Shirley Moncada serves as Senior Business Process Consultant for Kaiser Permanente.
On May 2nd, Shirley will give a presentation on "Delivering Access and Affordability through High Quality Virtual Care" at Becker's Health IT + Clinical Leadership + Pharmacy conference. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place May 2-4, 2019 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Shirley's session, click here.
Question: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?
Shirley Moncada: Most of my focus in 2019 will be collaborating with various groups to implement initiatives that further enhance our virtual care platform and streamline our patients’ digital experiences to get them where they need to go faster and with ease. We will be focusing on multiple digital channels and implementing ways to streamline processes and user experiences to help enhance access, improve outcomes, and decrease cost.
Q: Healthcare takes a lot of heat for not innovating quickly. What's your take on this?
SM: I disagree with this statement and think if people really examine where healthcare has come in the past few years they will see there has been a lot of innovation from how care is provided to the actual medicine and procedures that are used to treat patients. There’s a huge increase in video visit usage across various healthcare organizations and improved methods for patients to connect and communicate with their health care providers in ways that were not done 10 or 5 years ago. For example, emailing or chatting with a healthcare provider was not something that was done before, but it is something that is being done more and more now. Currently, at Kaiser about 56% of our visits are some form of telehealth visit (e.g., telephone, email, video visit, etc.). Patients can get the care they need quickly when they need it and not even leave their home, it’s the 21st century version of a house call visit. At Kaiser, we’re always thinking of ways to be innovative to help our patients and community get the help they need.
Yes, healthcare is complex and there are various regulations that are changing constantly, but part of being innovative in healthcare is understanding the landscape and problems you’re trying to solve. Ultimately, when trying to be innovative in healthcare one should always be thinking about patients’ privacy/security, regulations, and bringing in the experts in these areas early in the development/planning phase to make sure implementation does not stall.
Q: Can you share some praise with us about people you work with? What does greatness look like to you when it comes to your team?
SM: I work with some really dedicated people, who are always exploring ways to help improve the healthcare ecosystem. They are always willing to jump in and help each other in any way they can. We all have different expertise and skillset, but we collaborate and bring different perspectives to the discussion. Greatness to me is the ability to discuss and disagree on approaches but at the end of the day come out of it with solutions to help our patients, and that is exactly what the teams I work with do. We brainstorm, discuss, bring our various viewpoints and develop innovative solutions to ultimately help patients and the community.