Susheel Ladwa: Disrupting Healthcare for Better Patient Care

Susheel Ladwa has always been passionate about healthcare. He began his career at Texas Instruments before becoming part of the initial team that built Wipro’s healthcare practice, where he led the growth of the payer, provider, and medical device business to over $250M in revenue. He then served as a client partner for major healthcare transformation projects at EDS, later acquired by HP.

However, Susheel’s most impactful role was at IBM, where he served as an industry leader for healthcare and life sciences for Cloud Application Services. Following his time at IBM, Susheel joined a start-up in Silicon Valley, and he learned valuable lessons on how not to run a company.

With this experience, he took up the CEO role at Onyx Health, a healthcare company disrupting the industry by making data interoperable across the healthcare value chain leveraging the FHIR standards.

Besides his work at Onyx Health, Susheel is a contributing editor at DistilINFO Publications and has chaired the American Health Insurance Plans IT workgroup. He has also authored over ten books of quotes and sayings.

Solving the Growing Issue of Healthcare Data Interoperability

Over the last decade, healthcare digitization has generated a massive amount of healthcare data. However, the real problem in the healthcare sector is not the lack of data but the lack of interoperability across the healthcare value chain.

Patient health data is scattered across various health plans, providers, and pharmacies, creating a fragmented system that hinders effective care delivery for better patient outcomes. Onyx, however, is leading the charge in tackling this challenge head-on.

The Onyx team brings experience building Blue Button 2.0 for CMS, the world’s largest FHIR standards-based interoperability implementation serving over 53 million beneficiaries. Refining the lessons learned at CMS, and applying them for Health Plans, has placed Onyx at the forefront of healthcare data interoperability.

Collaborating with Microsoft, Onyx has developed its revolutionary OnyxOS, the world’s first “Interoperability Operating System” built on the FHIR standards. Onyx helps Health Plans comply to CMS Interoperability rules and leverage the investments to automate Prior Auth, Acquire Clinical Data for Quality reporting and more. Onyx also brings the first Payer to Payer data exchange platform that is connected to over 300+ healthcare plans.

“OnyxOS enables healthcare companies to adopt FHIR standards quickly and make their data interoperable, facilitating effective programs that deliver impactful healthcare to patients. We’re thrilled about the opportunity that lies ahead and believe that Onyx is well-positioned to disrupt the healthcare industry,“- states Susheel Ladwa.

Changing the Industry for Good

Despite being a relatively new start-up, Onyx has made remarkable progress in the healthcare industry. Presently, Onyx’s platform hosts over 4% of all Government Regulated healthcare lives including Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, CHIP, and QHP plans. The OnyxOS platform is rapidly becoming the preferred choice for healthcare organizations that want to embrace FHIR standards and accelerate data interoperability.

OnyxOS is a revolutionary plug-and-play product that seamlessly integrates with legacy healthcare data and platforms, enabling the adoption of FHIR standards and creating new business cases to enhance patient outcomes. The organization is presently focused on helping health plans meet the CMS Interoperability requirements, but the benefits of its FHIR standard-based operating system extend far beyond just health plans. Providers, medical device companies, pharmacies, and life sciences companies can all leverage the power of OnyxOS to unlock the full potential of their healthcare data.

Embracing New Technologies

Healthcare data is notoriously complex, and adopting a new standard like FHIR can add to the complexity for healthcare organizations. However, with Onyx’s platform, OnyxOS, healthcare organizations can quickly embrace the new opportunities that arise from the boundaryless healthcare data enabled through the FHIR standards.

OnyxOS simplifies the process for healthcare organizations to transform their businesses and reap the benefits of FHIR standards without undergoing a lengthy and stressful build project. Onyx provides a straightforward configuration program that enables organizations to take advantage of the full potential of their data. Moreover, new use cases like prior electronic authorization, digital insurance cards, payer-to-payer data exchange, good faith estimates, and upgrades to FHIR standards are handled on the platform as a version update, making the process seamless.

Onyx is proud to offer the industry’s first fully SaaS platform for interoperability, making it easier than ever for healthcare organizations to unlock the full potential of their data. Under Susheel’s leadership, Onyx has won the “Frost and Sullivan Best Practices” Award for Healthcare data interoperability.

Assembling a World Class Team

Susheel feels the best thing a leader can do is to assemble a great team, inspire and encourage them, set an aggressive goal and then step back and let them work their magic. To achieve this, Susheel follows three guiding principles that he prioritizes:

• 10x Rule: The first guiding principle that Susheel prioritizes is that every team member should strive to deliver 10x better than anyone else in the industry. When every team member is committed to performing at their best, the collective impact of Onyx on the industry can be almost magical.
• Maniacal Sense of Urgency: In his second guiding principle, Susheel believes that traditional human thinking can be limiting. So he and his team strive to challenge themselves to think differently and disrupt the healthcare industry. They believe that disruptive innovation occurs when people challenge themselves to achieve what may seem impossible, like building something assumed to take sixteen months in just six weeks. Susheel and his team are relentless in their drive to #DisruptHealthcare for the better.
• Comfort Zone Elimination: Susheel believes that culture is one of the hardest things to get right and keep it right. The first element of culture he believes in is “Open Communication,” it’s incredible how open, non-hierarchy, honest, and candid communication can create an environment for the best ideas to win. Two, “Empathy,” treat people how you want them to treat you. Three “Comfort Zone Elimination,” nothing significant gets accomplished in the boundary of the comfort zone. As a leader, it is essential to push teams out of their comfort zones; that is where the magic happens.

The Future 

Susheel believes building a meaningful business that positively impacts patients’ lives is critical to success. Over the next half a decade, the Onyx platform will touch 1 in 4 lives in the US, impacting positive healthcare delivery by making patient data interoperable. Also, the healthcare system is in dire need of a new, easily scalable Operating System that can roll out new capabilities within weeks instead of several years, and OnyxOS is poised to become the gold standard for the next generation of healthcare systems.

Personally, Susheel is also a big advocate for girl empowerment and will continue his work to improve the lives of underprivileged girls worldwide.