“The most successful CIOs will be those that wear multiple hats including strategist, operator and technolgist…with a very sound understanding of the financial implications of technology"

KARTHIK GANESH
EVP, CIO & COO
QualCare

Karthik is EVP and Chief Operating Officer at QualCare, Inc. with responsibility for all aspects of strategy, IT and operations. He also serves as the Chief Information and Strategy Officer for QualCare Alliance Networks, Inc., which is the parent organization of QualCare, Inc. Karthik has deep strategy, technology & operations expertise via broad leadership positions at Fortune 100 Health Plan & Pharmacy Benefit Management(PBM) organizations. Prior to joining QualCare, he had separate stints as the Head of Business Technology at Aetna and Director of Client Services at Express Scripts.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and your expectations

The biggest technology challenge right now is demand management. While this may not appear to be a technology centric challenge, the ability for technology to keep up with the demands of a fast-changing industry landscape is taking on life of its own. The health plan
sector is transforming at a very aggressive pace to finally embrace a direct-to consumer model with health insurance exchanges. The lack of clarity in terms of interoperability, poor health information exchange (HIE) adoption and non standard off-the-shelf EMR products are further complicating the ability to seamlessly delivery on the demand and associated expectations. To answer your question, the micro level challenges at the enterprise level are being directly driven
by the industry demands at the macro level.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier
 

Over the course of 2011 & 2012 QualCare moved very aggressively down the path of shrinking & optimizing our infrastructure footprint while also factoring in scalability. We have also very aggressively virtualized over 70% of our infrastructure and migrated to a private HP-based cloud
solution. The very high level of strategic dependence on our private cloud & associated SAN solution makes this my biggest pain-point.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
 

While I call out the fault tolerance of a private cloud solution as the thing that keeps me up at night, on the flip side I believe this is the biggest technology trend in the health plan sector.
Virtualization is on the strategic plan of virtually every mature health plan. Moving to a private cloud offers a level of information security that is critical to managing a customer’s healthcare data. Most importantly it offers a level of rapid scalability that is critical in today’s healthcare marketplace.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
 

The CIO as a technology leader is not a viable role anymore. I’m both the CIO & COO for my organization and this has allowed me to very effectively drive an enterprise-wide transformation of our service model. It has allowed the organization to very aggressively streamline the operations, reduce operating costs dramatically enhance the customer experience and make our service model a critical differentiator in the marketplace. It is increasingly becoming more critical for CIOs to be able to understand the nuances of the operation to ensure the right technology solutions are being deployed. With the growing importance of IT as a top line contributor and not just a cost center, CIOs also need to be key strategists within their organization. They are uniquely positioned to be able to connect the dots between
the business strategy & associated technology solutions.

Lessons learned as a CIO

The most successful CIOs will be those that wear multiple hats including strategist, operator and technologist…with a very sound understanding of the financial implications of technology, both from the top as well as bottom lines.