Future Leaders Class of 2022: Shradha Aiyer, Vice President, Axxess

Shradha Aiyer, vice president of products at Axxess, has been named a 2022 Future Leader by Hospice News.

Future Leaders are individuals nominated by their peers. Candidates must be high-performing employees who are 40-years-old or younger, passionate workers who know how to put vision into action, and advocates for seniors and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health, and hospice care.

Aiyer recently shared her thoughts with Hospice News about her career in hospice and palliative care, and the biggest forces of change at play in serious illness and end-of-life care.

What drew you to this field?

What really drew me in was my grandfather and watching him age. He was a brilliant pharmacist.

It was a time when I was working on my master’s, and I was trying to decide what degree program I wanted to take. As I watched my grandfather use technology, I thought there has to be a better way to engage patients as they’re aging, from technology.

I saw him struggle just holding an iPad just because of his age, and I realized that the field that I wanted to study was human-computer interaction to really understand how we can simplify this.

And as I went through the journey with my master’s, I discovered home health and then hospice and palliative care.

Candidly, since then, it’s felt like home because there’s so much need that people have, beyond the caregivers, in how we engage patients. There’s so much more possibility, and technology has to be so sensitive to the aging and dying process. That’s what drew me to the industry.

What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learned since you’ve come into the field?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned since going into the field is patience — ensuring that we help guide the changes and pathology very patiently and meet the caregivers where they are, meet operators where there are, and lead with a lot of empathy and patience.

That is very different than any of the other technology fields out there where you want to be on the bleeding edge and to be independent. But candidly, for our industry, we need helpful and empathetic technology solutions. That’s what I’ve learned — the patience to help make lasting change happen.

Speaking of change, if you could change one thing with an eye toward the future of hospice and palliative care, what would it be?

If I could wave a magic wand, it would really be more interoperability today. I think everyone is working towards that; everyone has answers, but providers need a much more connected solution than they have today.

I think health care is a few years behind where we need to be from an interoperability perspective and regulation needs to help us fix that, and in the home health/palliative/hospice space do more to incentivize interoperability.

How do you foresee the industry changing as we move into 2023?

The pandemic really shifted how caregivers think about and engage with technology. It also shifted how virtual we need to be as providers, while still being so much more efficient. So really, I see deeper adoption of global technology and telehealth.

Mobile technology is not just used for documentation, but it’s really an integrated workflow for the caregiver at the bedside. They have so many more insights using technology from telehealth and telemedicine that’s feeding into that mobile device, which is so powerful for them.

We all need to lead them and ensure that they’re investing in the caregiver experience through technology, because, especially in hospice and palliative care, there’s so much fear around using a device while you’re with a patient. That’s what I think is changing. The pandemic accelerated that, and there’s so much more possibility there for that perspective.

Beyond the next couple of years, what do you foresee for the future?

I think palliative care especially is going to grow. Palliative care is such an important program for patients and providers alike. It adds those touch points and really leans into integrated transitions of care.

It’s become so natural and so obvious, and technology supports transitions of care and the right decisions, truly marrying the patient’s needs to what we can offer through predictive analytics.

If you could look back to your first day working in this field, what advice would you give to yourself?

Looking back, one piece of advice I would give myself is to continue to show up every day, use every bridge, and use every opportunity to learn, because there’s so much that you don’t know about the interaction between a patient and a caregiver, and every interaction is so unique.

All they need to do is learn and assimilate as much as possible to really build the right technology. Because the needs of patients are made differently; you need to have a lot of empathy as you’re building the right solutions.

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