Rising Stars of the Profession 2021: Anish Patel

In 2018, GE and Tampa General Hospital (TGH) began their journey to deploy the first Command Center in Florida to increase patient access and reduce length of stay (LOS). The Command Center has saved $40 million, cut 20,000 excess days and reduced LOS.

Anish was integral to the Command Center project, leading block schedule redesigns across nine OR locations to increase access for patients and physicians. Anish's redesigns freed up 548 OR hours a week (the equivalent of ~219 cases a week). His work has been impactful, giving physicians greater OR scheduling flexibility and ensuring patients receive care in an appropriate setting. Anish and TGH have sustained this effort through a governance group of physicians and hospital executives that oversee perioperative strategy and operations.

"I enjoy working on our GE team, which includes intelligent, talented people and a humble culture. Every day we are helping our clients solve the most difficult problems in patient throughput using artificial intelligence, unlike other industries such as manufacturing and airlines, which use AI to fix production issues that will impact their businesses down the road. Prior to joining GE, I helped solve problems using "old" data. We didn't have real-time data to solve issues before they happened and were consistently behind. GE's Tiles are helping create a new reality by offering real-time decision support that helps save lives daily. The GE Command Center Team is a cutting-edge technology that is disrupting healthcare by mining data and turning it into real-time, actionable information for clinicians and operations. Ultimately, I love getting up every day and traveling to our various client sites and helping push them to greatness just as they push my team and me to greatness. Each client has similar problems, and as an industrial engineer, I enjoy peeling those problems back like an onion and coming up with solutions."

Of his achievements, Anish states, "My proudest achievement to date is leading an initiative with the Tampa General Hospital critical care team to decrease ICU capacity by developing a Tile that recommends when a patient is ready to move out of the ICU based on specific clinical criteria. This is important because the cost of taking care of a patient who does not clinically need to be in an ICU is extremely high and wastes key resources. After the pandemic, all hospitals need to be sure they have these key resources available at all times. I was fortunate to have a strong group of analytics consultants and engineering support ready to take on this challenging but gratifying project.

"We partnered with ICU nurses and doctors to develop a Tile with over 70 clinical criteria that help determine if a patient needs to stay in the ICU or is ready to move to a lower level of care. The Tile is 97% accurate, which means that the Tile's recommendations match those of the care team. The Tile is actively in use in multidisciplinary rounds and nursing shift changes. Today, not only is the Tile improving bed capacity for critically ill patients, but it is also allowing physicians and nurses to expedite transfer decisions much faster while driving down costs. We have taken time once wasted digging through the EMR and returned it back to the clinical team to take care of patients."

Healthcare has many moving parts and stakeholders involved in patient care, which can be a challenge to those on the frontlines. Anish notes that the most significant factor in his success, "is getting to know the barriers to success that many frontline team members face and help address them. The secret to doing this is spending time in someone else's shoes. There have been plenty of nights and weekends I have spent in the hospital experiencing firsthand what my clients and frontline team members experience. Overnight stays in the emergency room have allowed me to help make sure patients were transferred to beds promptly. I have come to understand the processes and components of taking care of specific types of emergencies, such as patients with multiple gunshot wounds. And I have helped clinics organize their staffing schedules to meet the demand of incoming patients."

"The partnership I form with the frontline team is humbling and so important when it comes to transforming healthcare. Success is often measured by a return on investment, but for me, success is also measured on if I helped make someone's life easier or had a hand in helping a patient get what they needed sooner. Living in someone else's shoes is a cultural belief at GE. My mentors from day one have supported me by helping me with the challenges I've faced and often have jumped into the battle with me."

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

"The best advice I was ever given was always to listen more than you speak. This is such an important element in consulting. Consultants tend to come in and "know every answer." This advice was coupled with a Toyota Production System tactic of observing the current state of processes by making a box on the floor and just watching with your eyes and listening with your ears. This advice will always stick with me my entire career. It allows people to know that I value what they say and am listening to them rather than formulating my own opinions. Greater than 50% of projects never make it into the sustainment phase or fail because we do not do the simple things such as listening and observing what is happening."