The Beat

How Infosys Helix Is Helping Payers Finally Go Digital Native

Episode Summary

In this episode of the AI at Health series on The Beat Podcast, host Sandy Vance sits down with Vadiraj Guttal, VP and Business Head for Infosys Helix, for a thoughtful and candid conversation about why health plans are still stuck in batch processing, what it actually means to be cloud native versus just cloud hosted, and how a platform-centric approach is delivering two to three times the improvement that incremental fixes never could. With Helix now six-plus years in the making, Vadiraj brings a grounded, practitioner's perspective to one of the most complex transformation challenges in healthcare today. If you are a health plan executive trying to reduce administrative costs, modernize operations, and prepare for an AI-driven future, this episode is essential listening.

Episode Notes

In this episode of the AI at Health series on The Beat Podcast, host Sandy Vance sits down with Vadiraj Guttal, VP and Business Head for Infosys Helix, for a thoughtful and candid conversation about why health plans are still stuck in batch processing, what it actually means to be cloud native versus just cloud hosted, and how a platform-centric approach is delivering two to three times the improvement that incremental fixes never could. With Helix now six-plus years in the making, Vadiraj brings a grounded, practitioner's perspective to one of the most complex transformation challenges in healthcare today. If you are a health plan executive trying to reduce administrative costs, modernize operations, and prepare for an AI-driven future, this episode is essential listening.

In this episode, they talk about:

• Most health plans moved to the cloud without actually taking advantage of what the cloud can do
• Batch processing is still the norm in healthcare, and it is the root cause of most administrative delays
• Platform-centric thinking means cloud-native architecture, reusable data, event-driven workflows, and composability
• Provider credentialing that takes two to three months today could be reduced to one week with the right platform
• Helix targets a 40% reduction in IT operations costs and a 50 to 60% reduction in workflow fallouts
• True digital-native health plans do not exist yet, and that is exactly the gap Helix is built to close
• Tier two and tier three health plans without large digital transformation budgets are the ideal Helix candidates
• The next big challenge is using AI at scale in production while keeping outcomes deterministic, not probabilistic

A Little About Vadiraj:

Senior Health-tech and IT Consulting professional with 23+ years of experience in software development, project management, sales, and delivery of strategic consulting engagements, product and solution development for the payer segment of US healthcare. He partners with senior executives to address their business and technology needs through innovative solutions, resulting in IT efficiencies and business outcomes.

As Business Head of Platforms at Infosys Healthcare, he is responsible for ideating and developing digital-native, AI- and cloud-run business applications. In this role, he also partners with other healthcare start-ups and academic institutions to industrialize their research and solve problems for large healthcare payers.