DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Building Teams with a Growth Mindset (ft. Sachin Agrawal)

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

In this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed talks with Sachin Agrawal, CEO of e-Visit. They discuss Sachin's background, the mission and vision of e-Visit, and the importance of personal growth in leadership. He also emphasizes the value of surrounding oneself with a personal board of directors and finding inspiration in difficult times. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the transformation of healthcare and the role of leaders in driving change.   Key Takeaways The CEO role is a vehicle for personal growth, and aspiring leaders should embrace personal growth as they pursue their careers. Building teams with a growth mindset and a positive sum game mindset can lead to greater success and collaboration. Surrounding oneself with a personal board of directors can provide support, accountability, and inspiration in challenging times. e-Visit's mission is to simplify healthcare delivery for everyone everywhere, and they have had success in public health applications.

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 Marks. Hey, everyone, it's Ed here. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I want to thank you for listening. I know you have a lot of choices in what you can listen to. I listen to a lot of great content out there. And you've taken the time to be with me. Thank you. We'll make it worth your while because we'll always have great guests like my friend Sachin Agrawal, CEO of E-Visit. Sachin, welcome to Digital Voices. Thanks.

I appreciate you having me. Always a pleasure to spend time with you. Yeah, it's going to be great because you and I go back a ways. We were talking about that, you know, basically, you know, hymns, chime, these different events over the years. You kind of meet each other, but never really spend a great deal amount of time together. But lately, because of E-Vis, I have spent some time with you and getting to know you. your team and the company a little bit better.

And what makes this particular episode also unique is I think your first brother combination I've had on digital voices because we had your brother, Shentanu Agrawal, the chief health officer for Elevon's Health, on previously. So welcome. And I know you're going to outshine your brother. That's not the objective. We're very proud of him in the family. Yeah, no, you have an amazing family.

You're all overachievers. songs on your playlist. That's the most important question we ask. Songs on my playlist. Wow. So my daughter is at the age where she's starting to dictate the playlist a little bit. She'll be four in a couple months. And I was worried about that dynamic kind of emerging because I've heard horror stories

about hearing Frozen and things on repeat. But I think she's an old soul. Like she really likes kind of like what I listened to growing up. She likes like Cat Stevens and we've recently I've recently introduced her to YouTube. She likes

she likes them a lot. I towed the West Sprocket. So she's got weird, weird taste. She doesn't realize that she's into these bands at her old man that they were either ahead of my time or like right in my time. But that's kind of what she's into. So that's what's on my playlist at the moment. Yeah.

I have a little guy who's not even one yet. So no matter what you play for him, he's smiling. He's happy with whatever. Yeah, you know, I have my oldest daughter's like that too. She likes all the music that I liked as a teenager, you know, so she's really into like 80s, New Wave and punk rock and it's kind of fun. Yeah.

What about life message or mantra? Are there words that you live by? Somebody said this to me. I might butcher the words, but I try to live the spirit of it as often as I can, although I'm sure my wife will tell you that I could do a better job. but I heard this a number of years ago. He said if you listen intently when somebody else is speaking to you, then you will be understood very well when you speak.

And I think, especially in this digital world, lots of stimulus, et cetera, where things are coming at you constantly, and you're putting things out in the world constantly. I try to get a little bit more kind of tunnel vision and focused on the person right in front of me, and I try to make a connection that way. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I'm not so effective, but I try to live my life that way. Yeah, I like that a lot.

In fact, we have a digital voices playlist full of everyone's songs on their playlist, and we are also creating a digital voices sort of life message and mantra, and we'll be sure to add that. one on there as well. So that's pretty cool. Tell us a little bit about yourself, like personal, professional, and you can go back as far as you want. Yeah, so I grew up in the Midwest in Ohio, where I know you spent time. I think like a lot of kind of folks of my age with Indian background, my parents came here as immigrants. They actually came here with my brother. So that's something that's quite different about us. He was four years old, was born in India when they came here.

I was born a few years later once they got settled in. So thankfully, he can never run for present at three. We're all over the moon about that. But yeah, you know, I grew up in a small town in Ohio, probably like a lot of people. When my parents came here, my dad was a medical doctor and a lot of residences ended up happening in places where there was a high need, but not necessarily the supply of domestic graduates. But so you have a lot of kind of Indian American families that have settled into small towns because of, you know, that's what the need was. And so he did his residency in Northwest Ohio and thought that they would, you know, kind of get a start with private practice for a few years.

And they just left Ohio like a couple of years ago. So I was born there and raised there. And I've basically spent my entire life. It's kind of linear in certain ways, right? I spent my entire professional career working with hospitals and health systems on a lot of the kind of major topics, right, revenue cycle and network alignment and now focusing on digital transformation. So I kind of fell into this almost as like a second career. My first career was in public health supporting hospitals and health systems around the world, particularly in South

Africa and then came back to the U.S. and I've been doing this ever since. Along the way, I got married to a very overachieving wife. So there is a theme in terms of people I surround myself with in life. And I mentioned we have a soon-to-be-four-year-old daughter and a soon-to-be-one-year-old son. So they're our focus. They're our nucleus. And they keep us very grounded because usually at some course in the day, you make some sort of mistake with them and you try to learn from it. Right.

Yeah. Do you and your brother live close to one another and close to your parents? We live close to each other now. So my family relocated from Nashville, Tennessee to Northern Virginia just a little over a month ago. And so that puts us within 20 minutes of my brothers. We've gotten to spend some more time with them, which has been a lot of fun. And then we've consolidated the Uggarwall brothers here. So we're now making a play to get my parents maybe to move up north from Florida.

they thought that they would retire, but we have other plans for them. No, that's great. It's one thing I appreciate about sort of the Indian heritage. You know, it's very, very family-oriented and, you know, like to be close to one another, which I think is great. You got your degree in nutrition. Tell us a little bit more about that. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I think maybe like a lot of people that age. And so I got to a great, a great university in Ohio, Case Western. made, you know, kind of immediately fell into a great group of friends, brilliant people. And they kind of fell into two camps. Either there were engineers because it was a very strong technical school for engineering or there were kind of pre-med or pre-dental or something. And I kind of had a sense that I wanted to get into more the business of health care, but I didn't really know how to go about doing that. So I just started taking courses that were interesting to me and a lot of them had to do with nutrition, which at case was at the time,

I don't know if it still is. It was part of the school of nursing. And so I just kind of fell into that group as well. And it was a good kind of peer group. And I never knew what I was going to do with it. I thought, if anything, it would be hopefully personally beneficial in my life, but I didn't have some master career path laid out. Yeah. Well, no, it's true, though. It's a very practical degree. Unlike mine, I have a bachelor's in psychology. There's not too much practical at a bachelor level. But at least yours does. And yeah, it's like allied health for sure. You mentioned several roles that you've had internationally and, you know, stateside. What's been the most informative role that helps you today as a CEO? And I got, I threw a combination of some luck and perseverance

my first career experience outside of as soon as I graduated case. So this is back in the early 2000s. I read about this company called Broadreach Healthcare that was founded by a couple X U.S. focused healthcare consultants. And they were kind of taking a different, maybe you could say, like more of a private sector-oriented approach to global health issues. And this was during George W. Bush's administration when there was a lot of foreign aid being sent to Africa, in particular Asia, to focus on HIV-AIDS treatment. scaling up treatment around the world. And so I read about these guys in Time magazine, and I just said, I'm going to be a nuisance until they returned my phone call,

which they did or my email. They invited me to come out to Washington, D.C., where they were headquartered. And so my very first job out of college, I was obviously in my early 20s. I went to D.C. for almost a year. And then I got sent to South Africa for a couple of years to support a huge PEPFAR contract at this company.

me had won. And I had no idea what I was doing. I practically had no business experience. And the reason that was informative is because I think it just created a lot of confidence in me that if I could if I could kind of put my mind to something and dedicate myself to it, that I could make impact and make value. I really was questioning whether I had anything to contribute when I first kind of got the assignment and I do believe I contributed kind of something coming back and obviously learned a lot along the way. So that was that was critical actually for that to have been a first experience and for me to have gone halfway around the world by myself, the way that my parents said when they came here,

it just tested and builds a lot of character for me. Yeah, this may be kind of a leading question given all of that, but is that something you would recommend to your kids or other individuals as well as they begin their career is really seek out sort of that international experience like find out what's beyond the U.S.? Yeah, I would, I specifically I would recommend an international experience, but maybe even even more so kind of broader than that. I would just recommend that people do something that makes them uncomfortable. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of us you know, kind of knock on wood, right? As we get older and, you know, we go on our career paths and have wonderful careers.

We tend to be surrounded by people who also have had wonderful careers and are raising kids, you know, maybe in certain ways that mirror how we raise kids and things like that. So it becomes this kind of self-perpetuating bubble. In a lot of ways, there's great things that come out of that. But I think one of the things is, you know, the importance of being uncomfortable and getting out of that environment. That could mean internationally, I think that's more important than ever in this world. But it could also mean just putting yourself into a different environment within the U.S., you know, we're a melting pot, et cetera. And I'm the beneficiary of very

hardworking immigrant parents. My kids are even more so the beneficiary as we kind of carry that forward. And I think it's even more important that they have experiences that put them outside of this northern Virginia. Yeah. Little wonderful bubble that we live in in this little bubble that they're being raised in. Because there's not a whole lot that we can do to make them uncomfortable unless they put themselves out there. Yeah.

That's sage advice. Look, I want to talk a little bit about your company, E-Visit, and then come back to leadership. I love having CEOs on and learning things like you just shared with us. Share with our audience the E-Visit story and the mission and vision. Yeah. So e-visit was founded back in 2015, and we kind of have a very simple mission, right? Our mission is to simplify health care delivery for everyone everywhere. It's simple, it's audacious, right?

It's kind of all-encompassing. But I think the founders of the company, who I've obviously gotten to know and still work with, the idea was that as health systems were starting to think about digital transformation right now, this is almost 10 years ago, right? So those words didn't necessarily equate in the same way, but as health systems were trying to figure out how, when they were at the inception of figuring out, like, what would happen that would be kind of digital first in terms of care, this company was founded on the principle that health systems needed their own.

dedicated set of tooling and methods to go execute on that as opposed to kind of looking at outside outside kind of methods, right? So 2015, the only kind of types of companies that existed in virtual care were the teledocs and animals of the world that were kind of offering an alternative to your health system, right, a digital, you know, virtual first network and things like that. So when I first met the founders, they said, hey, imagine such an if you had like a legacy industry like the taxi cab industry that had their own way of transforming digitally from the inside out when Uber and Lyft came along, what would the state of that industry be today if we kind of played that out? And I think that idea really resonated with me. There are a lot of

things that came with that idea that resonated as well in terms of our underlying business model and economics and things like that, which I think matter a lot in today's economic climate. But yeah, that was kind of the spark, the idea that the founders had. And then I got involved in the business a couple years ago as part of carrying the mission forward, you know, on behalf of the founding team as we are just, you know, kind of maturing as an organization. Yeah, I like that a lot. So in self-disclosure, I was asked by e-visit to come and facilitate a workshop. And that's how we got more connected than we had been. And I got to hear firsthand stories of customer success, which was really quite exciting because

I'm a big believer in virtual care and things of that nature. Can you share with our audience, maybe one or two customer success stories, that customers have embraced e-visit and something that they did with it? Yeah. So as you can imagine, the company was going along kind of nicely, but perhaps somewhat predictably from 2015 until 2020. and then the world became a remarkably unpredictable place in 2020. And there was a lot of explosive growth in this part of the market

and e-visit experience. It's part of it. I mean, I could list 100 different things that customers are doing, but the one that really stands out to me, or I guess a couple that stand up to me, always have to do with kind of public health applications. Because the promise of virtual care from my perspective is to, eliminate a lot of the traditional access barriers or to alleviate a lot of the traditional access

barriers that we have in trying to seek health care, right, as a country and as a global economy. And so, you know, you've got a very prominent New York-based health system, you know, the largest public health system in the city that is leveraging our technology to enable people that otherwise wouldn't have access to care to just scan a QR code and to be part of like a digital intake process into that health system. And they implemented that during COVID,

but they've kept it going afterwards for a bunch of different public health use cases, you know, for vaccinations and other things. And I think that's really cool because that creates that kind of spark of a relationship between somebody who didn't previously have, you know, a relationship with the health care system.

system, it creates that first spark. Likewise in Chicago, kind of a similar DNA health system, the largest public health system in Chicago, they use a technology for people who are arriving in the country for the first time. You know, they're oftentimes arriving in shelters and as part of their intake process, they're getting, you know, Social Security cards and other things, right, as part of landing here. But now they have like a whole healthcare workflow. and they get connected to,

to practitioners of this public health system virtually using our technology. And I think that's so cool, right? When I think about where my parents came from in the time that I spent in India and the time that they came from versus 2024, the fact that we could do these things, you know, kind of at our fingertips, those are some of the most gratifying things that we do at Eviso that I'm really proud of. Yeah, no, that's super. So there was big news.

This happened after we scheduled our time together. So we're recording in July of 2024. There was big news that came out last month that e-visit acquired teleconsult from UPMC. What sort of color can you add to that acquisition? Yeah. So I think the first thing I'd say is that our business model is differentiated because it's very focused. So we exist for the benefit. primarily of very large health systems, very large healthcare delivery systems, because they,

they tend to have a lot of untapped infrastructure in place, right? Whether that's human capital or hardware or connectivity, whatever it may be, they tend to have that and they tend to have very complicated workflows that span across the continuum of care that are not kind of easy to solve for. And so that intersection of the two is where our business model comes together, we're not a competitive network. We don't offer our own part where we are truly an enabling platform for those types of organizations. And I think as this market has evolved, there just aren't a lot of kind of dedicated business

models out there and dedicated missions that are really kind of for health systems, by health systems. And so as we started seeing our kind of post-COVID momentum, which is really to kind of hardwire what we do into the way that health systems operate, you know, frankly, other health systems have approached us and have said, hey, either we develop something, right, that is ready to be taken to the next level, or we really believe in what you're doing and we want to invest behind that and we want to embed what you're doing into the way that we, the way that we deliver care and things like that. And UPMC kind of represented all of that, right?

They have a really cool enterprises division within UPMC that creates and incubates technology, especially when they see that that kind of technology hasn't been made available in the commercial market. And then they also invest in companies and get involved in that success. And this particular asset was a very differentiated way of delivering stroke consultations and other specialty consultations that involved a lot of provider communication, involved a lot of temporal pieces, right, having to do those things within a certain kind of time standard or SLA in order to drive the best outcome. And when we saw it, we thought it was very complimentary to the work that we're already doing

with health systems, very additive, some really cool things, obviously that UPMC is doing because they're on the forefront of delivering care that we didn't see elsewhere. And we kind of all agreed that this would be a good partnership for e-visit to commercialize that technology in the broader market. Yeah, makes total sense. I want to flip over to leadership now and ask you, Sgton, what is the, one best piece of advice you would give for aspiring CEOs. Because you've been a CEO now a couple of different places.

Yeah, this is my first CEO gig. I've been a CEO now for about a year and a half. So maybe my advice starts there. The CEO job more than any other that I've had, but I would say any aspiring leader can turn this kind of philosophy that I'm about to say into their philosophy, which is you have a job to do, of course, right? And you have you have company goals and all sorts of things, right?

All business terms that everybody's already heard, right? Those are obviously important things that we have to drive towards. But the job is, you know, the platform itself, whether you're a CEO, whether you're an aspiring CEO, whether you're a leader in other positions, it's a vehicle for personal growth. And if you treat it as that vehicle for personal growth, I think you'll get return tenfold for the crazy effort that you put in, right? Leadership comes with sacrifice and effort, but you'll get that return not just kind of back into the business, but it'll just perpetuate along all aspects of your life.

And for me to be able to now start drawing a line between this personal growth and the CEO role that I'm on and how it impacts parenting. and how it impacts, you know, the spouse that I try to be, the friend that I try to be, the son and brother that I try to be and things like that. I think that's kind of the magic of the whole thing. And my particular life, I've chosen business as that vehicle for personal growth, but anybody can be a leader in any situation. And if they treat that as an opportunity for personal growth, I think they're going to get a lot out of it.

You've clearly as a leader have had to build teams in order to accomplish, you know, the mission and vision of the organizations. What has been, you know, one of the most important criteria to you when you think about forming and developing teams? I think it, you know, people call it the growth mindset, but I think it's all about the fact that the pie in the world, right, is always getting bigger. It's not finite. It's not getting smaller.

And I think if you embrace that philosophy and then you surround yourself with people who embrace that philosophy, the thing that ends up leaving the room is kind of ego and pretense. And the thing that remains is actually, I think, magical because you can build something together as a team that kind of makes you feel like an unstoppable force. And that happens day by day. Some days you take two steps backwards maybe instead of, instead of, you know, a giant leap forward or whatever. It may be right. It's never linear. But I think that's the most important thing, right? It's, it's, um, that kind of positive sum game mindset where you can do good for the world, you can, you know, do good for each other and for your families and for yourselves and

things like that, but it's, it's not some, some kind of shrinking pool of opportunity. And I've been in those environments. I'm sure you have as well. And, um, I just, I don't think that's, that's kind of the, I don't think that's the way the world is now. I do think the world is, it's kind of exponentially multiplying in terms of opportunity. And that's the mindset we should have. Yeah, I like that a lot. What about inspiration?

So where do you go, you know, because things happen and some negative things can happen. You don't get the deal that you wanted or, you know, I think everyone kind of relate to that. You know, it's not always a rosy. Where do you find inspiration? you know, it takes you the positive direction. You know, so I have a personal board of directors for, and they exist for two primary reasons in my life. The first is to hold me accountable to, you know, a number of things that primarily have to do with personal growth and have to do with, you know, things that are not necessarily, they don't show up on a business balance sheet. Right.

That's, that's the primary reason. And the other reason is because sometimes, you know, if you've been around long enough, you will get kicked to your point, right? You'll get punched in the teeth at some point. And so you've got to pick yourself up. And sometimes you just need that spark of inspiration from people who might know you, people who might know your tendencies when you get punched, you know, kind of how that shows up in your personality or how that manifests.

And they're able to help help manage that and kind of bring you back and pick you up and make you greater, right? And so I think those types of people are very important. It includes, you know, family members, close friends, other mentors that I've had in my life. And you need that, especially in this job, right, talking about the CEO gig. Because that kind of any given day, you could, it's not even like a, over the course of a week or a month or something. Any given day, you could have, you know, a couple great successes and a couple great things that kind of kicked. you. And so to have people in your life that can help you maintain perspective on all of it,

I think is very important. Yeah, that's very well said. And I wish we had more time to unpack that, but that whole concept of a personal board, super, super, super important. Hey, what would your, if your parents were on right now, what would they say about, you know, both you and your brother are, you know, you're very poorly focused in terms of helping others. You, you obviously raised a certain way that made you both seek out opportunities to help others and you can feel the empathy and the kindness. What would your parents say is like how did that happen? How do they how do that? We've asked them a lot because now obviously we have the risk. My brother's further along than I have than I am, but we both have the responsibility of raising citizens that that, that, you know,

we hope embody that. And I haven't gotten a clear answer on that, on that, Ed. I, I think, I think a lot of what we, a lot of the environments that kind of shape who we are, I think so much of it is just unspoken or non-intentional. Yeah. And my parents especially who, you know, have a completely different culture that they were raised in in terms of language and how things are framed from a linguistic perspective, et cetera. it was less about what they were saying that my brother and I I think were paying attention to and just kind of more how they acted with people around them. And I'm sure through osmosis or whatever that got absorbed, right?

But anytime we ask our parents for specific parenting advice, we get very non-descriptive sort of answers back. Well, they clearly did a great job. And I'm sure you and your brother are doing the same. with your kids. So wow, we covered a lot here, and I wish we had more time, especially on the whole concept of the personal brand. I think people should really pursue that and find out more about that. We talk a lot about e-visit, and I love the mission and vision. It's just on how simple it is, but yet grand, you know, how you're helping with public health,

in particular, in eliminating barriers and not just public health, but those were some of the examples that you were given that came out of the pandemic. And then in terms of your career, So you talked about taking risks, about being persistent, and my favorite is being uncomfortable. Covered a lot of content, a little bit of Kat Stevens, a little bit of YouTube. Did we miss, or is there anything you want to double down on, Sotchen? I'll give you the last word. Thanks, Ed. I just want to, we didn't get a chance to talk about you very much, or my perception of you,

but I'd like to maybe just spend a minute on that if you don't mind. I think what you're doing is super interesting because health care delivery, especially in this country, especially kind of health system-based health care delivery, is facing a very difficult moment right now. And we know all the drivers, right, in terms of burnout and other pressures that are being placed on health systems. But I think more and more the kind of people like you who are, who are, are taking a deep health system-based set of experiences and helping them transform kind of from the inside out, but by working with organizations that are coming from the outside in, it's really cool. And you don't really talk about yourself a whole lot, but I've seen it firsthand.

You know, you've talked about the work that you're doing with Evis and we're excited to do more work with you. But that's a really important part, in my opinion, of this, you know, kind of four health systems by health systems formula that we have at Evis. And so I just kind of want to want to thank you for that. You're a really trusted part of our of our ecosystem. And we should do a whole session on that at some point. Yeah. No, that's very kind. Thank you so much. And Sotan, truly, thank you for being a guest, super insightful and appreciate all that you do as a leader in helping to transform health care and helping a lot of different health systems around the U.S. and probably the globe as well. So thank you for being our guest. Thanks, Seth. Thanks again for having me.

Hey, that wraps up another edition of Digital Voices again. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.