Data For Us Is a Strategic Asset for Improving Patient Outcomes — Walgreens Head of Pharmacy and Healthcare Data

(US & Canada) Sashi Venkatesan, Head of Pharmacy and Healthcare Data at Walgreens, speaks with Marty Poniatowski, Director at AMD, in a video interview about his career trajectory and role at Walgreens, the organizational data approach, and leveraging the in-house data platform and data products for positive patient outcomes.

Walgreens operates the second-largest pharmacy store chain in the U.S. Venkatesan feels fortunate to have a career focused on data, wherein he has extended his expertise by building commercial software for enterprises. Further, his experience entails working for industrial companies such as Amazon and Walgreens and building data platforms and capabilities for those companies.

Adding on, Venkatesan reveals that his team has been building cutting-edge data platforms and products for the retail pharmacy and healthcare businesses of Walgreens for the past six years.

The primary focus, he notes, is patient outcomes and ensuring patient data safety while delivering products to the business to help them expedite the process to reach patients.

As a passionate archery sportsman, Venkatesan shares that the game has helped him understand himself better. He reflects that the bow operates on stored energy, and it is up to the preparedness of the human when it comes to using that energy. Much like data, safety is the first priority in archery, says Venkatesan.

When asked how data is used at Walgreens, he states that Walgreens approaches data as a strategic asset to primarily drive positive patient outcomes across healthcare avenues. Six years ago, Venkatesan started with the strategy and hypothesis to build data products that would help run the business instead of using data for analytics or reporting.

The second priority was data safety by reducing copies of patient data to lessen the exposure to PHI and PII and then moving the data at the speed of business. Walgreens now has a streaming data platform that creates positive outcomes, he notes.

Delving deeper, Venkatesan elaborates that first, the team focused on building a platform that could stream data safely from 10,000 stores and create curated data sets to drive business.

Consequently, for every strategic initiative within healthcare, retail, pharmacy, and healthcare businesses leverage the streaming data platform and data products built on top of that.

To explain further, Venkatesan takes the example of inventory, which plays a critical role in patient needs. He asserts that all patients get the drug they want at the time they want it, which reiterates the importance of having the right inventory at the right time and store.

To address this issue, Walgreens has built a data product that provides information about the actual on-the-shelf inventory of every drug at every store in almost real-time. This helps the company replenish the right order quantity at the right time, rather than overstocking.

Furthermore, this data product was also of great help during COVID-19, when the company had to distribute inventory amidst a shortage of vaccines to satisfy patient needs.

Sharing another example of data usage, Venkatesan mentions carrying out a campaign to better comprehend patient needs and deliver on their needs. In this effort, when a patient is new to a specific therapy and has not picked up the prescription, the streamlining data is utilized for patient outreach.

Next, the marketing team and pharmacists use that data for timely outreach to patients, says Venkatesan. In all of this, the goal is to ensure that the team members at stores and patients can access information at the right time. Moreover, having crucial information at a certain speed and quality helps the organization achieve its data goals.

When it comes to patients, Walgreens ensures that pharmacists have the opportunity to focus on patients rather than just putting pills in a bottle, asserts Venkatesan. The company has been on a long transformational journey to reach that goal, he adds.

With the upgradation of software and the creation of new processes, it has been a continuous journey, says Venkatesan. As a result, Walgreens now has robot facilities across 13 locations in the country where prescriptions are filled.

However, to serve a patient that comes in person or to predict the early arrival of a patient, the company must know the real-time status of the prescription throughout its entire life cycle. From physician to provider to store and then to robot, the real-time status at any given time is delivered in a streaming manner as a data product, confirms Venkatesan.

In conclusion, he maintains that this data product helps that patient because, when the arrival is predicted, it can be released from the robot facility to be filled at the store. It boils down to focusing on patients and team members who have the bandwidth to focus on the right thing at the right time.

CDO Magazine appreciates Sashi Venkatesan for sharing his insights with our global community.

*Note: This interview was originally recorded on June 25, 2024.