A Sri Lankan born technologist comes back to his country to share personal lessons on how to develop mission critical infrastructure in two industries.
Sanjay Bandare was at the stage of one of the leading tech conferences in the country last month with a message centered on infrastructure in the future. The co-founder of VRRB Labs, which is a Web3 infrastructure company that received $3.7 million in venture capital, did not start the conversation with blockchain scalability or decentralization topic. Rather, he began with healthcare.
Bandare informed the audience that in the construction of platforms that process millions of transactions related to healthcare for millions of members, moving fast and breaking things does not work. He emphasized that you get to know fast that reliability is not something to be wished upon and it becomes the minimum standard. The same is true when it comes to infrastructure in healthcare or blockchains.
A Homecoming with Purpose
Bandare was born and brought up in Sri Lanka and later left in search of opportunities. His visit back to address the conference was not only a homecoming, but a better opportunity to pass lessons learned in the creation of mission-critical systems in two separate industries: healthcare technology and Web3 infrastructure.
Being the Senior Product Manager of a health-technology firm which collaborates with some of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., Bandare would design integrated enterprise platforms to handle claims processing, provider management, financial operations, and billing. His designed systems are used in health insurers of national recognition handling millions of transactions on a daily basis.
In 2022, Bandare co-founded VRRB Labs with the same infrastructure thinking applied to blockchain technology. The business was directed at the development of software infrastructure to support supply mechanisms of blockchain that will rival conventional financial systems.
The most important thing that most individuals fail to realize, which Bandare explained during his keynote, is the fact that the underlying challenges are universal. You are solving distributed systems problems at scale – whether you are reconciling financial transactions across healthcare modules and are keeping audit trails that can be reviewed by regulators, or are crafting cross-chain interoperability protocols to blockchain networks.
The Healthcare Foundation
Much of what was discussed by Bandare was centered on his technology in healthcare and claims systems.
Bandare presented the development of provider management systems which facilitate smooth data exchange across several states and different types of providers between credentialing, contracting, and directory services. On the other hand, billing systems are coordinating the use of data, intricate benefit computations and payment procedures at a very large scale. And all must work, at all times, since millions of people are relying on it.
He explained how he formed cross-functional teams with extensive domain knowledge in the area of healthcare and enterprise software architecture talents, and how he developed processes that would facilitate the on-going development of the platform without interrupting ongoing live operations to process millions of transactions every day.
It was a challenge to build a team culture to think in systems and to design a complex healthcare system, Bandare admitted. You must have individuals who can reason that modification of one part involves the modification of three others, individuals who can think of integration, but not isolation.
Web3 to Healthcare Lessons.
He said these were the same problems healthcare experienced ten years ago. ‘Scalability issues. Interoperability problems. Various systems unable to interact with one another causing a broken ecosystem. The distinction is that in healthcare we have been forced to solve these on a large scale due to the fact that the life of people relies on it.
Bandare has been working on solutions of healthcare platform with the degree of integration and reliability mission-critical systems must have. His experience with systems that serve 25 million members has given him a lesson that technical capability is not all that is needed so that the infrastructure can be successful.
Building platforms is organizational capability, Bandare informed the audience. Without such an ability, resources are nothing but a waste of time and money. Each recruitment either fills up your platform creation ability or creates tension. Any process that you create makes either delivery more difficult or better-architectured.
The AI Agent Revolution
The role of AI agents in the future is perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the speech given by Bandare, which he discussed based on his experience in healthcare.
We had created platforms in healthcare that were capable of processing claims and billing at scale, he said, but these still needed human intervention to make important decisions at critical points. In the case of AI agents in Web3, we are discussing the systems capable of making an entirely autonomous decision regarding the value transfer and risk management. That is totally another paradigm.’
According to Bandare, most Web3-based transactions in the next decade will not be between humans but will be between agents. This will necessitate quick, dependable infrastructure that can support autonomous decision-making in scale with the same attributes as healthcare platforms, but even lesser tolerance to uncertainty.
Read more on Daily News and Analysis (DNA) India
