We empower healthcare organizations by developing effective strategies, implementing pragmatic solutions, and creating exceptional consumer experiences. Our consultants bring decades of deep experience across an array of healthcare settings to help our client’s build strategies for an evolving market and solve complex technical challenges. I recently sat down with a few of our healthcare leaders to discuss how they are utilizing their depth of experience in the payer and provider industries to achieve these goals for our clients.
Thank you for joining me today, Marybeth, Kristina, and Doug! I’d love to start with hearing more about your backgrounds in the payer & provider industries.
Marybeth Wrabel, Payer Specialist: I’m a tenured marketer and digital product management leader with 20 years of experience working for national and international payers. I built my career by following through on promises and going above and beyond for my constituents.
My colleagues quickly began referring to me as a subject matter expert in various aspects of the payer business.
During my career in the payer space, I got the opportunity to lead a global team of marketers. I developed a program to motivate them to think more strategically in their daily work. More recently, I led a cross functional group of Agile product owners and their respective peers across digital, analytics, marketing, and segmentation.
Kristina Kaufmann, Senior Business Consultant: I’m a lead business consultant at Perficient. I’m also a registered nurse (RN). Although I no longer provide direct patient care, I will always be a nurse. Prior to joining Perficient, I was an outpatient internal medicine and cardiac nurse for over seven years. Before that, I was a cardiac nurse in the hospital setting for about seven years. It was always such an honor to help save someone’s life, to advocate for patients throughout the continuum of care, or to comfort them during their last moments.
With each nursing shift, I felt like I made a difference and helped change lives for the better.
During my time in the outpatient setting, I was utilized as an expert on new rollouts and implementations. I enjoyed helping my fellow nurses and physicians with new technology. This guided my career towards healthcare technology, where I completed my master’s degree in health informatics and joined Perficient.
Douglas Stewart, Healthcare Principal
Douglas Stewart: I started my career in information technology as a programmer, back when Google was new, and Amazon sold books. That led to an opportunity in New York City working in the healthcare and life sciences industries.
Subsequently, I took a role leading projects and systems for the largest health plan in New Jersey. My focus shifted toward the intersection between technology and business outcomes, where I supported organizations in defining goal-oriented needs.
LEARN MORE: People of Perficient: Meet Marybeth Wrabel, Payer Specialist
Describe your current role at Perficient. What motivates you in your role?
MW: Today, my role as a payer specialist at Perficient gives me an opportunity to help support clients with strategy and delivery. Payers have so many constituents to serve. The strategies, experiences, and messages for each constituent group must be truly unique if you expect to earn their engagement.
The company culture at Perficient is one of openness, collaboration, and respect. I enjoy working on the cross-functional strategic teams where there is mutual respect for different backgrounds, strengths, and contributions.
KK: My current responsibilities at Perficient include clinical subject matter expertise, clinical business analysis, project management, medical terminology specialty, and healthcare strategy. I bring a unique perspective to the company through the lens of an actual provider in both the inpatient and outpatient settings. I’ve been able to help generate new ideas, use cases, and potential solutions to clinically oriented projects and initiatives.
I’m able to help integrate the clinical world with technology and business.
DS: As I met with leaders at Perficient during my job search, I was truly impressed by the caliber and number of dedicated experts concentrated in a single organization. Since joining the company, I’ve continued to be impressed with the talent pool at Perficient.
My colleagues are passionate about their industry, have innovative perspectives on how to solve problems, and are eager to collaborate to get things done and make exciting things happen. The enthusiasm is contagious!
I’m applying my 20 years of healthcare experience to help clients define their needs.
Read More: People of Perficient: Meet Kristina Kaufmann, Senior Business Consultant
What perspectives can you bring into your role based on your background? How has your expertise helped you serve our clients?
MW: After spending nearly my entire career with payers, I have developed a perspective on many aspects of their business. Payers have much potential to engage with their constituents in new and improving ways.
Achieving this engagement is determined by a payer’s strategic goals and appetite for change. It’s fascinating to see payers and providers around the country shift to integrated delivery models. This shows that there is a desire to impact the entire experience for members from service to payment. This is also an attempt to control costs for highly engaged populations.
There is great opportunity to help payers improve member experiences.
KK: My background gives me a good understanding of what the end user is expecting or needing from a product. I often use my personal experience with clinical workflows to support healthcare related decisions and solutions. I’m able to step back into the shoes of a provider and ask myself, what would help me as a nurse provide higher quality care or complete my tasks more efficiently, so that I can spend more time with my patients?
This has ultimately led to improved virtual health implementations through understanding of healthcare needs and change management.
DS: I’ve been responsible for hundreds of work efforts in the payer space. I’ve been the buyer on many occasions. Now I’m using that background to help provide the best solutions based on payer needs to develop deeper client relationships.
What does the emergence of the quadruple aim and the prioritization of health equity mean to you, as an industry expert? How are you seeing this impact the industry and the clients you serve?
Marybeth Wrabel: I’m proud to work with clients that are forerunners in health equity. These organizations strive to help bridge the gap of systemic health inequity and racial injustice. They have freely shared their findings and challenges obtaining self-reported race and ethnic data, assessing its accuracy from other sources, and even designing a program that meets high validity and reliability standards.
If payers and providers are striving to improve health outcomes, it can’t just address the health outcomes of specific groups. It must include everyone.
KK: Health equity is a critical step in improving the quality of care. If you’re not able to reach certain patient populations or geographic locations, resources and services cannot be utilized properly.
Making health equity a priority, is pushing the needle towards innovative care and digital health through remote monitoring, virtual visits, better communication, and collaboration, helping to close gaps in access, treatment, and patient outcomes.
DS: Professionally, I look at this from a healthcare management perspective. There is a lot of evidence that certain populations need more personalized attention to improve health outcomes. I also can’t help but view this issue from a personal perspective, having a racially diverse household. I’d like to think that the prioritization of health equity creates passion and opportunity to become more invested in what’s possible.
Healthcare Leaders Turn to Us
Our healthcare experts understand the unique challenges facing the industry. The 10 largest health systems and 10 largest health insurers in the U.S. have counted on us to support their end-to-end digital success. Modern Healthcare has also recognized us as the fifth-largest healthcare IT consulting firm.
We bring pragmatic, strategically-grounded know-how to our clients’ initiatives. And our work gets attention – not only by industry groups that recognize and award our work but also by top technology partners that know our teams will reliably deliver complex, game-changing implementations. Most importantly, our clients demonstrate their trust in us by partnering with us again and again. We are incredibly proud of our 90% repeat business rate because it represents the trust and collaborative culture that we work so hard to build everyday within our teams and with every client.
With more than 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Perficient is a trusted, end-to-end, global digital consultancy.
It’s no secret our success is because of our people. No matter the technology or time zone, our colleagues are committed to delivering innovative, end-to-end digital solutions for the world’s biggest brands, and we bring a collaborative spirit to every interaction. We’re always seeking the best and brightest to work with us. Join our team and experience a culture that challenges, champions, and celebrates our people.
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