Driving DE&I In Healthcare With Global Collaboration: Insights from Chennai

I recently connected with Iyappan Rathina, a delivery director at Perficient, to discuss the benefits of global collaboration, and how that collaboration contributes to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) in healthcare. We discussed how an increased demand for digital transformation in the healthcare industry is supporting a better patient experience. I enjoyed hearing his perspective on how DE&I in healthcare delivers better health outcomes, and I’m sure you will too!

Iyappan, thanks so much for joining me today. I’d love to start with hearing more about your role. How do you enable a growth mindset on your teams?

Iyappan Rathina, Delivery Director

I am a delivery director at Perficient based in Chennai, India. As a delivery director, I govern projects and delivery. I am also the head of infrastructure and facilities for the India global delivery center, managing seven centers across five different locations.

As a delivery director, I help my teams foster the culture of Perficient. Because of our shared culture, my teams exceed our clients’ expectations and are able to grow with Perficient. I enable my teams to achieve this growth by:

Facilitating collaboration across multiple geographies, ensuring that everyone gets the support they need
Exposing them to opportunities as they arise
Preparing them for their next role

As the head of infrastructure, I am responsible for ensuring that our colleagues experience world-class facilities that are positioned to delight our clients.

How is Perficient – as a global team – driving excellence for our clients?

As a global team, we are able to leverage people’s unique and complementary strengths. Because of this, we have a stronger team. Diverse global teams also allow us to share diverse perspectives and broader experience with our clients.

Diversity equips Perficient with the right people, the right strengths, and the right toolsets to uphold exceptional delivery standards and exceed the customer expectations.

Why is it valuable for organizations to promote diversity through global teams?

With a global team of people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, organizations can leverage diverse perspectives. These help teams arrive at more innovative solutions to common problems. Diverse global teams foster a culture of belonging and trust. These teams are well equipped to question themselves on their own assumptions. Therefore, having diversity in the teams allows for the following:

Decreasing unconscious bias
Reducing skill gaps
Building highly skilled talent
Removing cultural mismatches

All of this enables Perficient to outperform homogenous teams and build better value for our clients.

How is Perficient’s collaboration across the globe promoting DE&I in the healthcare industry? Why is this important? How does it impact the broader patient experience?

People from every race, culture, creed, age, and gender utilize healthcare. Patients see better health outcomes when they are able to trust their provider. Research has shown that patients are more likely to trust healthcare providers where they see themselves represented. This leads to a better understanding of their health condition and, ideally, more successful treatment. So, diversity in healthcare enables a better patient experience and drives better health outcomes.

Perficient’s collaboration across the globe has built an inclusive team that brings global perspectives and innovative ideas.

We share strategies that have succeeded locally, to be replicated by teams in other areas. We are also able to share the challenges we’ve faced locally in the adoption of digital care, so that we can implement solutions to avoid the same hurdles in other areas.

Global teams bring experiences from different cultures and diverse perspectives on the impact of equity and inclusion in healthcare. Various initiatives at Perficient such as our Women in Technology employee resource group (ERG), our Bright Paths Program, and our global delivery centers allow us to foster more diverse teams. This in turn, allows us to offer our customers well rounded, global experience in healthcare.

EXPLORE NOW: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) in Healthcare

Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us

Perficient is dedicated to enabling healthcare and life sciences organizations to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies. Our healthcare practice is comprised of experts who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fourth largest healthcare IT consulting firm. With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Perficient is a trusted, end-to-end, global digital consultancy.

We bring pragmatic, strategically-grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention – not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build every day within our teams and with every client.

Driving DE&I In Healthcare With Global Collaboration: Insights from Chennai