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Shashank Goswami is driving the next phase of healthcare revolution

To meet the high demand for value-based health care and comply with quality measures, healthcare organisations are increasingly switching to AI-backed solutions to interpret complex, unstructured data and generate workable intelligence. Meet Shashank Goswami, an industry expert, who is harnessing AI power in the US healthcare to open the doors to extraordinary opportunities.

Shashank comes from a small town in Madhya Pradesh in India. After completing his undergraduate at IIT Dhanbad, he moved to the US to pursue his master’s degree in data science. He mentions about his passion of using AI to improve the patient healthcare experience. His expertise lies in utilising natural language processing to advance patient choice and optimise healthcare costs. His whole professional career has been in the healthcare sector, and over the years, he started nurturing a dream of promoting health equity.

His journey began by advising pharmaceutical companies to later work in the health insurance sector. Goswami said: “From my experience, I discovered that despite all the advancements, affordable, quality, and timely healthcare is a distant dream for a lot of patients. And I could envision that many deep-rooted issues can be addressed by creating intelligent and ethical healthcare systems using modern technologies such as NLP."

He has spearheaded many impactful projects at his workplace dedicated to addressing burning issues in the US healthcare environment. “One of my projects revolved around improving a patient's healthcare journey. The journey consists of multiple experiences like finding a doctor who is in-network, estimating the cost of care, understanding insurance benefits, etc. Often patients find it difficult to navigate these situations. I performed data analysis on patient’s healthcare data which involves their medical history, demographics, utilisation behaviour, and so on. This generated meaningful data-driven insights and helped improve patient experiences, resulting in better care and greater satisfaction," he added.

Goswami works on identifying patient’s difficult experiences by understanding their comments using NLP. “I convert a large amount of text received as patients’ feedback into an actionable plan. We send monthly surveys to our patients to gauge their view of our products and services as well as understand any concerns. In response, we receive more than 200K comments in the form of unstructured text data. Imagine a person, or even a team of people, going through all this information, one comment at a time, interpreting it, and incorporating feedback. So instead of manually churning data what I do is use natural language processing to understand the prevalent topics across the comments. My analysis's output is specific keywords like doctors, customer service, etc. These keywords indicate what customers are talking about and our focus areas. After identifying those abrasive topics, I perform text mining to understand what aspect of a particular topic is causing customer dissatisfaction. This way, I generate an actionable summary of comments and incorporate that as feedback," he said.

The current healthcare landscape provides patients with limited price transparency, and Goswami is bridging that gap in the system using technology, thereby making health care more affordable, informed, and reliable. Goswami is a data scientist at CVS Health, focusing on utilising natural language processing (NLP) to advance patient choice and optimise healthcare costs.

Ishika Chopra is a tech journalist at Interviewer PR.