Getting to the heart of quality: A conversation with Dr. Pratik Rachh
By Sam Marie Engle
Rachhing should be a Lean verb that means skillfully facilitating continuous quality improvement with such humility about one’s considerable skills one doesn’t see how vital one is to the process. The term eponymously defines Emory Radiology’s Quality Programs Manager Pratik Rachh, MD, MBA. Since 2014, he has been rachhing with Emory Radiology faculty and staff as they collaboratively assess workflow processes, identify bottlenecks and opportunities to eliminate waste, and then implement solutions that improve efficiency and performance.
“The team approach is everything,” he says, “We cannot function without being a team. The focus has to be on we and us, not me or I. I am a facilitator, not a consultant. I shine a light on the problem but I don’t solve the problem. The people who do the work day in and day out are the ones who ultimately solve the problem. All I do is facilitate a change in mindset.”
Dr. Rachh, like his other Quality colleagues, does much more than that. When working with a team to solve a problem, he helps the team ask the right questions, gather the right data, and apply the right Lean principles. He also helps them focus on the ultimate goal: optimizing the patient experience. That’s no small order and rachhing takes considerable training and skill.
Dr. Rachh is a Six Sigma black belt. He also is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ), Certified Quality Process Analyst, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he earned national certification in patient safety. Each credential requires coursework, a comprehensive examination, and demonstrated proficiency through completed projects. Certifications are more than letters to put after his name. Each adds both skills and knowledge to his bulging toolbox.
“Even though I’ve been doing this for over ten years, I learned something new in the patient safety certification training,” he says. “Process improvement requires ownership. We need to move away from the mental model of convincing people to follow us, to buy into our ideas. Instead, we want people to be intrinsically motivated to make improvements themselves. When teams own the problem and co-create solutions, we get innovative and sustainable change.”
Dr. Rachh earned his medical degree from Rostov State Medical University in Russia. He returned home to India, where he completed his training and passed his boards. As a young doctor, he was intrigued by issues of quality and patient safety. He came to the United States to pursue an MBA with a focus on healthcare management from the University of Portland.
While completing his MBA coursework, a video from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement sparked an epiphany. “Here was a training video about the scientific methodology behind quality improvement and safety in healthcare. My pathway became clear,” he says.
After graduation, Dr. Rachh moved to Boston, where he managed quality improvement projects for six divisions in the Department of Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston. He also earned his first certification in healthcare quality: the CPHQ. He then served as a senior process improvement consultant for Massachusetts General Hospital, which enabled him to gain the black belt certification.
Moving from clinical care to healthcare management wasn’t easy. Spend ten minutes with Pratik Rachh and it’s clear why: his compassionate heart twins his sizeable, analytical mind. His heart’s desire—to care for and heal people—now would be achieved through systems change rather than through the traditional doctor-patient relationship. “I had to adjust my thinking,” he says.
Dr. Rachh’s heart brought him to Atlanta. More specifically, it was love for a woman who was completing her psychiatry residency at Emory. They married and made Atlanta their home. Emory Radiology serendipitously was looking for someone to support Dr. Phuong-Anh Duong, the department’s first chief quality officer. He was a perfect fit.
Over the past seven years, Dr. Rachh has played pivotal roles in significant quality initiatives. He led the quality team in standardizing criteria for STAT portable chest x-rays in Emory University Hospital’s intensive care units. The team submitted a poster describing preliminary project results for the 2016 ACR Quality Conference in Boston and was invited to give an oral presentation. Pratik and his team then presented more robust data on the project and won the best poster award at Emory’s 2017 Quality Conference. As project lead for the winning poster, Pratik was invited to give an oral presentation on the project at the 2018 Emory Quality Conference.
A related project aimed at decreasing CT acquisition time in the emergency department delivered similar results. The project team’s submitted poster for the 2019 RSNA Conference earned the best quality poster award, which prompted RadioGraphics to invite the team to submit an article for publication. The article was published just this month with Dr. Rachh as lead author: Decreasing CT Acquisition Time in the Emergency Department through Lean Management Principles.” Co-authors include Emory Radiology’s Dr. Tarek Hanna, associate professor and associate director of the Division of Emergency and Trauma Imaging, and Vice Chair for Quality Dr. Marta Heilbrun; as well as Dr. Duong, now an associate professor with the University of Utah; and Dr. Andrew Pendley, assistant professor and Emory University Hospital medical director for the Department of Emergency Medicine.
While seemingly at the top of his quality game, why would Dr. Rachh suddenly pivot and match into the Molecular Imaging in Medicine Track of the Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine residency programs at Emory?
His heart.
“As the legendary late Dr. Sam Gambhir said, medicine currently is focused on treating cancer as it occurs, but that’s like watching the credits of the movie. If you look at the body at the molecular level, then you can see the early signs of cancer a decade earlier, and that means you can provide treatment for malignancy just when it is developing. You’re in the story from the beginning. That’s very exciting to me, saving lives before they’re endangered.”
Dr. Rachh won’t get away from the data and analytics, and of course, the rachhing that he’s so good at. “I want to combine nuclear medicine, diagnostic radiology, informatics, and of course, quality, to improve the patient experience. I want to make it easier for us to do the right thing for the patient.”
Perhaps then rachhing will come to mean providing advanced nuclear and image-guided medicine with the perfect blend of head and heart.
Rachhing should be a Lean verb that means skillfully facilitating continuous quality improvement with such humility about one’s considerable skills one doesn’t see how vital one is to the process. The term eponymously defines Emory Radiology’s Quality Programs Manager Pratik Rachh, MD, MBA. Since 2014, he has been rachhing with Emory Radiology faculty and staff as they collaboratively assess workflow processes, identify bottlenecks and opportunities to eliminate waste, and then implement solutions that improve efficiency and performance.
“The team approach is everything,” he says, “We cannot function without being a team. The focus has to be on we and us, not me or I. I am a facilitator, not a consultant. I shine a light on the problem but I don’t solve the problem. The people who do the work day in and day out are the ones who ultimately solve the problem. All I do is facilitate a change in mindset.”
Dr. Rachh, like his other Quality colleagues, does much more than that. When working with a team to solve a problem, he helps the team ask the right questions, gather the right data, and apply the right Lean principles. He also helps them focus on the ultimate goal: optimizing the patient experience. That’s no small order and rachhing takes considerable training and skill.
Dr. Rachh is a Six Sigma black belt. He also is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ), Certified Quality Process Analyst, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he earned national certification in patient safety. Each credential requires coursework, a comprehensive examination, and demonstrated proficiency through completed projects. Certifications are more than letters to put after his name. Each adds both skills and knowledge to his bulging toolbox.
“Even though I’ve been doing this for over ten years, I learned something new in the patient safety certification training,” he says. “Process improvement requires ownership. We need to move away from the mental model of convincing people to follow us, to buy into our ideas. Instead, we want people to be intrinsically motivated to make improvements themselves. When teams own the problem and co-create solutions, we get innovative and sustainable change.”
Dr. Rachh earned his medical degree from Rostov State Medical University in Russia. He returned home to India, where he completed his training and passed his boards. As a young doctor, he was intrigued by issues of quality and patient safety. He came to the United States to pursue an MBA with a focus on healthcare management from the University of Portland.
While completing his MBA coursework, a video from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement sparked an epiphany. “Here was a training video about the scientific methodology behind quality improvement and safety in healthcare. My pathway became clear,” he says.
After graduation, Dr. Rachh moved to Boston, where he managed quality improvement projects for six divisions in the Department of Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston. He also earned his first certification in healthcare quality: the CPHQ. He then served as a senior process improvement consultant for Massachusetts General Hospital, which enabled him to gain the black belt certification.
Moving from clinical care to healthcare management wasn’t easy. Spend ten minutes with Pratik Rachh and it’s clear why: his compassionate heart twins his sizeable, analytical mind. His heart’s desire—to care for and heal people—now would be achieved through systems change rather than through the traditional doctor-patient relationship. “I had to adjust my thinking,” he says.
Dr. Rachh’s heart brought him to Atlanta. More specifically, it was love for a woman who was completing her psychiatry residency at Emory. They married and made Atlanta their home. Emory Radiology serendipitously was looking for someone to support Dr. Phuong-Anh Duong, the department’s first chief quality officer. He was a perfect fit.
Over the past seven years, Dr. Rachh has played pivotal roles in significant quality initiatives. He led the quality team in standardizing criteria for STAT portable chest x-rays in Emory University Hospital’s intensive care units. The team submitted a poster describing preliminary project results for the 2016 ACR Quality Conference in Boston and was invited to give an oral presentation. Pratik and his team then presented more robust data on the project and won the best poster award at Emory’s 2017 Quality Conference. As project lead for the winning poster, Pratik was invited to give an oral presentation on the project at the 2018 Emory Quality Conference.
A related project aimed at decreasing CT acquisition time in the emergency department delivered similar results. The project team’s submitted poster for the 2019 RSNA Conference earned the best quality poster award, which prompted RadioGraphics to invite the team to submit an article for publication. The article was published just this month with Dr. Rachh as lead author: Decreasing CT Acquisition Time in the Emergency Department through Lean Management Principles.” Co-authors include Emory Radiology’s Dr. Tarek Hanna, associate professor and associate director of the Division of Emergency and Trauma Imaging, and Vice Chair for Quality Dr. Marta Heilbrun; as well as Dr. Duong, now an associate professor with the University of Utah; and Dr. Andrew Pendley, assistant professor and Emory University Hospital medical director for the Department of Emergency Medicine.
While seemingly at the top of his quality game, why would Dr. Rachh suddenly pivot and match into the Molecular Imaging in Medicine Track of the Diagnostic Radiology and Nuclear Medicine residency programs at Emory?
His heart.
“As the legendary late Dr. Sam Gambhir said, medicine currently is focused on treating cancer as it occurs, but that’s like watching the credits of the movie. If you look at the body at the molecular level, then you can see the early signs of cancer a decade earlier, and that means you can provide treatment for malignancy just when it is developing. You’re in the story from the beginning. That’s very exciting to me, saving lives before they’re endangered.”
Dr. Rachh won’t get away from the data and analytics, and of course, the rachhing that he’s so good at. “I want to combine nuclear medicine, diagnostic radiology, informatics, and of course, quality, to improve the patient experience. I want to make it easier for us to do the right thing for the patient.”
Perhaps then rachhing will come to mean providing advanced nuclear and image-guided medicine with the perfect blend of head and heart.