-World Needs: Engage with healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders to gain insights into where technology can make a meaningful difference.
2. Prioritize User-Centered Design and Co-create: Put users at the center of the design process, leverage community stakeholders to build technology solutions that address real healthcare issues, and ensure user buy-in.
3. Build Scalable and Accessible Solutions: Ensure that your technology is scalable and accessible, reaching underserved populations and improving healthcare access.
4. Ensure Data Security and Privacy: Protecting patient data is paramount. Prioritize robust cybersecurity measures. Comply with data privacy regulations, like HIPAA, and prioritize encryption, access controls, and secure data storage.

Can you share a few best practices that you recommend to safeguard your technology or medical devices from hackers?

Interoperability, extensive digitalization, and accelerated cloud adoption results in an enormous amount of patient and stakeholder data. This makes structured data governance a necessity, as it is supremely important for healthcare providers to protect patient health data. This calls for robust and scalable data de-identifiers to carry out low-risk and high-utility data anonymization, which luckily, are easy to integrate into systems and provide a comprehensive user experience.

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?

Well, I would tell them that you don’t need a cape to be a hero. Small, consistent actions, like reducing waste, volunteering, or advocating for change, can collectively create a world of difference. So, take initiative and remember it’s not just about leaving a mark; it’s about leaving the world better than you found it.

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. :-)

It would be Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.

His journey is particularly inspiring. Born in Hyderabad, India, he came to the United States to pursue his dreams. His ascent from a software engineer at Microsoft to the company’s top leadership role is remarkable. I admire his transformational leadership and the way he has steered Microsoft into a new era of innovation.

What’s equally fascinating is Satya Nadella’s commitment to ethical business practices and his efforts to make technology more accessible and inclusive. I would relish the opportunity to sit down with Satya Nadella to discuss his insights into the digital future, the role of technology in solving global challenges, and his leadership philosophy.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can follow CitiusTech via social media on X, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. Additionally, stay up to date with announcements via the CitiusTech news page on our website.

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!