Vasanta Pundarika headshot
Why Clinical Mission and Business Strategy Must Scale Together
Vasanta Pundarika
CEO of Lotuspring

Why Clinical Mission and Business Strategy Must Scale Together

With Vasanta Pundarika

How do healthcare leaders integrate clinical mission with scalable business strategy—without sacrificing patient trust?

That question sits at the heart of my recent conversation with Vasanta Pundarika, CEO of Lotuspring, on the Healthcare Success Podcast. Vasanta brings a rare, end-to-end perspective to this topic, shaped by nearly 20 years working across the healthcare ecosystem—as an investment banker, advisor to health systems, and now a strategic partner to behavioral health and women’s health organizations.

In this episode, we dig into a problem I’ve seen repeatedly over the years: healthcare companies that either have a strong clinical mission but fail to scale it—or scale aggressively without the clinical substance to support long-term success. Vasanta explains why neither approach works, and why sustainable growth requires intentional alignment between clinical vision, operations, marketing, leadership, and governance.

This conversation is especially relevant for multi-location, private equity–backed providers in behavioral health and women’s health, but the lessons apply to healthcare organizations of all sizes.


Why Listen?

If you’re a CEO, board member, investor, or healthcare operator navigating growth, this episode offers a clear framework for avoiding the most common pitfalls of scale. Vasanta and I explore how misalignment shows up in real organizations—and what leaders can do to correct it before it undermines patient experience, staff retention, or brand trust.

You’ll hear insights on:

  • Why patient experience is the real “product” in healthcare, and why it must anchor both clinical and business decisions
  • How CEOs and boards can bring clinical, operational, and marketing teams into alignment
  • What happens when growth outpaces mission—and why patients notice before investors do

We also go deep into behavioral health and women’s health, two sectors where trust, continuity, and experience aren’t just competitive advantages—they’re essential to care itself.

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Key Insights and Takeaways

  • Treat patient experience as the core product
    One of the most important ideas Vasanta shared is deceptively simple: in healthcare services, the product isn’t just clinical care—it’s the entire patient experience. That includes how patients find you, how they schedule, how they move through care, and how seamlessly operations support the clinical encounter.

    When marketing, operations, and clinical teams aren’t coordinated, organizations tend to fall into one of two traps: either they fail to grow at all, or they grow in ways that damage trust. CEOs must actively integrate these functions rather than allowing them to operate in silos.
  • Make integration a CEO- and board-level responsibility
    We discussed how leadership structure plays a major role in whether integration succeeds. In some organizations, founders still hold the real power. In others, the CEO is a figurehead without authority. In private equity–backed platforms, sponsor involvement can range from hands-on to distant.

    Regardless of structure, Vasanta emphasized that integration is not optional—and it can’t be delegated away. Boards should ask for metrics beyond revenue and appointment volume, including staff turnover, patient retention, and repeat utilization. Without these indicators, growth can look healthy on the surface while problems compound underneath.
  • Align hiring, culture, and values with mission and scale
    Scaling without cultural alignment is one of the fastest ways to erode both mission and performance. Vasanta and I talked about how expensive it is to hire the wrong people—and even more costly to keep them too long due to sunk-cost thinking.

    To integrate clinical mission with scalable business strategy, leaders must hire for alignment, reinforce values consistently, and be willing to make difficult decisions when people or systems undermine the patient experience. Otherwise, mission statements become empty promises that staff and patients quickly stop believing.
  • Build trust deliberately—especially in behavioral and women’s health
    Trust plays an outsized role in behavioral health and women’s health, where many patients already feel underserved or overlooked by the healthcare system. Vasanta explained that when patients in these sectors place their trust in an organization, that trust must be protected at all costs.

    Breaking it doesn’t just lose a customer—it can drive patients away from care entirely. Organizations that integrate clinical mission, operations, and marketing effectively are better positioned to build long-term relationships that support both outcomes and growth.
  • Use technology—and AI—to reduce friction, not add it
    We closed by looking ahead at how technology, especially AI, can help healthcare organizations better align mission and scale. Rather than viewing AI as a cost-cutting tool alone, Vasanta framed it as a way to remove friction from the patient journey—whether that’s simplifying scheduling, eliminating redundant paperwork, or improving handoffs between care settings.

    When used thoughtfully, AI can strengthen patient experience while supporting operational efficiency—exactly the kind of integration healthcare needs more of.
“You can’t effectively market a healthcare company if you’re not plugged into what the patient experience actually is—that experience is the brand.”
Vasanta Pundarika headshot

Vasanta Pundarika

CEO, Lotuspring

Subscribe for More

If you’re interested in conversations at the intersection of healthcare strategy, growth, and patient experience, I encourage you to subscribe to the Healthcare Success Podcast and follow us on LinkedIn.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn at Stewart Gandolf, and follow Healthcare Success for future episodes and insights.

Note: The following AI-generated transcript is provided as an additional resource for those who prefer not to listen to the podcast recording. It has been lightly edited and reviewed for readability and accuracy.

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