|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
On his road to becoming vice president and chief information officer of CenterWell Pharmacy for Humana Inc., Gaurav Khanna took a fortuitous route that began with a different career in mind upon entering Lehigh University.
“I went to school for IT, doing computer engineering in college,” he shares. From there, he worked as a consultant for companies in the architecture, capital projects, and infrastructure spaces.
“Healthcare happened by chance,” Khanna explains. “I was looking to make a geographic change to get closer to family in the Northeast and an opportunity came up that allowed me to continue doing the same type of work I had been doing on a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and it just happened to be for healthcare.”
Khanna joined Medco Health Solutions (now Express Scripts) in New Jersey in 2005, and he’s stuck with the industry for almost two decades.
“In this country, we talk about how fragmented our healthcare system is. Experiencing the challenges of that system has shown me where and how it impacts patients and what it does to a community,” he notes. “I wanted to identify opportunities to make an impact. My career in healthcare IT has given me a platform to accomplish this.”
He acquired fundamental knowledge in two pivotal aspects of the healthcare industry, namely pharmacy, from his time at Medco, and medical benefits from a later stint at EviCore.
“You have folks using smartphones, apps, and the web—who are very comfortable with those channels. If we don’t cater to how the patient wants to interact, we are going to be left behind.”
Gaurav Khanna
“I didn’t know much about pharmacy benefit managers before I started at Medco,” Khanna says. “I learned how a pharmacy claim gets processed, how patients use pharmacy benefits, how claims are adjudicated, and, ultimately, how medications are dispensed.”
After nine years at Medco, he went on to join EviCore, where he gained an appreciation for how pharmacy and medical benefits come together.
“I learned about prior authorization and the various components of healthcare that interact so a patient can get the right care—the right tests and labs—and ultimately the right prescriptions,” he shares. “I saw first-hand the importance of [how technology and automation are] transforming the healthcare system and patient experience and the many relationships that have to be forged to enable that transformation.
“One of the key things I realized being exposed to this work was why the healthcare system to the outside world seemed so disjointed, and it’s because it really is,” Khanna says. “Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of interoperability and integration among the different players in the space.”
The next stop on his journey was at the Nashville-based startup Contessa Health, a hospital-at-home care provider.
“We were designing and implementing what true hospital care at home could look like,” Khanna says. “We had a pretty significant technology stack and processes in place to bring care to our patients where they want to be—at home. We were looking to turn healthcare on its side, and it became an extremely important perspective during COVID.”
After the company was acquired, in 2021, Khanna was offered the opportunity to become vice president and chief information officer of pharmacy at Humana, an industry leader in the delivery of senior-focused, integrated, value-based care aiming to deliver better health outcomes for its patients and members. The company today includes both Humana Insurance services and CenterWell healthcare services, the latter providing senior-focused primary care, home health, and pharmacy services. Humana has 17.1 million members across fifty states and Puerto Rico, which includes 5.1 million Medicare Advantage members and 3.6 million prescription drug plan members.
“When I joined Humana, it was an organization focused on bringing a truly integrated health perspective to the industry and growing its newly formed CenterWell healthcare services arm [including the mail-order pharmacy fully owned and operated by Humana],” Khanna says. “Getting into that in the early stages was appealing to me.”
“I wanted to identify opportunities to make an impact. My career in healthcare IT has given me a platform to accomplish this.”
Gaurav Khanna
Humana also was a company that Khanna had seen make bold moves and changes during his career, and he was impressed that it was always willing to innovate to make things better for consumers. Going digital was a key part of that strategy.
In Khanna’s opinion, it’s vital to prioritize technology to enhance patient care in a 2024 world.
“We live in a day and age where everything is technology-driven, and over the last ten years, we have seen that the population of seniors we serve is a highly tech-savvy generation,” he explains. “You have folks using smartphones, apps, and the web who are very comfortable with those channels. If we don’t cater to how the patient wants to interact, we are going to be left behind.”
Therefore, he knows that technology must be an enabler at every step of the way for a patient’s journey.
Anuj Kumar, senior vice president healthcare sector head of Wipro, emphasizes Khanna’s advanced use of technology. “Wipro is proud to partner with Gaurav Khanna on leveraging AI and automation to optimize, modernize, and transform healthcare systems and business processes,” says Kumar. “This collaboration helps advancing Gaurav’s vision for healthcare solutions, highlighting its pivotal role in shaping the future of healthcare systems.”
“We’ve done a lot of work around that digital track,” Khanna offers.
Since joining Humana, he has helped CenterWell Pharmacy relaunch and revamp its web and mobile presence, making it more user-friendly and relying on data to make it more uniform and convenient for all patients.
“We are reimagining our digital assets, not just in pharmacy, but across CenterWell. From developing new mobile apps and web experiences to a significant focus on interoperability with the intention of becoming a single point of interaction for patients who want to interact with us in that way,” Khanna says. “The digitization [of pharmacies] will enable patients to interact more closely with their care—information such as auto-refills, order status, prior authorization, and shipment methods—all which are critical components to ensuring patients have the right medications at the right time.”
“Gaurav Khanna’s unwavering dedication to innovation for better health outcomes is commendable,” says Shyam Karunakaran, executive vice president and head of health plans at CitiusTech. “Collaborating with Gaurav in mission-driven areas such as healthcare digital transformation, provider experience, medication adherence, and beyond is a privilege. These efforts are instrumental in shaping the future of care.”
Khanna, who has been leading teams for more than twenty years, believes that to be effective as a leader, one must be a servant leader, empowering teams to be successful.
“If you are there to serve the needs of your teams, it will go a long way,” he notes. “You must also make sure there is transparency, accountability, and trust across the board. That’s how I show up, and how I expect my teams to show up.”
Khanna feels as if he’s making a difference, and that’s what has kept him in healthcare for the past two decades. As with his career’s fortuitus beginning, his open mind and tendency to seize opportunities will continue to serve him well, considering the velocity of technology change.
“It’s been amazing to me how much healthcare tech has evolved, and yet there is still so much opportunity for innovation in our industry,” he notes. “And when you look at AI and GenAI and how they will play a role in the healthcare ecosystem, it’s very exciting and a tremendous time to be in this industry.”
