Hi, I’m Bala.
I am a Chicago based physician, informaticist, and technologist. I have been in healthcare for almost 30 years, with roles that have spanned clinical care, healthcare administration, clinical and operational informatics, and health tech.
After receiving my MD from the combined BS/MD program at University of Miami in South Florida and training in internal medicine and Infectious Diseases at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, I started as an internal medicine and infectious diseases specialist in the Chicago area in the early 2000s. I received a Masters in Public Health with a focus on epidemiology at the University of Illinois Chicago early in my career, and learned how to analyze large data sets for cohort studies.
I spent the next ten years seeing patients, conducting research in hospital acquired infections, and becoming more and more deeply involved in the use of the Electronic Record. Meaningful use was a watershed in the US, pulling the future forward. But because it such a rapid transformation, it left a legacy of documentation burden for physicians, interoperability disappointments, burnout, and increased capital and operational expenses on IT systems.
I realized in this time that I had a passion and knack for analyzing healthcare data to solve clinical and operational challenges, and moved more into the analytics and data science world. My next big pursuit professionally was to became the Chief Analytics Officer at Rush System for Health and a healthcare administrator.
When COVID-19 hit, I saw up close all the ways we were unprepared as a health system, as a country, but also how we could problem solve and be creative. I was a member of the Rush COVID-19 command center, and was able to work with the team on ways to connect data driven solutions to forecasting, prediction, and monitoring. I was also the principal investigator for a large multi-center study of the natural history of COVID-19 (including Long COVID) called the COVID INSPIRE study.
I was lucky to be at a system like Rush with a world class team and a chance to help the most vulnerable in our community. I was one of Rush’s spokespeople for the media, and was able to share best practices through that medium to our community.
Over the last few years I have been a Senior Vice President with Tendo. My focus had been in how data and analytics can be used to measure quality, how we as an industry get it wrong, and what patients need to make informed choices on their healthcare.