Is it necessary to explicitly focus and call attention to the obvious fact that I am a woman in technology? You might not think so these days. Women have accomplished so much since the first bra was burned, that it would be understandable if you believed that we have established and gained enough ground to just be people in technology.

The reality is, unfortunately, there remains a staggering degree of inequality. Last month, the New York Times published an article titled “The Top Jobs Where Women are outnumbered by Men Named John.” The article reveals that there are fewer women among Chief Executives of Fortune 500 companies (5%) than there are men named James (5%); fewer female Venture capital investors in the largest tech deals of the last five years (9%) than there are men named David, James and Peter 11%.

You may giggle at first when reading the article, but its conclusion is stunning: it is more likely that the names of the men in charge will change sooner — fewer Johns and Roberts and more Liam’s and Noahs — than the number of women.

This is a reality that we cannot ignore, and one that exists all over our industry. While some of us women may not “feel it” as much as others, we are all still subject to “it.”

The World of Economic Forum’s 2016 Industry Gender Gap report recognizes that in “nearly all industries and geographies there has been a marked shift away from deliberate exclusion of women from the workplace, there continue to be cultural beliefs that lead to unconscious biases. This includes perceptions that successful, competent women are less “nice”; that strong performance by women is due to hard work rather than skills; and assumptions that women are less committed to their careers.”

We women have all felt this. The one woman that can be “tough enough” always gets through, but not all of us. We internally debate with ourselves whether to be more like our male counterpart in order to simply be heard in a meeting. Sometimes it is a question of style, but more often than not, we don’t have a seat at the table. And when we “power through it all” we still struggle to find a lot of role models to look up to.

I personally attribute my success to relentless stubbornness, shameless self-confidence (which often gets mislabeled since I am a woman) and sometimes blunt confrontation. Still, many times throughout my career I was asked to sit on the sidelines. I was encouraged to “focus on my wedding planning activities, rather than worrying about a promotion” which by the way I well deserved and earned.

At Magellan, we have decided that the only way to overcome these inequalities is to take them on proactively. That is why, in 2018, we have formed an internal ‘Women in Technology’ (WIT) change leadership group.

Being at a company that is not only willing to discuss and support a Women In Technology group, but is actually ready to “put their money where their mouth is” is refreshing.

The WIT group we established has taken off and I am so happy to see the responses, the community and the peer (gender agnostic) support we are offering to women across Magellan IT and beyond.

Our group is not exclusive to women, in fact we need everyone involved to truly make a difference, because our goals are critically important:

• We are focused on fostering female employee development and growth across the IT organization.
• We want to see more of us out there – we want our talent pipeline and the recruiting tactics to bring women to the table.
• We aim to encourage young women in the middle and high schools our communities to consider, try and stick with STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics).
• We want to support each other through peer-mentoring.
• We want to bring role models forward to provide insights into the possibilities.

Ultimately, we want a future where being a woman in technology is not a heroic accomplishment, and super powers are not needed to claim our earned and well-deserved seat at the table.

Exponential Organizations (ExOs) deliver outcomes (or impact) that are disproportionally (10x) greater than their traditional competitors through the use of innovative business models, organizational techniques and digital technologies. Over the past two years, we at Magellan have developed, implemented and are continuously improving a new approach for managing IT in ExOs. Magellan Exponential IT (ExO IT) is a digital and cloud-first healthcare strategy that is enabled by agile operational processes and implemented by a highly engaged learning organization. These three basic components of ExO IT – Digital Strategy, Agile Operations and Learning Organization, work together in a cadence to deliver iterative technology enabled capabilities that build on each another to deliver business agility, 10x results and be adaptive to meet the evolving needs of today’s healthcare industry.

Earlier this year, we started to automate Magellan’s ExO IT model through a highly scalable, secure and always-on system called DREAMS (Digital Real-time Management System). DREAMS has six modules that are built on ServiceNow (Kingston) platform using a customer focused low-code, no-code approach. With DREAMS, we aim to deliver minimum efficient scale through the use of today’s cloud-based technologies, ubiquitous access, real time insights and lean processes. It is highly influenced by Design Thinking, Lean Thinking (The Toyota Production System), Agile Methods, and the Amazon Way (Customer first, develop press releases, two-pizza team etc.). The broad scope of DREAMS includes:

1. Lead IT – This module operationalizes and automates our ExO IT strategy through focused and highly visible initiatives and expected outcomes. It does this through several Lean Thinking work products such as the X-Matrix, Leader Standard Work, Visual Management Systems, Initiative Press Releases, Project A3s and OKRs. At the center of Lead IT is a Digital 5S System. 5S (Sort, Standardize, Set-in-order, Shine and Sustain) is a Lean Thinking technique that makes the most frequently used and current and properly configured tools available to the right people, at the right time and at the right place. The Digital 5S is used to enable a highly engaged, productive and collaborative IT leadership team.
2. Manage IT – This module aims to maximize the throughput of IT by continuously aligning demand with the supply of IT at the most optimal cost. Manage IT standardizes and automates IT Service Delivery capabilities such as demand, resource, capacity, portfolio and financial management. This module is built around the Magellan Asset Portfolio (MAP) and it provides an easy to use and easy to search repository of infrastructure and application assets used within Magellan. MAP is enabled and operationalized through Service Owners and Solution Owners within our ExO IT organizational model.
3. Ask IT – This module aims to improve employee productivity by helping them request and receive IT solutions and services through simple, secure, easy-to-use, reliable and context-aware experiences. Ask IT implements a Services Portal and Services Catalog that can be used by employees to order, track and receive solutions and services in a way that is similar to leading online services such as Amazon.
4. View IT – This module focuses on driving continuous improvement within ExO IT by providing access to real-time dashboards, interfaces, benchmarks, metrics and outcomes used to measure the effectiveness of IT and its operations.
5. Secure IT – This module automates Security Operations, GRC, adherence to standards, audit controls and other mission critical functions related to protecting the security and privacy of healthcare information and
6. Operate IT – This module focuses on delivering predictable, secure, always-on operations using standardized and automated IT Service Management capabilities in the areas of Incident, Problem, Change, Event, Release and Capacity Management.

We are currently in flight with rolling DREAMS V1.0 out to the leadership ranks within Magellan IT. This release provides limited scope across all six modules and represents a significant step forward. We have 4 more releases planned for 2018. These releases will add more functionality and roll these capabilities out to a broader audience within Magellan.

Our own Seth Feuerstein spoke recently at the APA annual meeting about how Digital Mental Health Care is increasing access and delivering positive outcomes.

“Here’s what’s interesting…subjectively, patients described [the digital program] as by far the most positive experience they have when they go to that center,” said Feuerstein. “Their engagement with it was kind of off the charts.”

You can read about Seth’s comments and more at the American Journal of Manage Care by clicking here

More than 70 healthcare thought leaders, providers, and other innovators gathered in Florida in late January to explore the profound impact that new disruptors are having on healthcare delivery models, financing approaches and outcomes.  For the third year in a row, Magellan Health’s ‘Magellan Open Vision Exchange’ (MOVE) innovation forum brought together executives, providers and analysts to collectively discuss how industry innovators can solve some of healthcare’s biggest challenges.

Over the course of three days of dynamic interaction on Amelia Island, the group participated in presentations and discussions from a wide range of experts – including a Pulitzer Prize-winning practicing oncologist, CEOs of several large public and commercial healthcare programs, futurists, entrepreneurs, and innovation change gurus.

The speakers at MOVE 2018 brought very different perspectives, but the messages they delivered hit remarkably consistent notes.  Healthcare is being transformed through ever accelerating advances in technology, leveraging the power of big data, and producing personalized health solutions that are radically changing the way disease is predicted, identified, treated and contained.  As more than one expert noted, many of us do not even realize that ‘deep learning’ – as population-based meta-data analysis is known – has already made its way into our homes, and indeed into our pockets.  Sam Srivastava, CEO of Magellan Healthcare, reminded us all that the humble Smartphone has much more computing power than the early super-computers.  Pulitzer Prize-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee explained how researchers are using voice data passively recorded on Amazon’s Alexa™ to identify early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.  And, as eminent futurist Jim Carroll noted: “Connected health homes are the new normal.”

How do these profound changes impact the healthcare delivery system? Or as one audience member mused:  “In a world where computers make most of the clinical decisions, what becomes of the traditional provider?”  The answer was encouraging.  Several panelists felt that when machines take over routine diagnostics and health maintenance, the doctor-patient relationship will actually be enhanced, as primary care providers will have more time to actively listen to their patients, and more flexibility to address the non-clinical determinants of health that positively impact healthcare outcomes.

In the short term, providers are preparing for a transformed healthcare landscape by investing time and resources in creative partnerships with health plans and health informatics leaders in an effort to re-define and augment their value proposition.  Leaders from Magellan’s healthcare and pharmacy divisions joined with GuideWell of Florida in a panel discussion that explored the ‘volume to value’ shift in Value Based Purchasing (VBP).  Participants suggested that, while finding the optimal value-based model has been elusive, some promising pilot programs are emerging.  Aligning provider and payer incentives remained a challenge, the group agreed, and even the best-designed VBP program will fail if it does not drive member accountability.  Dr. René Lerer, president of GuideWell, captured this sentiment perfectly when he said that an effective health solutions company no longer delivers managed care – but instead ‘delivers a managed life to each and every member.’

In other words, the key to good personalized medicine will always be the person at the center of the healthcare journey.  Tommy Duncan, CEO of Trusted Health Plan, revisited this theme forcefully when describing how his inner city D.C. health plan was able to achieve a remarkable operations and financial turnaround in only one year.  The secret, Tommy explained, was that Trusted pivoted its existing care management model completely to focus on high-touch, face-to-face interactions at brick-and-mortar ‘Wellness Centers’ staffed by interdisciplinary teams.  Using predictive modeling data as a starting point to identify high-risk, high-cost members, the Wellness Center model generated behavior change at the individual member level that resulted in a 60 percent drop in emergency room visits in only one year.  Erhardt Preitauer, CEO of Horizon Health New Jersey, delivered a similar message, and ended his discussion of long term care best practices with the comment, “It all comes down to personal engagement.”

MOVE 2018 came full circle with closing comments delivered by Barry Smith, CEO of Magellan Health.  Many presenters talked at length about vast cloud-based, technology-enabled data repositories. Barry brought the discussion back down from the data cloud to an intensely human level, when he told the story of how a group of 80 compassionate strangers formed a human chain to save a family in distress on a Florida beach not too far from the room where MOVE attendees were sitting.  The group of strangers bonded spontaneously around a common goal, unanimously determined not to fail, and focused single-mindedly on ensuring not a single member of the stranded family drowned.  As a vivid metaphor for MOVE 2018, Barry’s story moved everyone who heard it.  It was also a perfect reflection of Magellan’s purpose:  “leading humanity to healthy, vibrant lives.”

Note: This article originally appeared on LinkedIn, you can read it there by clicking here.

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today – Abraham Lincoln

On one of my many cross-country flights, I started to think about how the concept of employment has changed dramatically over the course of my thirty-year career in the US. In this time, information technology and globalization have changed how business is done, increased competition and improved workforce productivity in every industry. These forces have dramatically changed the employer-employee compact*, doing away with stable jobs, lifetime employment, pensions, and predictable career advancement. These have been replaced by a dynamic, ever changing, ever evolving workplace. It’s not a stretch to say the Future of Work is very different, it is emerging and changing right in front of our eyes, and it requires:

• New skills: Students going through school will very likely be in a job that hasn’t been invented yet and more than a third of the job skills that will be needed in 2020 are not considered crucial to the jobs of today
• Curiosity and Continuous learning: These same students are learning core curriculum content that will be out of date by the time they graduate. They need to develop the capabilities to make learning a life-long activity that they enjoy
• Resiliency and Adaptability: Provide the skills required to adapt to careers that have 10-12 job changes in their career and possibly change their career 3 or 4 times, and
• New models of employment: Many individuals with specialized skills will see their career as a series of “Tours of duty”, with a newly defined Employer-Employee compact*. Other employees will expect the flexibility to have more than one gig at the same time enabled by the Gig Economy.

The Workforce of the future is made up of tech savvy digital natives who are always on and always connected. They flow between work activities, personal tasks and gigs that fulfill their need for artistic, financial, security or other needs. These employees are highly adaptable continuous learners, who have a breadth of skills across multiple domains. Organizations need to have a different view of their workforce and talent. They need to plan for employees who:

• Seek a higher purpose and “meaning” to the work they do and balancing that with what they are good at and at the same time enjoying what they do (The Japanese call the “ikigai”)
• Want to pursue multiple jobs/roles/gigs that align with their values and needs
• Prefer to work from anywhere, at anytime through different modalities – work from home, co-working spaces, all-inclusive campuses or traditional workplaces
• Look for the work to come to them as opposed to moving their families to where the work is and spending several unproductive hours commuting in big cities. The nature of work today is increasingly digital, distributed and not constrained by geographical boundaries, it goes to where the skills are
• See work and life as two sides of the same coin. These employees go beyond traditional notions of work-life balance and embrace work-life flow where they work where they want and can handle their personal life when they need to.

At Magellan Health, we believe that communication, collaboration and community are core basic human needs. We believe that collaboration is a highly personal and uniquely human experience that is critical for us to achieve our Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) of “Leading humanity to healthy, vibrant lives”. Our challenge was to see how we could build a collaboration platform that took advantage of the strengths of this workforce and addressed some of the opportunities and constraints that come with the workforce of the future.

In late 2016, we introduced Magellan Hub, our platform to enable the workforce of the future and make them thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Magellan Hub was designed with five foundational principles:

1. It had to be humanized, personal and democratic – the platform needed to be personal in a way that it gave every individual within the organization a unique voice that was their own. It also needed to be representative, self-governing and participatory (collaboration is not a spectator sport). It also should NOT allow for anonymous participation.
2. It had to support emerging modalities of communication – the platform had to go beyond Web 2.0 technologies to include emerging modes of communication including Groups/Communities, Videos, Group Chats, Video and Audio Conferencing, desktop NLP, and Chatbots
3. It had to bridge distance and time – In other words, it had to retain the context of conversations, the history of events and be searchable. In addition, it had to have the flexibility to support real-time and delayed interactions at the same time
4. It had to be everywhere and nowhere – this allowed people to be always connected when they needed to be and completely disconnected when they wanted to be. This enables both pull and push communications where users could opt-in to the content they wanted to see.
5. It had to be future proof – The platform had to be scalable to support our growth and be accessible from anywhere, at any time over no, low and high-bandwidth connections.

We believe in Magellan Hub, we built a platform that supports the workforce of the future to effectively handle the future of work. Here are a four examples:

• When Dana, a new employee joins Magellan, she is instantly connected to the broader community across Magellan. She has the choice to share what she wants to share, develop her unique voice and influence the dialog of her colleagues, her team or the entire company. She can subscribe to the content she wants to see, groups she wants to join, formal and informal leaders she wants to follow. In other words, Dana immediately becomes part of the Magellan Community the minute she gets an ID to access Magellan Hub
• Steve, a long-term Magellan employee, spends most of his time in infrastructure operations and is focused on his day-to-day tactical tasks. With Magellan Hub, Steve can be part of groups that are focused on the projects he is working on to stay in sync with the rest of his team irrespective of where they reside or work from. He can also join special interest groups around technical domains or social domains (such as Magellan Musicians) to connect with others with similar interests. He does all this on his Android smartphone as he is running personal errands working out of his home office.
• Lara, a highly engaged mid-level executive uses Magellan Hub to do a digital management by walking around to check on the pulse of her team that is spread across 12 states and 3 different time zones. She uses HD Videoconferencing and personal chat/video/audio conferencing through to enable these highly personal and humanized experiences without extensive travel. What’s cool is that Lara can have these humanized, high-touch interactions with her team from her home-office, from the indoor gym as she watches her kids play or from an airport as she waits for her flight to take off
• Jeff, who is a product manager developing our next leading edge Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tool can collaborate real-time with his colleagues and team members from different departments across the company to create, edit, comment on shared product specifications in a secure way. At the same time, he uses a closed and private group to discuss and collaborate on these product specifications and coordinate the development of this product across the company.

At Magellan, we are the employer of the future who is fully committed to continuously exceeding the expectations of the workforce of the future. While we may not be there yet, with Magellan Hub, we provide a collaboration platform for employees so that they can do their best work every single day and they become the change that we want to see.

References and Notes:

* Hoffman, R., Casnocha, B., & Yeh, C. (2013, June). Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact. Harvard Business Review.

** World Economic Forum. (January 2016). The future of jobs: Employment, skills and workforce strategy for the fourth industrial revolution. http://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs

*** The name Magellan Hub was selected by our employees through a crowd-sourcing contest that was conducted on the platform

I have had the privilege of wearing many hats in a variety of industries throughout my career, including as an entrepreneur, executive, board member, educator, inventor and investor in technology, healthcare, biotechnology and life sciences.

I have seen the development of ideas and innovations that never had the opportunity to come to fruition. There are a number of contributing factors that impact these advancements. However, one of the most frequent causes is that inventors and researchers do not have the proper experiences, training and education to advance their ideas and work from the research setting to the patient or consumer.

In addition to my role as chief innovation officer and chief medical officer of medical and digital innovation at Magellan Healthcare, I also serve as a faculty member at the Yale School of Medicine. It is through my role at Yale that I have the opportunity to lead a unique training program for substance abuse researches from across the country in entrepreneurship starting next spring. The work of these scientists focuses on the prevention and treatment of substance abuse disorders leading to innovative options for improved care. Unfortunately, many of these innovations never reach the market because today’s scientists do not have the training in how to commercialize their ideas.

The training program, called Innovation to Impact: Translation Support and Education, is made possible through the funding of a $1.25 million grant by the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Students will participate in a free five-day boot camp on entrepreneurship and product development and will also have access to an extensive network of new venture mentors, seed funding for new ventures and training in how to promote a culture of entrepreneurship locally.  This will also help start what we hope will be an active community hosted virtually as well.

In addition to my work in developing apps and software programs designed to combat substance use disorders, I have also been teaching entrepreneurship for many years. This program is a logical next step to not only advance these innovations, but significantly help people with substance abuse disorders.

Open to researchers across the country who are focused on basic science, epidemiology, prevention, treatment and policy, the program will help advance innovations that impact the substance use field. This work is of the upmost importance as we face a national crisis on substance abuse. I also believe the future innovations of these researchers will soon impact our work at Magellan and the customers and members we serve.

Magellan makes it a priority to advance innovation, as evidenced by its support of my participation in this initiative with the NIH as well as dedicated resources through various innovation initiatives to help develop and commercialize new product ideas or services. It is rare that you find a private sector company like ours that is committed to allowing its executives to undertake educational activities when they fit within our massive transformative purpose of “leading humanity to healthy, vibrant lives.” I’m excited to continue to focus on collective entrepreneurial spirit with an amazing team at Yale to share our lessons with others and bring new ideas to light.

Magellan’s own CTO, Srini Koushik, was recently featured in Forbes Insights, talking about the benefits of videoconferencing and how it is changing the way that we work at Magellan. In the article, Srini discusses how new technology is improving efficiency while increasing connectedness and effectiveness of teams.

Check Srini’s profile here.

Earlier this year, Srini shared his experiences reimagining Magellan as a digital healthcare company here on the Magellan Health Insights blog. Take a look at his views here.

The past decade has seen some remarkable changes in technology, which has ushered in an era where we are always “on,” always connected and where most everything that was analog now is digital. Many of us walk around with powerful computers in our pockets –also known as smartphones–that are more powerful than the computers that help put a man on the moon only a few decades ago. Today, we can order car rides from our phones, pay for our groceries, watch movies or do just about anything from a smartphone or network-connected device from anywhere across the globe. Yet for many of us, we go through a time warp when we move from our personal lives to our work environments.

Magellan: a Digital Healthcare Company

At Magellan, we have an inspired leadership team that is building a workforce of the future. We recruit the best talent wherever we can find it across the globe and provide them with great work-life integration by providing flexible working arrangements. Over 40 percent of our workforce does not work in one of our offices, and many of our employees are mobile and on the road helping our member and providers. This kind of a workforce requires the collaboration platform of the future.

During the summer of 2016, we assembled and rolled out Magellan’s next generation collaboration platform. This platform was built with a mobile-first, cloud-first, always digital mindset designed to provide secure, seamless and context-aware experiences within the enterprise. This new platform is all about providing choices: it works across Macs and PCs, across browsers, across Apple and Android mobile devices and can work across a 4G connection and high-speed wifi alike.

The platform uses five technologies that we use in our personal lives on a daily basis:

• Workplace and Workchat for desktop and mobile devices. These are the enterprise- grade versions of Facebook and Facebook Messenger, complete with networking, group collaboration and social sharing capabilities.
• A cloud-based document and content management solution from Box.
• Enterprise-quality HD video conferencing and desktop sharing through Zoom.
• Productivity applications from Microsoft through Office 365.
• An integrated access portal tied together by a robust security and identity management solution from Okta.

Okta acts as a gateway to every other application, website or solution provided by Magellan. It simplifies password management and provides secure multi-factor authentication – in short it makes our applications accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time over any network or device. It allows an employee to take a video call from her home office and collaborate with her colleagues in a Workplace group and continue that conversation on a mobile device as she takes the train into see a customer for an afternoon meeting – secure, seamless and context-aware collaboration.

 Technology leading culture; culture leading technology

One of the interesting developments in our culture is the use of desktop and mobile video conferencing which allows us to personalize each call, read body language and emotions and share the true benefits of face-to-face communications, instead of being on nameless, faceless, monotonous conference calls.  This is changing the cultural fabric of Magellan by making the enterprise more personal and more social.  It is challenging our management orthodoxies and help reinvent management.

With this new platform, we are building communities that span geographies, business units, departments and even companies. In the past year, we have seen over 700 groups evolve organically on this platform.  Some of these groups focus on specific projects, initiatives or events, and others focus on communities of users and social groups. We even have a community of musicians at Magellan. In short, the platform helps people stay connected in a personal way without having to be located in the same spot.

Ultimately, our technology is a means by which we can help improve the experience – and quality of care – for our customers and members. Our objective for this new platform is to make the technology invisible to the user and allow them to seamlessly play their part to help individuals live healthy, vibrant lives.