Rising Stars of the Profession 2021: Ruchika Jhaveri

Ruchika helped GE Healthcare develop and launch its first clinical Command Center (CC) at Johns Hopkins (Forbes), bringing artificial intelligence and real-time and predictive analytics to a hospital setting. The CC has helped optimize care coordination, expedite delivery, and improve patient access.

Today, 200+ hospitals across six countries use CC software. Since Hopkins, Ruchika has led three complex, multi-year clinical CC projects, which required guiding clients through re-engineering processes, creating a capacity strategy plan and implementing data analytics to serve patients and support care teams.

"I am incredibly honored to have been nominated for this award," says Rachika. "I appreciate the recognition from my leadership and organization for the work that I have done, which has only been successful because of my incredibly talented team members. Our collaborative and system-thinking approach has been why our clients love working with us. Winning this award would be a significant win for our entire team and a validation of our work, which has resulted in numerous innovations for the healthcare delivery system and many positive outcomes for patients and their families before and during the pandemic."

Ruchika credits people as the biggest factor in her success so far, "The people I have worked with have had an exceptional impact on my work. One strong visionary leader once said, "invest in building relationships and you will lift both yourself and others around you", exemplifying the type of individual contributor I want to be. Because we've always been a small team, every person has always been willing to roll up their sleeves and jump into the trenches to complete any task, big or small. I also try to embody that same ethic and truly believe that it has kept me grounded, allowing me to build strong relationships with individuals across different teams and levels. Ultimately, my success has been driven by working hard, maintaining positive relationships, and being surrounded by people with the same goals and the desire to deliver exceptional outcomes to the client. I am also lucky to have strong female mentors who have helped shape my career trajectory and to work for a team that has promoted female leadership."

When asked what she enjoys most about her career in consulting, she notes, "Consulting has always been exciting because I am working with an exceptional organization and motivated teams (both on the client-side and within GE) to figure out collaboratively the toughest challenges that our clients face. At GE, I've been able to layer in technology solutions on top of traditional consulting to help drive innovative solutions that are sustainable and scalable for large healthcare systems. Even more importantly, these solutions are improving patients' lives."

"Problems like lengthy patient stays, adverse clinical outcomes, and inefficient capacity management are age-old issues that healthcare systems have been tackling for years. Being able to place a scalable and expandable technology solution right into the hands of front-line caregivers has allowed us to move the needle on these metrics more than we were ever able to do with just process and change management alone. Helping our clients provide better service to patients and achieve better outcomes is by far my favorite part of the job. It is incredibly humbling when our clients send us stories of how the patient was able to have a life-saving procedure faster or an adverse event was caught in time."

Taking pride in her work, Rachika discusses her proudest achievement to date. "After four years of working on multiple capacity-strategy and Command Center projects, I was finally able to lead my first Command Center project with an eight-hospital healthcare system in Washington. After a year, we opened the first centralized Mission Control program within our ecosystem. Leading up to the program's launch, we developed 10 "Tiles" (real-time apps), hired new positions, centralized departments such as bed management and staffing across the system, and constructed a NASA-style space to promote collaboration of all the teams better. It was an incredible feeling to attend the ribbon-cutting event in the summer of 2019, which represented the culmination of all our hard work. It's been very gratifying to see how Mission Control has helped this healthcare delivery system become more innovative and navigate the COVID-19 pandemic."

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

"Delight the client and everything else will be taken care of. Working in an industry where customers determine our success, it is imperative to continuously learn from, adapt to and deliver results to our clients. The GE Command Center team brings forward the unique combination of strategy + analytics + activation, allowing us to partner with clients to create breakthrough, sustainable outcomes."