Patient Engagementthrough Digital Health
Presented by Subha, Ramiah,Senior Director, Innovation R&D, Cigna
Biography:Subha has spent the past twenty five years in technology leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies in Chemical, Pharma, Media, Retail, Technology, and HealthCare sectors. He has founded a technology startup, and as its founder CEO, brings balanced business, leadership, and technology experience. His expertise spans all facets of IT, Marketing, business/IT innovation, strategy, planning, infrastructure operations, architecture, applications, processes, security, governance, management, and business operations. Currently as a senior director of “Innovation” he reports to Cigna's CTO to grow customer centric innovation efforts in Cigna Inc. (a F100 Healthcare provider). Prior as a visionary and Staff Vice President of Technology in the CIO office at WellPoint, (a F30 Healthcare provider) Subha oversaw business/IT strategy, planning, and innovative solution architecture for new products, customer service, infrastructure, and unified business communication systems. Since 2009, he has spearheaded efforts to transform WellPoint’s business vision, strategy, IT operations, products, services, processes, using disruptive technology innovation. These innovative new products/services and clinical/customer service systems support WellPoint ecosystem of ~40,000 associates, ~35M customers, and hundreds of thousands of business partners/providers.
Presentation Description:
This session is about how to adopt, leverage disruptive digital technology to manage a better health.
With diabetes running in the family, Subha Ramiah, a Senior Business Technology Executive at Cigna, always knew he was at risk, but didn’t know how high the risk was and how soon he would get the disease. At age 49, Subha, who lives in the New York City area, hit a rough patch – his father passed away and he started a new job, and life was stressful. It was on World Diabetes Day in November 2013 that he finally went for a diabetes test. He was diagnosed with severe Type II Diabetes.
Immediately, doctors put him on six drugs costing over $600 each month. He was also experiencing early signs of other complications of diabetes such as diabetic retinopathy, neuropathy, kidney damage and digestive issues. He also had severe reactions to two of the drugs. That’s when he decided he had to learn and do more about living with diabetes.
“What I have shown is that that lifestyle change using modern digital health technology and actions can help prevent NCD such as diabetes and its other complications. I am fortunate to be a scientist, a technologist, and a healthcare innovation professional with access to tools and training that allow me to make these changes. I am passionate about showing people how to prevent or reverse diabetes with my personal example, showing them things they have no other way of learning due to their circumstances. Today, when I tell people I am 50 they don’t believe me.” At his 50th birthday last year, he decided to educate others about diabetes as one of his missions in life.
Today, Subha shares his story with others, speaking at conferences and at work events about his experience so that he can help others prevent or recover from chronic disease.