Description

Nakin, Freddy and Joe sit down live in San Diego before their presentation at MGMA to bring in the sixth episode of BYOB: The Healthcare Podcast. The team speaks to Shruti Kothari on Innovation and Insurance, Shruti is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Blue Shield of California. Throughout her career, Shruti has had stops as a health educator, in venture capital and at a prominent healthcare provider. She discusses how her experience working in county hospitals highlighted the disparities within healthcare and why she decided to jump into the healthcare space to try and make a change.

Shruti shares great perspective on what early careerists should think of when they are looking to pursue a new opportunity, start a new organization/company and what she learned from working in the Venture Capital space. Additionally, Shruti shares how striking statistics in early seed funding compounded by events that affected the entire nation, moved her to elevate the voices of women of color and call attention to the staggering low number of executives who are women of color.

Shruti Kothari – Blue Shield of California

Shruti Kothari is a healthcare transformation advocate. She leads Industry Initiatives for Blue Shield of California, focusing on industry alignment, collaboration, and policy movement that drives the change needed to scale BSC’s Innovation and transformation agenda.

Prior to BSC, Shruti led Strategic Engagement for Kaiser Permanente’s venture capital fund, integrating early-stage startups into the Kaiser Permanente ecosystem. She also worked as an early-stage startup operator for Honor, healthcare system quality improvement leader for Kaiser Permanente, and a health educator and community mobilizer for the American Cancer Society.

Shruti is on the board for Family Caregiver Alliance, as well as an Advisor for the End Well Foundation. She is the founder of Women of Community which engages in advocacy efforts to increase representation of Women of Color in healthcare leadership. You can follow Women of Community (WOC) on Instagram and LinkedIn. The crew asked Shruti the following questions:

• Serving as Director of Industry Initiatives, Health Care Reform at Blue Shield of California. What does your work entail?
• In your career you made a couple of stops at Kaiser, first as a principal in the continuum of care experience and later as the director of KP Ventures. What was your experience like each time and what brought you back?
• You founded an organization called Women of Community. What was the genesis of the organization and how do you see its role moving forward?
• Outside of your day job and WOC, you also serve as a board member for the Family Caregiver Alliance, an advisor to End Well, and a steering committee member at Scale Health.
• How did you get involved with these organizations and how has working with each helped you evolve as a healthcare leader?
• If you didn’t work in healthcare, what job would you be doing now?
• Your work thus far has been wide ranging, what are you most proud of in your career?
• What was the hardest part of moving from one organization (where you had a lot of success) to another?

Talking with Nakin – Merck Antiviral COVID-19 Treatment

Nakin speaks with the group about a new treatment by Merck to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death once an individual has contracted the COVID-19. The groups discuss the effect of introducing an antiviral treatment for COVID-19 into the mix of current treatment options and what that means for patients here in the United States along with the rest of the world.

We’d be interested to know from our listeners how they view the ongoing dynamic of the availability of vaccines and treatment options for COVID-19. Would you be willing to take a pill to treat the effect from COVID-19?