Becker's Hospital Review is excited to highlight the following three rising health IT and innovation leaders.
Ravikanth Koganti is vice president of information technology and CIO of Englewood (N.J.) Health, and he oversees the system's innovation track. He is responsible for the health system's technology systems to ensure that day-to-day operations run smoothly. Hired in the middle of a transition to Epic, Mr. Koganti dived right in to lead the implementation. He is also responsible for modernizing the health system's IT teams to focus more on care and quality.
With a strong vision for innovation and new solution development, Mr. Koganti has identified emerging technologies to solve clinical and operational problems. He has also partnered with others to inspire innovation in legacy settings with demonstratable return on investment. He has initiated partnerships that have helped the system become more efficient.
Prior to joining Englewood Health in 2017, Mr. Koganti was corporate director of IT at NewYork-Presbyterian in New York City. During that time, he gained experience in leading technical initiatives for clinical, ancillary and financial system implementations as well as operational improvements. He also led the development of the NYP Care+ app to improve workflow efficiencies at the health system's burn center.
Sara Vaezy is the Renton, Wash.-based Providence Digital Innovation Group's chief digital strategy and business development officer, responsible for developing the system's digital strategy and roadmap. She also oversees digital partnerships and business development for the health system and plays a key role in technology evaluation.
As the leader of her group, Ms. Vaezy oversees the sustainable incubation process that has launched multiple successful ventures, including Xealth, Circle — which was acquired by Wildflower Health — and DexCare. She aims to impact healthcare through innovation, including the patient experience, health system economics, quality outcomes and value.
Her team works with market researchers, internal stakeholders, external experts and colleagues from other health systems to evaluate problems and potential technology solutions. Recently, she told Becker's Hospital Review that patient engagement through personalization was on the horizon.
"We are now embarking on the journey to start building a patient engagement platform that is personalized and can drive relevant interactions, whether it be providing content for patients to read or setting up a preventive care visit," she said. "We are building that in-house now. We could partner on some aspects of it, but overall, we think there is a need that isn't being met with current products, especially in the orchestration of all services available to the patient. We want to provide the services in a way that doesn't introduce clutter and is simple for the patients to engage with."
Ms. Vaezy has previous experience with The Chartis Group, a healthcare management consulting firm.
Jonah Feldman, MD, is an internal medicine physician and the medical clinical transformation officer at NYU Winthrop. He has a background as a physician informaticist and has a keen interest in how IT can improve patient care and satisfaction. He was appointed clinical transformation officer of the hospital in 2016 and led multiple initiatives to advance patient care, including standardizing communications during care transition and improving documentation.
After implementing these interventions, the hospital realized a 70 percent decrease in medication reconciliation errors among hospital patients and a decrease in risk adjusted hospitalwide mortality rates.
Dr. Feldman was also the co-leader of the hospital's Epic Ambulatory implementation, which spanned 550 providers and 140 locations. He is now directly responsible for implementing system-level transformations and supporting other systemwide changes. Dr. Feldman also established the NYU Winthrop Physician Informatics Team and serves as founding director for the Center for High Value Medicine and Health Delivery Innovation in the hospital's department of medicine.
Dr. Feldman is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and was recognized by the organization as a Leadership Day Grant recipient.
Contact Laura Dyrda at ldyrda@beckershealthcare.com to recommend rising stars in health IT and healthcare innovation for Becker's to feature in the upcoming weeks.