Siva Sankar protects patient data at Advantum Health. For two years he also looked after the power, water and safety of 380 neighbors. The two jobs look nothing alike. He treats them the same.
A few years ago, a neighbor told Siva Sankar the elevators were not running properly. Siva was treasurer of the Kendriya Vihar Phase III Housing Welfare Society at the time, so the problem was his, and the simplest fix was a call to the vendor. Instead, he renegotiated the contract so every elevator in the society was covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One neighbor had asked about one elevator. Three hundred eighty families ended up with a system that no longer failed them at night.
That habit, of repairing the structure underneath a problem rather than the problem itself, is the clearest window into how Siva works, and for two years he practiced it in two places. The treasurer’s post was volunteer work he carried alongside his day job as an assistant vice president at Advantum Health, responsible for the technology infrastructure that revenue cycle teams depend on. On paper the two roles have almost nothing in common. In practice they ask the same thing of him.
That was true from the beginning. Siva took the post in August 2021 because the society’s finances were in bad shape, and his first act was not a popular one. Working from the by-laws, he took firm action on overdue dues and collected what was owed, which is a dependable way to stop being invited to things. He did it anyway, and the finances stabilized. The recovered money went into the parts of a building nobody photographs, and over the next two years Siva helped restructure the electrical system, expand water capacity and install new security cameras before handing off the role in July 2023.
None of that is comfortable work, and Siva traces his willingness to do it to four words of advice. Be honest and brave. A manager earlier in his career gave him that instruction, and he credits it with most of the doors that have opened since. It was tested when a hardware vendor offered him a gift in exchange for overlooking the quality of material being supplied. Siva did not simply decline. He told the vendor to leave the business if he was willing to compromise on quality, because the failure would surface later in somebody else’s work. Declining the gift would have been honest. Saying the rest of it out loud was the brave part.
The career that put him in that room began by accident. In May 2006 a friend mentioned an opening at a healthcare company and offered a referral. Siva took the interview immediately and walked out a systems administrator. Early in that job a manager called from the United States asking him to roll out servers on a tight deadline. He met the deadline, then took over administering those servers himself, a job nobody had assigned him, and somebody had to do. It is the elevator story, 15 years earlier.
“That experience gave me confidence,” he said. “I never hesitate to take on new challenges.”
That confidence showed up next as initiative. He taught himself virtualization before any role required it, and his employer built a position around what he had learned. The same pattern has carried him at Advantum Health from manager to senior manager to director and then assistant vice president.
The work at the top of that climb is invisible on purpose. When that infrastructure is sound, teams move faster and nobody spends a thought on the servers, which is the point. He is clear about the weight under that quiet, though. Revenue cycle management runs on protected health information, and when asked to name the critical challenge in his field, he goes straight to security and privacy. It is the same responsibility, scaled a great deal further. He once safeguarded what 380 households could not afford to lose. He now helps protect what patients trust healthcare organizations to keep safe.
The families at Kendriya Vihar knew exactly where he lived. The people whose information moves through those systems will never learn his name. Neither fact changes how he does the work. When asked what might surprise people about him, Siva offered no hidden talent, only what he seems to consider the plain fact of himself: his loyalty and honesty. Coming from the man who fixed the elevators so nobody would have to think about the elevators again, it sounds less like a boast than a description of the job as he understands it. Notice what needs doing. Do it for good.