SriVani Ganti brings a unique perspective to member engagement as Director of Health Equity at mPulse and feels that she and her team play a critical role in making people feel seen.
“For me, when I think about health equity, it’s really personal. As the daughter of immigrants, as a woman of color, I have witnessed systemic racism not just in terms of looks but also in terms of all the assumptions that have been made historically,” she says.
Working hard to address that imbalance and treat people with the dignity and respect they deserve, SriVani feels that mPulse’s solutions are changing the landscape of member engagement. “We have this really cool technology that lets everyone’s experience be bespoke to them, and we can do it in a scalable way. Everyone comes with different perspectives, backgrounds, and narratives, and that means we need different approaches to achieve the same outcomes for each of them.”
Bridging the gap
Having done her Bachelor of Science in Biology through Northeastern University thinking she might become a doctor or a researcher, SriVani realized that neither were for her and went on to achieve her Masters in Health Communication through Boston University.
Having always been her family’s ‘translator’, demystifying what was presented to them when it came to ‘doctor speak’, today, SriVani continues to do just that for millions of people around the country.
With considerable experience in digital engagement, member experience, and health communications through text messaging, interactive voice response, emails and nanosites, SriVani has been focused on these modalities since she joined HealthCrowd in 2016 which later merged with mPulse in 2021. Prior to her time at HealthCrowd, SriVani worked in a few different industries including as a counterintelligence government contractor and Membership Director at a non-profit.
As a result, SriVani understands that delivering the right content to the right people at the right time, and through the right channels is critical when it comes to health equity, and she challenges her team to find new and innovative ways to reach diverse member population groups all the time.
“My philosophy, when it comes to health equity, is to design for everyone on the margin. Because when we design for them, we include everyone in the middle,” she says. “This inevitably benefits society as a whole,” she adds, citing closed captioning subtitles as an example.
Dedicated to creating the ideal member experience, SriVani describes the Engagement Team as a small but mighty group of individuals, who each bring valuable experience from their different backgrounds, such as public health, behavioral science, health equity, and learning experience to create engaging moments of education that motivate people to take action. This not only helps health plans close important healthcare gaps, but it also educates and empowers members in a more sustainable way.
In fact, during her time at mPulse, the team has worked on a number of fascinating projects including surveys that uncover social needs such as housing, food insecurity, and financial and job instability. Based on these and other insights, they’ve developed a range of solutions focused on improving health equity, such as pregnancy solutions that target and educate Black mothers who experience some of the highest mortality rates in the country, or diabetes management campaigns for Latino populations that provide culturally relevant dietary tips and acknowledge cultural beliefs on how to treat the condition. Additionally, they have created programs in over 13 languages to help improve individual health literacy, which have seen extremely positive results with members seeking out important social services and closing healthcare gaps.
Trusted advisors
As a result, SriVani says she’s proud that, as a team, they’ve become more than a vendor to their customers, they’ve become trusted advisors.
In fact, having attended and chaired the BRI Network SDOH (Social Determinants of Health) Summit earlier this year, SriVani used the opportunity to connect with the industry and really dig into what our customers and their members are struggling with.
“A big part of what drives your personal health outcomes is actually what’s happening around you. It’s not just your access to primary care providers or urgent care, it’s things like financial stability, access to quality education, even the quality of the neighborhood you live in,” explains SriVani, who went on to add that conversations she had sparked all sorts of ideas for what we can do and how can we do it better.
“The benefit of the mPulse Mobile technology is that we can get messages out there at a wide scale, but more than that, we can make them super personalized to the individual receiving them,” says SriVani, who explains that she and her team are working on a health equity playbook and how to be more inclusive in their marketing.
“The thing with health equity is that you always have to be considering different perspectives. No one should receive the exact same message. Every message should be tweaked based on the person’s background, health, cultural background and more,” says SriVani.
Giving Back
It’s clear that a different perspective is exactly what SriVani brings to the table, as she works to create genuine moments of connection in everything she turns her hand to. Fortunate to enjoy a natural synergy day between her personal passion projects and her day job, SriVani is doing what she loves every day.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, SriVani is now based in Maryland, and credits her parents for shaping the way she sees the world. Growing up watching them give back to those around them, she’s inspired to make a difference in her own way. “I like giving back. I think it goes back to kindness, and if we have more kindness in this world things can only be better,” she says with humility.
A veritable powerhouse, SriVani is proof that dynamite comes in small packages. Aside from volunteering with a local spiritual organization, she co-founded a Hindu environmental organization, is the Director of Communications for a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating maternal and infant mortality rates in India, and is also the co-founder of a South Asian Publishing house, focused on putting out children’s literature featuring children of color.
“Every child deserves to be the hero of a story because if you don’t see yourself, then you don’t believe you can do it,” explains SriVani, eloquently summing up her beliefs when it comes to health equity too.
