Authors
Elzbieta Dziekonski, RN, director of Population Health Initiatives with the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH), serves as the Coalition’s main liaison to health care stakeholders, including the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services. In this role, she completes collaborative work on diabetes and obesity prevention and management, as well as cardiovascular disease. She leads and develops select initiatives and projects and seeks grant funding to support initiatives. Dziekonski also contributes to the Coalition strategy on improving workforce and community health and manages project evaluation activities, including data collection and basic analytics.
Dziekonski has over 18 years of combined experience in clinical care and managed care, most recently having served in utilization and quality management roles at Jefferson Health Plan (Health Partners Plans).
She received a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Chamberlain College of Nursing and a Registered Nurse Diploma from Northeastern Hospital School of Nursing, Temple University Division.
A passionate advocate for patients with cancer and other serious diseases, Terry Wilcox is executive director of Patients Rising, a nonprofit patient education and advocacy organization that helps patients get access to essential diagnostics and the treatments they need.
Co-founder and CEO of Surgo Health
Yoona Kim, PharmD, PhD, is the CEO and co-founder of Arine, a next-generation medication intelligence company with a mission to solve medication mismanagement across the health care continuum. Arine’s proprietary platform pulls insights from a complex ecosystem of clinical, socioeconomic, and behavioral data to optimize patient outcomes and deliver value-based care. The technology uses predictive analytics to target care to at-risk members, develops artificial intelligence (AI)-driven personalized care plans for each patient, and uses machine learning to continuously optimize members’ medication therapy. Arine overcomes the limits of traditional, manually driven medication management approaches by making the practice scalable and allowing time-strapped health care providers to deliver care to large populations and with a far greater impact. Arine’s clients have achieved the highest quality ratings and have reduced hospital admissions by 40%.
Arine’s AI-driven technology platform is powering successful interventions that navigate complexities discussed in this article. For example, Arine’s platform identified a 67-year-old Latinx male in Medicare Advantage with diabetes and an elevated hemoglobin A1C at high risk for hyperglycemic crisis. He had a history of medication nonadherence and canceling appointments and expressed difficulty affording a branded diabetes medication. Arine’s platform identified a generic option, along with several other recommendations, to optimize the member’s array of medications for other comorbidities. The platform also flagged a pattern of underutilization of care, indicated by an absence of a primary care visit within the last year and connected the member to an appointment. These measures were supplemented by auto-generated Spanish-language educational materials on the importance of medications and lifestyle changes for diabetes management. Ultimately, the member was very receptive to the recommendations and started taking his medications more regularly.
Prior to Arine, Yoona has held various roles at digital health, pharma, and consulting companies. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University; a PharmD with an emphasis in health policy and management from the University of California, San Francisco; and a PhD in health economics and outcomes from the University of Texas at Austin.
https://nursing.umich.edu/faculty-staff/faculty/lynae-darbes
As Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina’s (Blue Cross NC) Vice President of Government Markets: Engagement, Integration and Innovation, Angela leads company efforts to identify and optimize strategic relationships designed to drive growth in government marketsand deliver on the company’s mission to make health care better for all.
This VP role is responsible for leading engagement at the county level across Blue Cross NC’s government lines of business, guiding relationships with local leaders as well as faith-based and tribal organizations to understand local needs and develop tailored solutions. She is also involved in the company’s community work to promote stronger statewide support for children and families in the child welfare system.
In this role, she also helps advance tribal initiatives, engages communities across the state with Blue Cross NC’s corporate centers, and optimizes programs with North Carolina’s colleges and universities. She leads work to reduce gaps in quality and health outcomes, while achieving financial performance goals and overseeing budgeting, cost management and the membership experience within Blue Cross NC’s government lines of business (including Medicaid, Medicare, Federal Employee Program and a dual-eligible special needs plan).
Angela has been a key force in developing, launching, and managing Blue Cross NC’s Healthy Blue Medicaid managed care plan, which went live on July 1, 2021, and now serves over 500,000 members. For several years she served as Healthy Blue’s chief administrative and compliance officer. In that role, she was responsible for providing operational and regulatory oversight of the contract requirements, and she represented Blue Cross NC with regulatory agencies.
Angela now serves as CEO of Healthy Blue, where she leads day-to-day operations and overall strategy for serving Blue Cross NC’s Medicaid members.
A life-long North Carolinian, Angela graduated from Appalachian State University with a Bachelor of Science in communications. In addition to her work for Blue Cross NC, Angela serves her community in several leadership roles and is especially committed to supporting children and adolescents. She sits on the Tammy Lynn Centers Board of Directors, Triangle Family Services Board of Directors, Wake Tech Foundation’s Board of Directors, and Reach Out and Read NC’s Advisory Board. She is also an alumnus of the Leadership North Carolina program.
