As the new associate medical director for Clinical Informatics, Roheet Kakaday, MD, has a passionate curiosity for how technology can make health care better for patients and more efficient for providers. It’s a role he will split half time with his practice at Samaritan Urgent Care Walk-In Clinic — Geary Street.
This dual position is new at Samaritan, one prioritized by the medical group to support digital strategy and clinical practice.
Since he started in October, Kakaday has met with clinicians across the system to hear their concerns about Epic and other tech issues.
“Projects I’m working on are pretty wide ranging, from updating order sets in Epic to brainstorming how to incorporate artificial intelligence to help providers spend less time writing notes and more time with patients,” said Dr. Kakaday.
Growing up in Silicon Valley, Dr. Kakaday can’t remember a time when technology wasn’t part of his everyday life.
“It was just part of the conversation, at school, the dinner table, everywhere, and I was very interested in it all,” he said.
That fascination led him to University of California San Diego and an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering. During his sophomore year, he took a volunteer role at a hospital, hoping to find the next big biomedical engineering idea that would launch him into a wealthy early retirement.
Instead, he discovered something new about himself – he felt lit up by helping patients, a discovery confirmed when he later spent a month at a leprosy colony in rural India, helping to treat patient wounds while listening to their stories.
“I didn’t think I was a people person, but I really liked sitting with patients, hearing their stories and finding ways to help them,” he said.
After that, medical school seemed inevitable and off he went to Oregon Health & Science University.
“Even though I was tunneled into the world of biology at that time, there was also part of me wondering how tech could help with this problem, how software could help that one,” Kakaday noted.
When he discovered the field of clinical informatics it was another big ah-ha moment for him.
“Much like the role of a primary care doctor to take a wholistic view of a patient’s situation, an informaticist uses technology to look at the symptoms someone is having and then zooms out to look at their workflow to better understand the root cause,” he said.
Thus, he sees his two roles with Samaritan as complementary.
“Because I’m practicing clinically, I get to experience the symptoms I’m trying to diagnose,” he noted.
Most recently, Dr. Kakaday completed a two-year fellowship and master’s degree in clinical informatics at OHSU, where he learned processes and tools that can help Samaritan. He sees a spirit of innovation at SHS and a commitment on the part of leadership to make clinicians’ lives easier.
“So we can provide fantastic patient care without wanting to throw our laptops out the window,” he said.
Dr. Kakaday and his wife Sonyia, also a family medicine provider, will continue to live in Portland, their home of 10 years. He is undeterred by the commute a few times a week to the Willamette Valley.
“I essentially have traveled up and down I-5 my entire life,” he said.
He and Sonyia enjoy biking around town or on gravel paths, as well as regular high-intensity interval training workouts. A self-proclaimed foodie and chef, his signature dish is pizza, which he crafts from his own 72-hour fermented dough, homemade marinara and carefully prepared toppings, a detailed process he calls “a production,but really worth it.”
“My friends tell me they’d pay for this pizza, so my backup plan, in case this doctoring stuff doesn’t work out, is to open a pizzeria,” he said with a laugh.
He is eager to make an impact at Samaritan and feels he has come full circle.
“One of my first rotations as a med student was in rural family medicine, working underneath Dr. Rick Wopat at the Lebanon Family Medicine clinic,” he said. “My extracurricular project was informatics related, creating an onboarding guide to help new med students get oriented to Epic in the clinic.”
Dr. Wopat also wrote a letter of recommendation helping Roheet get into his family medicine residency.
“In a very real way, I owe both my journey in family medicine and informatics to Samaritan,” he said.
Looking for a new job? From housekeeping to nursing and accounting to managing, there are a lot of opportunities to explore at Samaritan Health Services.
