Rasu Shrestha, Chief Innovation Officer, UPMC, Chapter 1

We’ve all heard the expression, ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket,’ and in any industry like healthcare where costs are skyrocketing, it seems like sound advice. But if you strongly believe that the basket — in this case, innovation — is the future, perhaps it’s time to rethink it, particularly if your organization has invested so much time and resources in this area.

For years, UPMC has worked to build a foundation for innovation that focuses on “substance backed by academic and scientific rigor to create products that are effective,” says Rasu Shrestha, who holds dual roles as Chief Innovation Officer at UPMC and Executive VP of UPMC Enterprises. In this interview, he talks about how the organization is leveraging its innovation arm to develop better care models, the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ when it comes to acting as one strategic group, and the ultimate goal of making technology “as invisible as possible.” Shrestha also discusses what it will take to improve interoperability, and why he’s excited about where the industry is headed.

Chapter 1



* About UPMC

* Balancing the “yin and yang” of being a provider and payer

* New care models

* Innovation using Silicon Valley methodologies

* “Rethinking the paradigm” of clinical tools

* Reducing waste in rev cycle & supply chain

* Dual leadership roles: “My role is to build bridges.”

* Creating a cohesive strategy — “It’s the how and the why.”



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Bold Statements

We’re able to put our money where our mouth is. We’re investing into companies, startups, and talent, and bringing in methodologies that Silicon Valley has used to push their innovations forward: agile development, methodologies, and human-centered design.

How do we take some of the greatest research work and some really cool, innovative scientific work that’s going at the bench side, and bring it to the bedside? Whether it’s around immune transplant therapy or a number of different areas, we’re pushing that forward in ways we had not done before.

It’s not just about a cool app that we’ll upload to the app store and make available for downloads; it’s about changing business paradigms and saying that the future of healthcare is moving away from brick-and-mortar hospitals to patients’ homes and even the smartphone in their pockets. What does that future look like?

Our approach is more of a speedboat than a large ship or Titanic, for that matter. It’s being nimble and agile around not just how and what we focus on, but also the specifics of how we get to these results.

Gamble:  I think the best way to start is for you to give an overview of your top priorities as Chief Innovation Officer at UPMC.

Shrestha:  I’ll start first with the backdrop. UPMC is a payer-provider organization with $17 billion in annual revenue, 80,000 employees and about 40 hospitals on the provider side, and on the payer side, a network of about 3.5 million member lives covered. It’s a fairly large organization.

What’s interesting about where UPMC is today — as we position ourselves from an innovation perspective for the healthcare of tomorrow — is the yin and yang between the payer and the provider organization. That, in large part, is where we’re trying to capitalize — the makeup and the dynamics of how providers and payers need to work much more cohesively together as we look at innovations around precision medicine or population health. And so we’re taking the power of data across not just clinical systems, but end users and consumers, marrying that with claims data, and looking at how we manage and shift risk across health systems, across the payer-provider yin and yang.

Coming up with these newer care models is essentially what we’re doi...