I’m Harish C. Rijhwani Author, Speaker, Mentor & Health IT professional

It’s been almost 20 years, when I was in the second year of my engineering college. We were a class of around 60 students, I was standing in front of my class trying explain my project. It was probably the most challenging thing for me at that time, i.e. speaking in front of a group of people. Speaking comes naturally for some people, but for me it wasn’t easy at all. I was trembling, not looking at the crowd, probably using long fillers at the end of each statement. I wanted to overcome my fear of speaking in front of a crowd.

I pursued my MBA in Systems from NMIMS Mumbai, I did so along with my Job. We had 49 subjects over the span of three years (Part-Time Evening classes 2006 to 2009), and each subject had multiple presentations. I saw this as an opportunity for me to improve my communication skills.

Once I completed my MBA, I wanted to further improve, hence I decided to pursue my passion for teaching. Communication is not just about speaking, it is more about conveying your message appropriately. In this context, teaching/mentoring is one of the ultimate challenges one can take up. It took me sometime to reach that goal, but finally I got an opportunity to teach at Welingkar and I have not looked back since. An additional benefit of teaching is that one also keeps their learning Alive. I have mentored students in the area of Healthcare Informatics, Enterprise Management Systems, Business Analytics, Advanced Analytics, Excel, VBA, Tableau and very recently in R and Python as well.

My passion for writing also stems from my engineering college days, when I was helping one of my professors for the Second Edition of his book “Electromagnetic Fields and Waves”. The book did not get published at that time, I was disappointed, but my passion for writing only grew. In the past twelve months (Jun 2019 to May 2020), I self published two books, one around Healthcare IT and other around Technology to Business.

After completing my engineering, I started working in Syntel and this is where my journey around Healthcare IT began. Its been almost 18 years, where I have been part of various Health IT Projects, Solutions and Deals. Via Healthcare I understood the importance of business and how it drives technology. I got an opportunity to work in multiple technologies in Healthcare starting from Mainframe, VBA, Mirth, Informatica, DMExpress, Business Objects Xcelsius, R, Python, Sql Server and MySql. Other than technology it is also essential to understand various terminologies and Standards in Healthcare, i.e. ICD, SNOMED-CT, RxNorm, HL7, EDI, CCDA, DICOM and FHIR. Healthcare is vast and due to this factor, you get to learn something new everyday.