Renuka Bisht pushes simpler healthcare with AI and product leadership

Humana product leader Renuka Bisht is using enterprise strategy and consumer AI tools to make healthcare easier to understand and navigate. Her work spans enrollment, member data, Medicare and Medicaid platforms, plus two outside projects aimed at decoding benefits and prior authorization notices.

Why it matters: - Healthcare complexity can affect whether people understand bills, coverage decisions, and next steps after a medical visit. - Bisht’s work targets that gap by combining product strategy, AI, and plain-language design. - The approach could help more members and patients navigate care with less confusion and more confidence.

What happened: - Renuka Bisht has spent 16 years working to make healthcare easier to navigate. - Bisht is Director of Product Management at Humana. - Bisht leads enterprise product strategy for enrollment modernization, member data, and Medicare and Medicaid platforms serving millions of members. - Bisht also founded Decoding Health outside her day job. - Decoding Health has built two consumer AI applications: Decode My EOB and Prior Auth Coach. - The apps are designed to help people understand healthcare information and advocate for themselves.

The details: - Bisht’s career includes roles at Accenture, Anthem, Express Scripts, Cigna, and Humana. - Her experience spans member experiences, enterprise platforms, modernization efforts, and AI-powered healthcare solutions. - Bisht came to the United States with a degree, a suitcase, and no professional network. - She says the biggest professional lesson has been that technical expertise earns credibility, while leadership earns followership. - Bisht now spends much of her time aligning leaders, developing teams, and connecting strategy to execution. - She sees healthcare as a translation problem, not just a literacy problem. - Bisht argues that many healthcare systems were designed by insiders for insiders. - Bisht sees AI as a way to deliver plain-language tools at scale. - Her approach to innovation centers on simplicity, integrity, and kindness. - Bisht says complexity should help people understand, not impress them. - If she cannot explain what she has built to someone outside her field, she believes she does not fully understand it herself. - Bisht holds a B.Tech. in Electronics & Communication Engineering from DIT University. - She has also completed executive education through Stanford University, Cornell University, and MIT. - Her additional education includes AI for Everyone, Product Management, Communication for Product Managers, Technology for Product Managers, A Design Thinking Approach to Putting the Customer First, and FAHMC. - Bisht is a member of the St. Louis Product Group. - She spends weekends teaching and mentoring children in the St. Louis community. - Learn more through her Influential Women profile or her website.

Between the lines: - Bisht’s story reflects a shift from individual product work to broader systems change. - Her focus on difference and inclusion suggests she sees varied backgrounds as a source of better problem-solving. - The launch of consumer AI tools outside Humana signals that healthcare usability is becoming a direct-to-consumer opportunity, not just an internal operations issue. - Her emphasis on leadership, not just technology, suggests AI will matter most when paired with better decision-making and clearer communication.

What's next: - Bisht expects the next wave of healthcare leadership to rethink how technology serves people. - She sees AI as a tool for redesigning experiences around patients and members, not processes. - Her ongoing work at Humana and Decoding Health points toward more tools that simplify coverage and authorization questions. - Bisht says her long-term goal is to leave every team, product, and organization stronger than she found it.

The bottom line: - Bisht is betting that the future of healthcare will be won by leaders who make complexity understandable.