Healthcare relies enormously on a doctor’s careful understanding of the symptoms as described by the patient and a comprehensive examination that leads to an accurate diagnosis. However, in today’s digital age, we have access to more information than ever before, from medical devices, wearables, millions of health apps and social media. The challenge we now face is how to bring it all together in one place to deliver a personalized and continuous healthcare experience, where the single most important and least used resource- the patient, herself, can play a major role in her own health.
In a quest to do just that, Udai Kumar founded Ohum Healthcare Solutions to build, implement, and support information systems that transform healthcare delivery in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, healthcare facilities, and public health communities including insurance, corporates, and districts, states and entire countries.
OhumSky, a proprietary product of Ohum Healthcare, is a world-class cloud-based integrated enterprise hospital management system which helps control costs and improve care. It is a sophisticated clinical and business management system that transforms all care management programs to world class performance standards.
An Exceptional Leader
Udai Kumar, the Chairman and CEO of Ohum Healthcare Solutions, is a highly successful entrepreneur, mentor, and investor. He has thirty-two years of IT and entrepreneurial experience in global business development, human capital management, finance, software development, and six sigma processes.
Udai is driven by the purpose to achieve massive transformation where the best of healthcare in the world can be delivered to the world’s 4 Billion destitute and/or underserved people. He envisions transforming the lives of billions of people by providing them with the necessary tools to manage their health without being over diagnosed or under diagnosed and/or wrongly treated. They should provide them an assurance that every patient matters and their lives do not need to be accompanied by unnecessary or avoidable medical complications.
Udai’s vision is a single integrated patient-centric digital health platform driven by evidence-based best practices to deliver world class preventive, prescriptive, predictive, and palliative care for the entire population. All stakeholders in the healthcare delivery ecosystem including doctors, nurses, patients, providers, payers, government and social workers would have one single common view using all the digital tools for planning, scheduling, managing, and controlling every care event in every patient’s life.
Crucial Life Lessons
“I have learnt that success comes at a cost and often also carries the inherent seed of subsequent failure,” says Udai. He describes his life as a series of mini journeys. He believes in himself and strives to work as hard as one possibly can, not worrying too much about what others think or about success or failure. Early in his career, Udai realized that mistakes happen, and taking a positive approach to such mistakes by embracing them as part of one journey through life, helps to maximise learning, and eventually overcoming them.
While digitizing the stock exchange, he learnt that providing a solution is more important than posturing. Working on a port management system, he learnt that the worst feeling is when you make careless mistakes that cost others a lot of money, time, and disappointment. To overcome such feelings of negativity, the best approach was to come clean and own the mistake, seek help to find both opportunities for correction and to work harder than ever to minimise the loss. Working with great minds and a great company with a clear vision, he learnt that nothing is impossible if there is a clarity of purpose and at least one degree of freedom. Working in US, he learnt that one’s successes in life are as much a result of good knowledge and learning, upbringing and luck. More often than not, we are neither deserving of our grand achievements nor are we fully responsibility for our failures in life. These lessons set the tone for his lifelong ambition to bring massive change that benefits as many people as possible especially socially and economically disadvantaged people of the world.
While working in the US, he realized that what you you do matters more than what you know, and what you do only matters when it meets the purpose for which you do it. “The work I did made a huge difference to both the company and myself because I understood what skills and talent were needed to be harnessed to meet any goal. That was the basis of the entire Indian IT industry and it continues to be so,” says Udai. He learnt that the key difference between public sector and private enterprise is the scale of opportunity and incentive to create and maintain change. He learnt how countries work in multiple geographies and how to build a business in a very short period of time. Udai realized that all countries have local customs that they cherish and the right local partner can help bridge local culture with global purpose. Thus, you can be truly global and local at the same time.
After losing his company to his partners, Udai understood that both legal agreements and the right partners matter.
When Udai decided he wanted to do something that will connect billions of rural, poor and less educated patients to the millions of urban, rich and highly educated doctors, he understood that he would have to give up short term profits and instead go for a long ten year investment. “It was a perilous journey which has its own needs and constraints and can produce its own ups and downs,” says Udai.
Forthcoming Intents
For the last decade, Ohum Healthcare has innovated on a 35 year old IT application that manages world-class care. In the coming years, Udai aims to deploy Ohum’s digital platform in over twenty-five countries, serving over a hundred million patients, transforming the way health is managed.
Advice for Upcoming Entrepreneurs
“Success is a state of the mind and it requires us to learn the lessons on a daily basis and keep improving,” suggests Udai. He believes that the biggest lessons come from the smallest encounters. An organisation is all about uniting the minds and hearts of many into a single cohesive goal. Challenges arise when this is in conflict with individuality and autonomy. “Our efforts, our environment, our connections, along with our persistence and innovation combine to present us with the means to affect our final results,” concludes Udai.
Source :- The 10 Most Admired Leaders in Healthcare
Udai Kumar: Revolutionizing Digital Healthcare
