Raising the Stakes for Professional and Personal Development (ft. Ganesh Persad)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Hey, I'm really excited. Today, our guest is Ganesh Prasad, He is the director of IT applications at Memorial Healthcare System, South Broward Hospital District. Welcome, Ganesh.

Hi, Ed. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, this is going to be fun. The reason I'm excited about it is because I know a lot of our listeners, while many of them are CIOs and CDOs and people at that level, we don't really talk too much about sort of the directors that are out there and that are seeking to— really the next generation of leaders. And so it'll be a really fun conversation because you're already doing a lot of great leadership things, not only within your health system, but also what you're doing with HIMSS. So we want to talk all about that. But before we get there, DJ, Megan, I had a question for you. So Ganesh hails from South Florida. I know you're in the region. Have you ever attended HIMSS chapter? I haven't. I've not even attended the local one here in Virginia. But we've got a lot of team members who are engaged in their local chapters in both South Florida HIMSS and up here in Virginia.

Yeah.

Maybe after you hear Ganesh and I talk a little bit about the HIMS chapter, you might be convinced to start attending your Virginia HIMS chapter. Yeah, they're pretty— it's— they're pretty great. I've always been a big fan, and we'll get into that a little bit. But Ganesh, I'm trying to think, the first time we probably connected might have been through the South Florida chapter of HIMS, maybe virtually.

Yeah, I think it was, I want to say maybe 3 or 4 years ago, you had Chris Yeah. And delivered our keynote.

Yes, yeah, Chris Ross and I kind of teamed up, talked about patient experience, things like that. And so we connected and, uh, with your whole board, yourself, and it's a great chapter down there. In fact, I think you all won some award in the last year or two.

Yeah, our 10-year anniversary. I mean, unfortunately it was during, during the pandemic, but we won Chapter of the Year. We kind of swept, swept that year, but unfortunately we couldn't, couldn't celebrate.

I remember, but it does speak to the great leadership And how everyone in that region has come together to form the chapter. But before we go on, because my listeners will get mad if I don't ask you this very, very important question, songs on your playlist. So what do you like to listen to when you're—

I like to listen to all kinds of music, but one of my favorite songs is Lose Yourself by Eminem. So that's one of my go-tos. It speaks about seizing the moment and working in the industry. I think a lot of professionals can say that. At one time or the other, they've kind of been the underdogs. So it speaks to kind of overcoming and believing in yourself. So one of those songs that I hold true close to me.

Yeah, no, I like that. And that might lead into this next question that we always ask, and that is sort of around your passion, life message, or mantra. Are there words that you sort of live by?

Yeah, well, my passion is my family to begin with. But if I were to say one of the mantras that I typically live by is Gandhi. It's like happiness is when, when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

When what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. I like that. That's good stuff. And yeah, we do want to talk a little bit about that too, because I think people might be able to tell from your name that your family origins may be outside of the United States. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your family origins? And then I want to talk about Diwali too. So the— we're recording this just after Diwali 2022.

Yeah. So I, I am Indian descent from India, but I and my dad and my grandpa, we were all born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, a small island right off of South America. So I came to the States when I was 9 years old, but grew up, you know, even though we didn't live in India, I mean, the culture, everything that we do is still the same, such as celebrating Diwali.

Yeah, we do the same in our family. I think most people know my wife is from India, and so we've adopted many of the India culture. So here's a question out of ignorance, but if I have the question, probably some of our listeners do. What's the official language in Trinidad and Tobago? Is it French or what's the— English.

We were ruled by— we were first ruled by Spain, and then English came and took over. And so predominantly English, but again, kind of It's a very diverse country. We have, you know, all types of religions— Hindus, Islamic, you know, Christian, Catholic. So it's very multicultural, and you can see it in the food that we all eat, the way everyone kind of interacts, all the holidays that we celebrate.

Yeah, that's cool. I always think it makes for, you know, kind of like— it makes for— always be careful how I say it because I don't want to offend those who don't have a multicultural background, but I think it makes for a really complete person. And as you get into leadership, you know, you sort of understand other people and other cultures a little bit more.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So I'm always sort of biased that way. And that's why I always tell people, you know, if you can, even if it's having a foreign exchange student in your home or visiting foreign countries or trying— if you work for an organization where you have, like when I was at Cleveland Clinic, you know, we had Abu Dhabi, we had London, Canada. So if you can, you know, get a rotation through one of those countries. I just think it really helps. But anyways, so we talked a little bit about you on a personal level just now in terms of where you grew up and coming over to the US when you were 9. Tell us about your professional progression. Like, how did you get in? You know, where'd you go to school? How'd you get into healthcare?

I grew up in New Jersey pretty much. So from Trinidad, kind of landed in New Jersey, went through middle school and high school there. And while I was in high school, I started working at Walgreens in the pharmacy. Started off in photo, and then one of my friends was like, hey, you need to come into pharmacy. I'm like, all right, sure. And little did I know, that was my first real exposure into healthcare. I knew I wanted to do something in healthcare, didn't know what quite yet. I was kind of going down med school or nursing or something like that and focused on like the pediatric side of things. And then I started working at at a hospital in Orlando, in an actual farm— in the pharmacy in the hospital. And that's when I had my first, like, real exposure to the IT side of healthcare, working on their Pyxis implementations. And for those that don't know what Pyxis is, it's a medication dispensing system in the hospital settings. And, you know, I was able to kind of use that to marry the clinical aspect of it from pharmacy and then working with the IT teams. And I realized at that point, that's where I wanted to be. It was a good mix. And then I went to school. I went back to New Jersey and I went to school at Rutgers. Go Rutgers! And I got my bachelor's in health information management there. And then I ended up getting into the Epic space as a system analyst while I was going to school. So working on implementing Epic on the ambulatory side more so. And then I went and had my degree in biomedical informatics at NOVA. Down here in Florida.

Along the way, you're working your way up, you know, within your healthcare system. So how long have you been with Memorial and tell us about that progression?

So I moved down 7 years ago. So I've been with the health system a little over 7 years now. I came in as a senior analyst and, you know, working with our primary care division. And I think timing is everything, right? So when I came in, that was when the industry was kind of going through that evolution of population health and obviously primary care being the core of it. So working with our physicians and the leadership team here to build out our health footprint for our primary care division. And then I was kind of asked to take over our interoperability team. So, you know, with pop health, what do you need? You need data. So in order to get as much information in from the health information exchanges, you know, whether it be the payers and so forth, working with the teams to get as much data in as possible kind of helped catapult me into my leadership role. So then I would say after about 3 years, I was promoted to supervisor and then to manager where I took on our Connect program. Our Connect program pretty much allows us to extend Epic to our community providers. But again, keeping the Pop Health footprint in mind because having your providers in the network or your ACO being on the same EMR as you, there's tremendous value in that, right? So developing that program to extend it out to our community was another area. And now in my current role, As director, I have taken on our Healthy Planet team. So again, Pop Health, our MyChart patient experience team, and that's really keeping a focus on what we're building out from a patient experience, or as I like to call it, the human experience, because we always forget about, yes, the patient experience is one thing, but what happens after the patient comes in, right? You always have the MAs, the nurses, the providers, and what their experience is gonna look like. And be so hyper-focused on that, both from an operational standpoint, but as well as a technology perspective, making sure that we're, we're putting in solutions that are going to help augment that experience, whether it be a chatbot, whether it be our call center solution, to make sure that we're not just putting the technology there, but building out that experience within the tech stack that we have.

Yeah, no, that's super interesting. And the reason I'm asking these questions is because, you know, we're going to come back to recommendations you have for others who are right behind you and to help them succeed. But before we go there, and we do want to weave in HIMSS in just a little bit, there's so much to talk about. So let's try to make sense in a good order. What is your career aspiration? I'm sure, Jeff, or your leadership doesn't mind knowing that it's probably not to just be a director for the rest of your life, although that's a fine thing if that's what it is. But I just have the sense that you have Some major ambitions. Yeah.

I mean, my goal eventually is to become a CDO, CIO somewhere, and, and Jeff knows that. But, you know, I, me personally, I guess, you know, you asked kind of earlier my background and where I came from and come from hum— I came from humble beginnings, right? Didn't have a lot, but given the opportunity to come to America and be able to go to school and better myself, I'm gonna strive to give it. my all and strive to be the best that I can. And I understand that it's not going to come easy, right? There's obviously a lot to learn still. There's a lot to do. But I've been blessed throughout my career with having mentors in my life, leaders that have come in at various points to help me get to where I am, right? But it's a journey, and I'm happy that There's been those mentors that have seen more in me than I might have seen in myself at times. I think that's one of the goals. I don't forget where I come from, but hopefully at some point in my career, I'll get to that point.

Yeah, I have no doubt that you will. What's cool is that you do work for an employer and a leader. For those who don't know, Jeff is the CDO/CIO that we keep referring to. Jeff Sturman is that in a great organization and a great leader, they want the people that serve with them to become great and become all they can be, right? And to move and reach their career goals. So that's really cool because there are some people that leaders, quite frankly, who who might not be that way and will sort of hold people down. And so you want to make sure that you're aligned in an organization and with leadership that you know wants the best for you long term. While they hate to see you go. Or create opportunities for you to grow, which they've done where you are. That's really cool. I like that. What's one or two things that your teams, whether it was when you were a manager or now, your teams have done that you're pretty proud of?

I think, you know, and I'll speak to Memorial here for a second, you know, they're amongst the team, not just within the IT team or the teams that directly report to me. There's a sense of family here. There's a sense, the culture, it resonates throughout the organization and the community that we all treat each other with family and we genuinely care for each other. And that's one of the things that differentiates us, I think, from others. We're really an integrated team in the sense that we lean on each other's strengths. We all know each other. We know who is stronger in certain aspects. than others. The teams, they just come together depending. And I mean, I think I speak for many IT teams that have gone through this with the pandemic, whether it be monkeypox or COVID or the vaccine efforts, right? We all kind of— it was all hands on deck. And I think those types of— they demonstrate grit and tenacity to overcome those things. And that resonates within our team here.

All right, let's switch now to HIMSS a little bit. So while you're Working your way in your career, doing great things, you know, helping a lot of people, clinicians and humans. You were also involved with HIMSS. So tell us why you got involved with HIMSS and sort of your evolution to the position that you're holding now.

Yeah, I mean, largely to give back. I mean, like I said, I think I've been very, very fortunate in my career to have a lot of leaders, you know, help guide me and paved the way, I guess, for me.

Yeah.

It's funny, I graduated, so my health information management degree, obviously I was exposed to HIMSS because of that at an early stage of my education. And I just didn't get a chance to get involved when I was in New Jersey. When I came down here and I completed my— I was completing my master's, one of the professors, he was on the board. He was on the South Florida HIMSS board. And I, you know, being, I guess, the standout in the class because I was actually in the profession. Not standout academically, standout because I was in the profession that a lot of these students were trying to get into. So he was like, I think you should get involved. And at that time, one of the VPs here at Memorial was the president. You might know him, Oscar Perez. And he was like, you should get involved. And it was during their election period. I applied, I was voted in as the secretary and getting exposed to the team and the leadership that was there and really seeing how much time and effort and the passion that everyone puts into it. It's not just a chapter just for holding events or webinars and stuff. They genuinely care about what it is that we're providing to our community and our members. That was kind of my introduction to HIMS and a large part of, you know, I guess professionally where I am and where I am now. We just had our elections almost 2 years ago, and I was voted in as the president-elect. So this coming June, I will be the president of our South Florida HIMS chapter.

That's really cool. I have a lot of HIMS chapter experience, and it just was another thing that, yeah, you can give back, as you mentioned. And And you learn, you've given different types of leadership positions you might not be exposed to, you know, in the workplace, or now you're dealing with people from multiple different workplaces and then just building that team, all the things that you already said. That's pretty cool. For those listeners who might not be in a HIMS chapter, and this is by no means a paid ad for HIMS, but it was just, you know, talking about leadership and believing it, what would be one or two reasons you'd suggest that someone participate?

I would say just to get involved. I mean, You know, in healthcare, we're all doing a lot of the same things, right? And not just HIMSS. I mean, there's a lot of other health IT groups. There's other, other forums that you can participate in to kind of understand and educate yourself on what's going on in the industry. And, you know, it'll help you as a person be able to say, oh, you know what, maybe I didn't consider this, or this organization is doing it this way. Maybe we should consider doing it, you know, another way. Or again, growing your network. Like, you go to a presentation and you see someone that's doing something really, really cool. I guarantee you 99% of the time, if you reach out to them, they're gonna be more than willing to, to talk to you and provide and share some of the insights. And then it goes back to growing your professional network as well as getting into IT. If you're already into IT, Or even regardless, whatever profession you're in, right? I think it's agnostic. It doesn't have to be IT, you know, even nursing, it's the same thing. I would tell our nurses, go get, associate yourself to some type of organization.

Yeah, those are all really good reasons. So now we're gonna pivot into sort of the last topic where, you know, be super practical for people that are earlier in their careers. And, you know, that's why I wanted to bring so much out about you and your different roles so people can can see that and relate. What advice would you have for someone who's maybe like, uh, you know, you started as an analyst, I think you were saying, and then became— before you became a manager. What advice would you have for someone like in that analyst-manager stage in terms of their career? And, you know, as they, you know, let's just say that they aspire to be at least a vice president as they get older.

Yeah, don't be afraid to take on more. I think having more work, yes, it is stressful, it is taxing, and I think Showing that you want to learn, that you want to grow, that you're not willing to back down from any task, be it large or small. I think that'll help with your visibility and showing that you're eager to grow professionally. But I think there's a balance in that where wanting to grow— and I learned this very early on— one of the advice that someone gave me is Be yourself, be confident, and be humble. So you can do all these things. You can have the aspirations and want to grow and want to grow quickly, but stay humble to where anything that you go into, you're giving it your all. You're treating others with respect. You're building strong and lasting relationships. That was another area that I learned very young, is to not just work on a project, not just have— typically in IT, everything is really project-based, right? And having that project, but making sure that there's a level of relationship between you and your stakeholders and taking that and setting that foundation to build on as you go along. And I, in my personal experience, once you have a solid foundation and a solid relationship, those other projects that come down the road typically are a lot easier because You build that trust with your stakeholders and your team members.

Yeah. Uh, sound, sound advice. What about education? That's a question people often ask me. I know you have a master's. You kind of did yours in phases. It sounded like, you know, you got the bachelor's and then may have been a gap and then got the master's.

Mm-hmm.

Talk about education. How important is it that someone who aspires to be, let's just say VP or above, has education?

Huge. I think having an education, again, where, how I was brought up and raised, I mean, education was kind of core in our family. I did start a little later in my life, but I knew having that foundation was going to help set me up for success in the future. So, and again, not saying everyone needs to go out and get a master's or a PhD, but having, you know, whether you want to get a certification or something, right, constantly keep growing. The more you learn, right, the better you're going to be.

That's really important because you see that a lot with our colleagues where They'll get the degree, punch that ticket, so to speak, and then stop learning. And it's like, no, no, don't do that. Keep learning. It's healthy. And then it does add more value and makes you—

And especially in the landscape where in the health IT industry, right? It's ever-changing. Like, you know, regulations might be one thing this year and then, you know, next year it's gonna change. So, and you gotta adapt. So, You know, not just the academic education, but understanding what's going on in, in the, I'll say the market. Yeah.

And so Ganesh, you mentioned early on that your passion was family and you're also very passionate about work and you're very intentional as you, we can tell, you know, from your answers. So how do you make sure that you have time for that integrated life and recharge your batteries, right? And rest. So you're not always like, so work-minded, but you're there for your family. So I, you know, everyone sort of has their way of, uh, trying to maximize that. I'm curious about yourself.

Yeah, it's tough, but, you know, trying to— we enjoy traveling. Our family typically likes to go on, on a couple, couple trips a year, building those experiences with my wife and 2 kids. We even living in Florida, right, there's always something to do. So on weekends and stuff, we try to Get out of the house, especially now that we're working from home. Try to do things with them as much as possible just to kind of decompress a little bit. But our outlet is traveling.

That's great. And I like just the whole concept of on the weekends, get out of the house. It makes a lot of sense for many, many reasons. So we talked about a lot, but I wanted to summarize really quick for people listening. Ganesh, some things— here's about 10, 15 things that you said, which I think are really important. Because I found it very interesting that it was just a natural part of who you are and probably represents somewhat the culture too of Memorial. But you talked a lot about culture, which requires deep understanding. Experience, you used the word experience a lot. Talked about networking, the value of education, the grit, the giving back, having mentors, working hard, networking, taking on more, being visible, but also balance. And then the final thing, which we've seen a lot in a lot of the great leaders that we've had on the on Digital Voices is the concept of humility. So maintaining that humility is so critically important. So you gave everyone at least 10 things right there. So awesome. So thank you. But I want to leave the last sort of word for you. So we covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that we missed that you want to mention or anything that you want to double down on?

No, I think for all of the aspiring leaders out there or folks that are trying to get into it, I've been hearing this a little More often than I'd like to hear is we're all so busy. We're all very busy, but we didn't get here— us as leaders, we didn't get here because it happened overnight. We had people that invested the time in us, and we have a lot of students that are looking at coming into the field that need that opportunity. And the same way we all probably had mentors, I think we need to be able to to give that back to new and incoming individuals into the profession so that they can learn, that we can kind of pay back in some respects. And that's one of the reasons I forgot to mention to you about the education. Actually, coming up in January, I'm going to be an adjunct at NOVA teaching in their Bachelor's of Biomedical Informatics program. So again, giving back and wanting to— To help the future of future generations of IT leaders keep—

That's a really important thing. I'm glad you doubled down on that. Plus, giving back also requires that you continue yourself to be at the top of your game, you know, because, you know, especially you're teaching or you're mentoring even one-on-one, the stakes just got higher in a way, you know? So that's kind of the, the secondary benefit that you don't really think about. The primary one's giving back, but then the secondary one is like, actually makes you a lot better as well. So. That's really cool, Ganesh. I know that you will continue to be super successful in life and with your family. You're an amazing leader. Without going too far into it, these sort of things that just naturally came out of you is not the norm for many leaders, and it should be, but it's not. And you're definitely very gifted. I think Memorial, Jeff, lucky to have you. Continue to do great work for them. Don't leave them now because then they'll blame me. They'll give you great opportunities there to grow. And thank you for what you do, for what you do with your HIMS chapter, really important down there. And again, thank you for taking the time to share some wisdom with us.

Thank you, Ed. It's a pleasure.

All right, that wraps up Digital Voices, and we look forward to speaking with you at the next drop.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.