Explore Public Health With Blue Shiled of California

Speaker 1: Yes. Okay. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming this evening to meet Blue Shield of California. I'm really excited to see our faces in the audience. Here's the agenda. We do have a tight agenda. Please remember that there will be some time at the end for Q&A, so let's allow our speakers to do the presentation. We will have a panel discussion where I have some questions that I prepared that were sent in from students in the past. At that time I will also ask the audience for more questions.

We will be recording for the online students, so keep that in mind. Silence your phones and try to keep the noise to a minimum. From time to time I will ask Janet, the Program Manager, from an online program to tell me if there's questions when we come to the panel. Please excuse that.

Without further ado, let me do just a brief introduction of who we have here today. I have apologized already to Nazli and said I'm not going to butcher your last name. First we will have Nazli. She is a Senior Manager of the Wellvolution Program. This is a set of programs that are evidence based. They have been proven to prevent and reverse disease through 100 percent lifestyle based approaches. They do so by improving the wellbeing through diet, activity, stress and social support. Nazli will help us learn more about Wellvolution.

Then we will hear from our very own Surabhi who is ... Last year, right?

Surabhi Narain: Yeah. Last year [crosstalk 00: 02: 18].

Speaker 1: From MPH program. Is it policy?

Surabhi Narain: I was in Health Education and Promotion.

Speaker 1: Okay. Fantastic. While she was here, I'm just going to mention two other things that she did. She worked at the American Heart Association serving there as a Health Educator for Multicultural Initiatives. She also did an internship at the LA County Department of Mental Health where she conducted a clinic and community needs assessment for women with Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders.

The reason I'm mentioning these two activities is so that you all know that you can do more than just your Practicum. I encourage you all to be thinking about different experiences in addition to your Practicum because the more things that you can put on your resume the better it will be.

Then we will also hear from Paige Lowery. She is a Strategic Recruiting Program Manager of Blue Shield. Yes. She is the one that will be looking for [inaudible 00: 03: 24] like you [crosstalk 00: 03: 26], and making sure that your resume gets reviewed. So please be nice to Paige. She has extensive experience in program management, managing relationships. She is now the Program Manager that recruits for Blue Shield for her internship and fellowships.

Of course myself. I am the Career Services Advisor Coordinator, and the event planner as you can tell. I encourage all of you to ... if you have not come to meet with me, to please do so earlier on in your career and your time here with us because the earlier you start thinking about where you're going to go, the better it will be for you when you are graduating.

The worst thing that you can do is come April of the year you're going to graduate and say, "Hi. Can you please help me find a job?" Then I'll be like, "Okay. Let's do a quick review of your resume," then we start the process there. But it's better for you to start reviewing your resume now, developing a cover letter. When you are preparing to reach out to employers for your Practicum, that's a great time to come to talk to me so that when you're reaching out to employers for your Practicum that you're doing so with a well professional reviewed resume and cover letter.

Like I said, we have very limited time, in a time crunch. I wanted to say thank you to our sponsors. Blue Shield specially sponsored this event, and also the programs of the Public Health Sciences. So we together provided the food for you all to have a nice meal. Apologies for the online students. We hope to see you at our mixer events. We have a MPH mixer event. Hopefully they can join us in San Diego. We'll have future events that they can join.

I'm going to introduce now, Nazli, now, right?

Surabhi Narain: Paige.

Nazli Ghamarifa: Paige will start.

Paige Lowery: I'll go.

Speaker 1: Let me [inaudible 00: 05: 43] the presentation up for you.

Paige Lowery: Thanks.

Speaker 1: If you can just-

Paige Lowery: Perfect. All right. Thank you all so much for coming and spending your evening with us. We have a very interesting set of topics to talk to you about tonight. Because I'm a recruiter so I'm just going to start off by giving you really brief company overview, and then we're going to jump into the important topics of tonight. I'll hand the floor to Nazli.

Raise your hand, if before tonight, you have heard of Blue Shield of California? Okay. Good. How many of you looked up Blue Shield of California for career opportunities? Have you been to our careers website? Okay. Not so many of you.

I'm going to do a quick overview of who we are, our mission, our values, what we do and how we do it. Then again, I'll hand it over to Nazli. She'll go through a Wellvolution presentation. Then we'll talk some more, and Surabhi will talk more about some positions that they're currently hiring for at Blue Shield. So we've already had some introductions but there we are.

We are a mission driven Not-for-profit health plan. That is unique with a lot of our competitors being mission driven. Our mission is to ensure that all Californians have access to high quality health care at an affordable price. We are working to make health care sustainable system within California. We are striving to build plans that we would want to be on, and that we would be proud to have our family and friends be covered by those plans. Those are pretty lofty mission.

How did we get here? How did we get to this mission? How did we get to be one of the largest health care providers in California? We are founded in 1939. We're one of the very first insurance plans that had statewide coverage sponsored by physicians. Physicians initially sponsored this plan for their patients. We've formed as a Not-for-profit. That status continues with us today. Again, that's a little bit unique for a health insurance company to continue that Not-for-profit status.

We have, and have always had a strong community minded focus. We're very deeply connected to our communities both in Northern California and Southern California in various ways, which we'll cover. We are part of the Blue Cross, Blue Shield Association. If you are coming into California from another state, you probably have a Blue Cross Blue Shield [inaudible 00: 08: 33] in your state. We're all connected, and that we're all governed by the National Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. We're all part of that. But it's health care. So every state operates regionally. Our region just has California. In California, Blue Cross and Blue Shield are two separate companies. If you come from Massachusetts, for example, Blue Cross Blue Shield is one company. I'd like to separate that out that we are one company. We are separated, and we only operate in California.

That being said, we're all over the state of California. We want to cover all of Californians. We have presence across the state of California. We currently have 15.6 billion in revenue. I know some of you might be thinking how the Not-for-profit have a revenue like this, right? Maybe? Part of our community work is that we have a branch of our business called The Blue Shield Foundation. That's a true Not-for-profit portion of our business. Every year that we are fortunate enough to make above the two percent of our profit, we keep two percent for our operations and for maintaining our business. Then we donate the rest of that back into either members or community or into the foundation.

I said the foundation's a true Not-for-profit part of our business. They work on several initiatives whether it be community engagements, building up our clinics. Those are the few other initiatives that they work on. The current one that we're working on now is domestic violence. They are giving donations to clinics around the area that are working with survivors and those currently experiencing domestic violence, and bringing awareness and education around the issue.

We are one of the largest providers in State of California. We currently have 7,000 employees. We have over 15 office locations. Major offices are our corporate headquarters in San Francisco, at El Dorado Hills, which is up by Sacramento, and we have a few offices down here in Southern California. The biggest being Woodland Hills.

Before I hand it off to Nazli, I just wanted to take one moment to see if there's any questions about Blue Shield as an organization. If not, no worries. Jot anything down that comes up. We can answer some questions at the end. Okay. Nazli.

Nazli Ghamarifa: Great. I forgot to put the comma MPH by my name. Sorry. But I do have a Master's in Public Health as well. My name is Nazli Ghamarifard. I have been with Blue Shield of California for about 10 years now. I actually got my master's in public health at CSUN ... Cal State University of Northridge for those who don't know what CSUN is, about 20 years ago. But I've been practicing public health in a health plan setting my whole career since I graduated 20 years ago. But I've been with Blue Shield about 10 years now.

Wellvolution is the brand name of our, what used to be historically our wellness program. We shifted and evolved over the years. Our department is called Lifestyle Medicine. Have you guys heard the term lifestyle medicine? Anybody? Awesome. Cool. Does anybody want to say what lifestyle medicine means to you if you've heard of it? Go ahead.

Student: Focus on the everyday factors that makes you ... basically diet, [inaudible 00: 12: 41] you are. Things that affect just your lifestyle overall.

Nazli Ghamarifa: Awesome. That's perfect. Really that's my presentation today, is just about that, and why our department exists with Blue Shield of California, and how we got to this point where our focus is on lifestyle medicine right now.

Just a little about how we're organized within Blue Shield of California. There are different business units. I am in the Health Care Quality and Affordability Department. What does that mean? You saw those terms are all in our mission statement. We're very important part of Blue Shield. What does that mean? We make sure that all of our members have access to that quality care and that it's at an affordable price. That means our department is in charge of contracting with providers, whether some of the doctors, where there's hospitals, pharmacies. We have a Quality Department that makes sure that those provider offices and hospitals are providing quality care. Then we have a Pharmacy Department making sure that we keep our pharmacy rates low, so again our members have affordable care. Then our department is the Lifestyle Medicine. We are there to help not only prevent disease but also using lifestyle medicine to try to reverse disease. There's lot of research that shows that you can actually reverse disease by using lifestyle techniques.

Like I said, a lot of my slides are about research. We want to prove that to everybody because not everybody is on board yet, so that we have to train our providers, we have train even our employees and just a community about what lifestyle medicine is. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to get to this place where lifestyle medicine is a core way to intervene and try to reduce health care cost, and also keep all Californians healthy.

Lifestyle is medicine. These are different components that together make it a really powerful way to try to not only prevent disease but also reverse disease. If you have a regular physical activity in your life, if you have primarily whole foods plant based diet, if you stay away from substance abuse, primarily smoking alcohol ... Emotional health, we'll talk a little bit about that. The need for social support. Also sleep was really a part of this lifestyle medicine.

This is where all the science starts. This is a lifespan chart. We're at a point where we're living at least on the average in our 80s. This point right here is when the flu pandemic happened. We had a major loss in the population, but over the years there's been a lot of advances in science. That cause us to live healthier. Along with that we also see a similar graph for health care span. Health care span has increased over the years as well. We do know that 75 percent of health care spend is on chronic conditions that you can actually prevent. That's where we come in with lifestyle medicine. There are a lot of organizations that are supportive and know that lifestyle medicine is the way to go because there's so much research. Here the American Cardiac Organization and American Heart Association have set guidelines that say the first step to reducing or reversing high cholesterol or heart attacks or heart disease is lifestyle medicine.

Again like I said, I'm going to just quickly go through all the slides. You guys are all in Public Health School, right? So you probably have heard a lot of this in your field as well that [inaudible 00: 17: 59] using education and helping people change a lifestyle is probably one of the most powerful ways to try to keep everyone healthy and reduce health care spend.

These are all the different organizations that recommend change of diet as the first way to try to prevent and reverse disease before you start prescribing medication. There's all these organizations that say there's all this research that shows that lifestyle medicine is the way to go. But then when you ask general population if they think they're having a healthy diet, the majority of them are saying, "Yes, we do." But then when you actually also ask, "How many fruits or veggies do you have a day?" Majority don't. There's not a clear understanding of what healthy really means, and what a healthy lifestyle really is.

Mayo Clinic has done a study, and they defined healthy lifestyle. There's four different trackers they pointed out. Their research shows that only three percent of the population actually fits to that healthy lifestyle. The disconnect also is that a lot of physicians in medical school may not get lifestyle medicine education. It's more about treatment to try to manage disease.

We like to share this cartoon as how our health care system is, is just we're constantly trying to treat disease when we're not getting at the root cause of why people are getting chronic diseases. Look at the root cause. That's just to turn off the faucet. Even in a health plan when we are putting a benefit together and we talk to our providers, we see that the focus is on ... You'll see here when you're doing preventive care for patients, you're checking for ... what's your cholesterol, what's your blood pressure, what's your weight, but you don't really ask about ... You'll see smoking as a question, but you don't see as much on the health risk assessments about how's your nutrition, how much physical activity do you have, do you have any social support. You don't see that as much. Are you practicing mindfulness? But that doesn't exist.

We are partnering with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to try to get more education out there to our providers, but also within our health plan to add lifestyle medicine techniques as a way to assess where someone else with respect to their lifestyle, and using that as a way to prevent disease and reverse disease as well.

Getting into some of the research, there's actually been a lot of research on using lifestyle medicine techniques to reverse disease. We'll go through some of that. This chart is actually about the diabetes prevention program. This was a national program that actually ended up becoming so successful that it's become a mandate for health plans to cover as a benefit for the members. If you're at risk for diabetes, it's completely covered for you to be in the diabetes prevention program. The research showed that with lifestyle medicine type techniques, you can actually reduce the onset of diabetes versus giving someone prescription drugs or someone who's in a control group.

Has anyone heard of Dr. Dean Ornish? Yeah? Cool. Okay. We work very closely with Dr. Dean Ornish, and he's done a lot of research on lifestyle medicine. This one, images of before and after heart PET scan. It's of a patient who had heart disease. The dark spots are unhealthy part. This patient went through a year of lifestyle medicine, those six components. Make sure he didn't smoke. He had the right nutrition. Exercise, social support and emotional wellness. Just one year later, he was actually able to reverse his disease, and after he stopped taking medication. Because he had heart disease, he had to continue to live a lifestyle medicine type of lifestyle to continue to stay off medication. The research is there, and we see a lot of results there.

Again, this is another paper that Dr. Dean Ornish published along with other collaborators. This one's about prostate cancer. He did a lot of research about prostate cancer. Even with prostate cancer, you can actually reverse, or improve your health. Let me go through a few more slides about prostate cancer. He actually showed that with these lifestyle changes, you can actually improve your PSA count, which is the way to measure whether you're at a point where you have prostate cancer or not.

More research that was done was around your genetics, and whether you can change your genes if you change your lifestyle. A lot of us think, "Oh my gosh. My dad was diabetic. His mom was diabetic." I'm like, "Oh my god. I'm going to become diabetic," no matter what I do. But what this research showed is that even if you have the genes for ... This one's on cancer. Even if you have the gene for cancer, you can actually reverse that through lifestyle change. The first one shows your genes. The red shows the cancer cells. After one years of lifestyle change, you see that the green is the removal of the cancer cells. There's definitely ... they are there.

These are chromosomes and telomeres. The tails of the chromosomes are telomeres. As you get older, or if you get a disease, your telomeres fray and shorten. Dr. Dean Ornish did another study that showed that overtime if you change your lifestyle, and you can actually increase the length of your chromosomes, the telomeres. This not only prevent you can actually reverse this.

Again, all of this is backed by several different organizations. A lot of people think that it's scary that lifestyle that we talk about that we need to live, to be able to live a longer life and a healthier life could be scary. This shows a joke of that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. When we do the education for members who feel uncomfortable about changing and whether they're ready to go to a plant based diet and eliminate meat ... You don't necessarily have to get that extreme.

Even small changes in your health and lifestyle can lead to really great results. A little bit of change is great. A lot of change is even better. Some is better than none. More is better than some. This is a physical activity and mortality. It tracks the level of physical activity that individuals had. There is a sweet spot where you can reduce your risk of mortality by exercising. But even if you change a little bit it's still good for you. The recommendation for a physical activity is 150 minutes a week of moderate and vigorous activity. You don't have to right away start, "Vroom" if you haven't had any physical activity. When we do education, we say that it starts slow. You don't have to get there right away.

Some research around weight. If you are overweight you're unhealthy. That's not necessarily true. You can be overweight or obese, and if you're active, you have a lower risk of mortality than if you are normal weight and you don't exercise. I would just think about those lifestyle versus what are my individual numbers. You should pay attention to the numbers but as long as you start somewhere and you make the change one step at a time, I think, you're in a good place.

We talked a little bit about the nutrition portion of it. Primarily whole food plant based diet. A lot of people who are like me, they're like, "I'm afraid of going vegetarian," but we're not saying that you have to completely be a vegetarian. Some research [inaudible 00: 28: 57] nutrition. This is New York County a while back when they had some laws in place to eliminate trans fatty acids at restaurants. Some counties changed earlier than other counties. Those counties actually saw a reduction of heart attacks as a result of that. Just more science from me. We really want to prove that this is a way to go.

Then this is a research on vegetarian mortality rates. It just shows that if you have vegetarian lifestyle, your risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer is lower. But even if you're not a vegetarian, white meat is better than red meat. This shows the difference in mortality risk for that.

All right. You guys heard about Blue Zones? You know what that's all about? Anybody? Cool. Dan Buettner did this work. For those of you who don't know about Blue Zones, it's areas where pockets of different cities where there are high population of people who are living in their 90s and 100s. Dan Buettner did some research that showed why is that the case. What he was finding is that those populations were actually following this lifestyle medicine type of regimen. Surprising. When I was local ... Loma Linda, California. What's happening there is, there is Seventh Adventists Group population that lives there. They don't smoke. They don't drink. They're very social. They have a lot of the components of lifestyle medicine in their life. That's why we see a high population of people living in their 100s there.

Little bit about mindfulness. Just a lot of research that shows that you don't necessarily need medication. Doctors tend to right away prescribe you something for depression and anxiety, but you can actually reduce your depression or anxiety by meditation and mindfulness therapy. I put this here because we don't like to scare people off by saying, "Oh my gosh. You have to for hours sit and meditate every day." That's not what we're saying. I actually have a friend who does that as she goes to these retreats that are three or four days of silence. There's no way I could do something like that, but that's not what we're saying either. There's actually research shows that even five minutes a day of taking time to yourself and just meditating is really good for you. There are lots of apps out there for mindfulness and meditation, so take advantage of it. Just more data on meditating, that the more you meditate the more balanced your brain becomes overtime.

A little bit about social support. What was surprising to me here was that social support is actually more important than physical activity and your body mass index when it comes to mortality. We should make it an important part of our life to do that. It's really hard for me to go exercise on my own, so I actually need the social support when I work out. Luckily I finally found someone to do that with me. We get up at 5:00 in the morning. We workout at 5:00 in the morning together, it's been successful so far. It's because I have that social support, and I need that social support, someone to push me. Sometimes she gives me the push first. We're lucky to have each other for that.

You guys are students. Does anybody get about seven hours of sleep? Cool. Anybody get less? Five? Five or less. [inaudible 00: 33: 32] between six to eight. Try to get there. That's what the research shows about sleep.

All right. The whole point of the conversations that we have about lifestyle medicine's to try to ... because we think there's a lot of unnecessary prescriptions when you can actually change your lifestyle and avoid prescription. It's a data on the matter of drugs that it's prescribed, and the fact that 50 percent of the population has five or more prescriptions. All these prescriptions have their own side effects. We've seen all the pharmaceutical company type commercials that are out there like the last 10, 20 seconds of the commercial lists all the different side effects. Diarrhea. Say them, may need them all. What are the different ... all side effects that they have.

That's what we're trying to get at. There are options for certain diseases to perhaps get off drugs if you're on it. Unfortunately right now, that's the first go to when you go to a physician's office because they just don't have the time. They have 15 or 20 minutes with you. As soon as they hear that it's something wrong with you, they want to prescribe you something. I think there are other ways around it. People need to be aware of that. Just more information about why prescriptions might not be the best thing because some people don't even adhere to it. They might get it but they don't take it, or they don't take it correctly.

We're very passionate about lifestyle medicine. This is a one example that we like because everybody likes to hear about sex. These side effects of some of these medications actually impact your sex life as well. But with lifestyle medicine, you don't have those issues.

This is just, again, one of the final slides I have. It's just saying that with lifestyle medicine ... That's just like one pill versus all these different types of pills that you need for different medication. Just lifestyle medicine alone can impact all of these different types of health issues. So why take all these different medications when you can avoid all that with good diet, exercise, social support, mindfulness, being tobacco free.

All right. We have a couple of quotes here. I'm just going to skip that, but it's basically more and more evidence in why lifestyle medicine's so good. With Wellvolution when I started 10 years ago, we just started Wellvolution or wellness program. We've evolved with the program over the years. At first when we launched Wellvolution, it was just for our own employee population. We have the basics. Complete a biometric screening, complete a health risk assessment.

Over the years we've had a lot of lessons learned about making sure that what we do offer is meaningful and that it's evidence based. Currently we offer these five different programs to all of our members, not just our employees. Daily challenge focuses on overall wellbeing. Walkadoo is a physical activity program. Quitnet is this smoking cessation. We talked a little bit about Diabetes Prevention. Undo it is a program with Dean Ornish. It's [inaudible 00: 37: 47] heart disease to reverse heart disease.

We're going to a next phase of Wellvolution. We've had these programs in place for the last four to five years. What we've learned is they're all separate. They're not all not integrated. We've talked to a lot of members to see what they want to hear, what they want from us at Blue Shield of California. They want to make sure that everything is integrated, and it makes sense for the member. Each member's different. What we're doing as the next phase for Wellvolution is ... We're calling it Wellvolution Next, actually. It's taking all different types of lifestyle medicine therapeutics. There's digital programs, or they are bringing more of the community based type of programs. We're creating this platform to offer as many choices of the different types of program that hit all the different lifestyle medicine modalities to make sure that we provide to our members what they need when they need it.

What will be included as part of Wellvolution Next is we want to make sure that we are trusted source and resource to our members. We want to be transparent about what data that's available about our members, and make sure that we provide the right programs for them. We want to make sure that when they access its online platform, it's simple for them. It's easy to navigate. It's super convenient, so you can access it on your smartphone if you have that. We're just building this Wellvolution Next. Our goal is to have this new platform up in 2019. We'll get there. I think that's it for me. Thank you for your time and for listening and hearing me out about lifestyle medicine. Do you have any questions now, or do you want to hold off till the end? How do you want to do that? Any questions?

Speaker 1: We can also do it in Q&A.

Nazli Ghamarifa: Cool. Okay. Great. Thank you.

Surabhi Narain: Hey everyone. I'm Surabhi. I'm one of the Shield Emerging Leaders at Blue Shield. I also graduated from the USC master's in public health program last year in December. I did my Practicum at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. Prior to that, I was at UC Irvine, getting my bachelor's degree in biological sciences.

I just wanted to start off by sharing a picture of all 22 of us in the Shield Emerging Leaders Program in cohort three. This is a picture of all of us at orientation at Fogo de Chao. On this day we got to meet our Rotation Managers.

The Shield Emerging Leaders Program is a two year rotational program in which we're getting prepared for leadership and management type roles. We've got four rotations, each are six months long. They are across five different areas, which include corporate, customer experience, health care quality and affordability, information technology and markets. Most of the rotations are located out in the Northern California region. Sacramento, the bay area. But I do know a couple of Shield Emerging Leaders who are out in Los Angeles and San Diego. I know that there are opprtunities in Los Angeles with Care1st acquisition.

The main program requirements are that you must have completed a master's in public health, business or healthcare administration within one to three years of the start date of the program, which is next year in July, and also have had three to six years of experience in public health, healthcare administration, business or any related field. Also having leadership experience is a plus.

I'm currently in my first rotation. I've been at Blue Shield for almost three months. I'm in the customer experience area. I'm in claims. I'm currently working on two different projects. The first project that I'm working on is called performance guaranteed. When an employer chooses us to be their health insurance providers, we have to guarantee them that we're going to process their claims at a high accuracy, make sure that they're reflecting correct dollars, correct payment amount, and that this is getting done in a timely manner. When we don't meet these requirements customers or members can get irritated, and it just hurts their experience when they're going to the doctor's office. We really want to focus on improving their experience. One way that we do this is through guaranteeing high claims processing accuracy.

On the employer's side if we're not meeting this level, then we actually have to pay out a penalty to those employers. So it's really important for us to look at areas and do root cause analysis on where these errors are occurring, and reaching out to those internal departments whether it be an installation and billing, or product configuration, and reaching out to these areas and making sure that these errors are not occurring again and that they're being resolved temporarily and permanently. I work with a team of analysts, and we conduct these cause analyses. We present this data to a monthly performance guarantee governance. That meeting includes a lot of different stakeholders who play a role in making sure that our claims are getting processed correctly.

The second project that I'm working on is creating strategic plan for the Claims Department. Currently we've got all these different teams within claims that are working on different items. But we're all aiming to get to real time claims adjudication. What that means is that when you're in a doctor's office and you swipe your credit card, to have a claim be settled there and then, that you don't have to worry about getting bills at your home, having those claims readjusted and getting all these papers in the mail. We really want you to have a good experience as a patient. When you're going to the doctor's office, just swipe your card and you're done. That's a goal, but we've got different teams working on different things meeting towards that goal.

What I'm working on with my rotation leader is to create a strategic plan to create this overarching plan that is like a guidelines for all the different teams and aligning all of the work that they're doing, their objectives and their goals. That's what I'm working on in my first rotation.

I've had a really experience so far. Something that I've really enjoyed is really networking with different people across various different departments at different levels. It's been a lot of fun. I've gotten to meet with different analysts. I've gotten to meet with people from IT, from finance, from customer experience. Recently I even got to meet the VP of claims, which was such a great experience. Not a lot of people get to interact with her, so I thought that was really great.

Apart from the work that I'm doing, specifically my rotation, our program as well as Blue Shield offers us a variety of different activities that we can get involved in and participate in. One of the things that we have access to for the Shield Emerging Leaders Program is, our courses are leadership and management courses on Harvard Manage Mentor as well as Coursera. A lot of these course have been very helpful for me in my day to day work. I've taken class on strategic planning. I've taken one on project management. So it's been very helpful.

We've also got access to Employee Resource Groups, which are ... The way that I see it is they're like clubs. We've got like Women Lead to Excellence. We've also got Asian Pacific Employee Network. We've got something called ĄUnidos! We've got a variety of different employee resource groups that you can get involved in. We've also got book clubs and guest speakers. We also have a variety of volunteering events. Recently I went out to an open enrollment fair for CalPERS members. That was a lot of fun because not only was Blue Shield there but there were all these different health insurance companies. Kaiser, Anthem. It was really cool to be able to talk to some of our potential members and existing members, and really see and learn what's working for them and what's not.

Apart from those things, we also have a lot of social and networking events, which is really fun because we really get to know about the work that our peers are doing, what the other Shield Emerging Leaders are doing, and just get to know them and learn more about them and their work.

You might wonder how does what I'm doing relate to public health. As Paige and Nazli both mentioned, our mission, which is to ensure that all Californians have access to high quality health care at an affordable price. It's really at the heart of public health. I think that in public health, we're constantly striving to improve accessibility to make health care more affordable and to improve a quality of health care. That's something that Blue Shield really strives to do. We've done this through our partnerships with various different organizations and accountable care organization.

Through these partnerships, we've improved quality. We've reduced ER visits. We reduced hospital stays. We've had a huge amount of cost savings. Another way that what I'm doing relates to public health is, I guess, two of the rotations. Health care quality and affordability, which Nazli spoke about. There's also customer experience, really focused on the member and their experience at the doctor's office and their health. I think that's another way that what I'm doing relates to Public health.

The last thing I wanted to just share is how I think that MPH Program helped me. Some of the courses that I think really helped me are health service delivery, leadership and management, program design and evaluation as well as Biostats. I'm sure a lot of you guys are taking those classes now, or have taken up or planning to take up. Yes, even Biostats helps me my job. I analyze a lot of data. Not doing statistical test, but analyzing a lot of data. It helped me understand, given a dataset what's going on and what can be improved from that dataset. That was really helpful.

Then in addition to classes, I think being involved in MaPHSA ... I don't know if you guys are familiar with MaPHSA or involved in MaPHSA, that really helped me out. I think it helped me build on my leadership skills, and it really helped build on communicating effectively with a team and working with a team. That was super exciting and fun. If you guys are thinking about getting involved, I would highly recommend it. It was a lot of fun.

The last thing I just wanted to share that my Practicum experience at the LA County Department of Mental Health was a good way. I was in the health education and promotion track, but I was really interested in health service delivery. Doing my Practicum at the LA County Department of Mental Health and being involved in the quality improvement project really helped me shift gears, I guess, and get to learn a little bit more about something that I was interested in.

I worked with a team of healthcare consultants on a quality improvement project. We got to go to different mental health clinics in Los Angeles County area, and just sit down with a program administrators and learn about some of the areas of concern in their clinics that they see with their patients and really learn about some of the needs and preferences of the patient. I think that it was really helpful to me to shift my focus from health education and promotion to health service delivery. If you guys are currently in Practicum, or you're thinking about doing your Practicum soon, I would really recommend lot of bridging your experience to gain skills and knowledge that you think might be helpful for you in your future job.

Maybe if there's something you're trying to work on like analyzing data or team management or something, I would really recommend reaching out to a Practicum Coordinator and looking for those opportunities to just build on those skills. I know I talked really fast. But if you guys have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them. I really encourage you guys to apply for the program if you're interested. I'm sure Paige could give you more information on that.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Paige Lowery: I'm just going to touch briefly on another position that we are currently hiring for. We are currently hiring for Field Emerging Leader cohort number four. We are also hiring for summer internships. The summer internships at Blue Shield of California, we have a ten week paid internships, starts mid-June and wraps up around mid-August every year. Every year we bring in about 30 students most mix of first year undergrad, recently graduated, and also junior, senior from undergrad from all different types of backgrounds. We have actuaries, finance, computers science, public health, business administration, everything, and are also pretty evenly distributed across three of our main offices. We have San Francisco, El Dorado Hills Sacramento, and then down here Southern California Woodland Hills. Each of those offices takes a portion of our interns.

What you can expect in the summer? Our interns are busy. We put them to work. There is no getting coffee or standing in line for someone at a Blue Shield internship. You are put to work pretty much right away. For each of our 30 interns, we write a project based job description. You know exactly what you are coming in to this role to work on. A lot of these are created with knowing that it's a short term role. What's really rewarding about this is many of our interns get to see their project from start to finish within their 10 weeks.

You also, along with the Shield Emerging Leaders, have close access to a senior leadership. You're paired with mentors and a buddy in your departments. You also get a lot of health care education along the way. We don't require for any of our programs that you've worked in the health care industry before. The requirement is that you're interested in health care, and you're interested in building the plans for the future. That's the health care requirement.

Throughout that knowing that a lot of our individuals come in without a health care background. We give you the tools that you need. You go through a health Care one on one week where you learn about some of the work that's being done in Wellvolution, some of work that's being done in mobile app development in the IT computer space, as well as what all those acronyms means, what happens behind the scenes when one of our members goes to the doctor, how do we take care of that person. You get all of those skills built into a summer internship.

Instead of hearing me talk about the internship, I'm going to play a quick YouTube clip. We're going to hear from one of our 2017 interns, Hubert Sung, about his experience in Wellvolution.

Hubert Sung: I grew up in a Chinese American household. My mom introduced me to herbs. Asthma in high school. Mom was like, "I'll take you to a herbalist." The doctor just put some Chinese concoction together, took it for a week, my asthma's gone, and didn't come back for a couple of years.

There's so much potential for thinking about health not in terms of drugs but in terms of just changing your lifestyle. What I did at Blue Shield is I go into literature and I find out what the evidence is for lifestyle as medicine. We're not just preventing disease. We're actually helping treat disease with lifestyle changes. Things like changing your diet, reducing your stress, exercising more can actually treat disease.

What I'm passionate about is seeing people express themselves through body. This is a really unique art form because it's uninhibited figuring out new ways to express how I feel is what I love to do.

What Blue Shield is after is transforming our health care into something that is worthy of our family and friends. There's still a population of people really struggling. Their lack of access to health care really prevents them from being able to live out their life to the fullest. When I think about health care I want to provide for my mom, for my dad, being at Blue Shield specifically is allowing me to fill that gap. That's why I'm in it for the long run.

Paige Lowery: Hubert came in as an intern in 2017. He is now in a full-time role working in Wellvolution. [inaudible 00: 56: 25] back to ... Perfect.

One of the things is that we hold our highest standard for at Blue Shield of California is investing in our talent, in our early career talents, so you guys. For the internship program, we bring in 30 individuals. We invest in you. We get you some training. You work on a really wonderful projects throughout your time. We have a goal of converting 50 percent of our eligible interns into some full-time roles within the organization. What does it mean to be eligible for conversion? Someone that is graduated from their program and can step into a full-time role. We have even had a situation where one of our interns was ready to be off-boarded, couldn't accept a full-time role yet. A hiring manager did not want to let this person go. They worked out a part-time contracted situation until that individual could commit to something full-time.

We have goals across the organization on our leadership. All the way across organization it's very committed to retaining our interns, retaining our Shield Emerging Leaders. We look at these programs as investing in our next generation of leaders. That's the kind of exposure that you get. That's the kind of support that you get from myself and the program management team to make sure that if you see yourself growing beyond one of these programs at Blue Shield that you have the opportunities to do that.

Here are some of our interns and some of the things you get to do outside of a program. We also want you to have a bit of fun. There's some volunteer opportunities built in that we took everyone last year to a Giant's game. [inaudible 00: 58: 04] over the summer so we participate in our Pride events and some of our other community engagement events. That says it all.

Speaker 1: Thank you. I just want to say I didn't even have to use my timed minutes.

Paige Lowery: Good.

Speaker 1: You all stayed within time. I was like, "Wow." We're now going to move into our panel questions. I'll ask a question, and if there's a followup just raise your hand. Janet, let us know if any of our online students want to ask any questions. I think I really want to say thank you for coming and presenting. I really appreciated all the information.

Nazli, I'm terrified of getting diabetes. I don't have diabetes. However, I'm doing the diabetes prevention program here at our occupational office. USC offers it. I think it's like $5 per session. I just want to say I'm in my sixth month. I'm starting my monthly visit. It's not because I have diabetes. It's because I wanted to learn how to live a healthy lifestyle. I know I went to public health but I ended up being the epidemiologist by training. So I didn't get all the tricks of public health, health promotion like how to live a healthy lifestyle. I got more of a statistics and methods. I want to say it's a great program. I encourage all the students to ask at the Eric Cohen to see if they have it for you. You learn so much.

I also wanted to say thank you so much Surabhi. It was great to hear your leadership, your classes, how that's impacting you. From Paige, I love to hear the goal that you convert 50 percent of your interns into a full time position. It's a win-win situation. You get paid during the internship, and that can convert into a full-time position. I think it's a great opportunity.

Now let me start the panel. I want to say thank you. I really appreciated that. Here are some questions. Then you could decide which question you can answer. But my first question is we heard that there's two positions, the summer interns and the Shield Leadership. Are there any others that are entry level for our MPH students or our masters of science students ... or I know we have some Ph. D.s in the audience. Any other titles that you recommend they look into?

Paige Lowery: Sure. For our internship, we take all academic levels. We also take all backgrounds. If someone's in masters of science, if they're in epidemiology, we have those opportunities in all of our departments. Same with Shield Emerging Leaders. We focus on MBAs and MPH and Healthcare Administration. But in this past cohort, for example, we have wide variety. There's some public policy. We have a nurse. Those degrees are not limited. It's just typically what our cohorts consist of. But if you are of a different academic backgrounds and one of those programs interest you, I still encourage you to apply for that.

Across Blue Shield in general, I think right now we have over 200 open positions that we're looking to fill across our entire organization in those five business units. The best way to orient yourself, if you will, with the careers we have open because there are so many, visit our careers website, www.blueshieldca.com/careers, and just play around in there a little bit. See what's available. Familiarized yourself with how our job descriptions are written, see what's common thread in some of the positions that you're looking for.

I would say if you are looking for a full-time not necessarily in the program, you want to look for some of those program manager level roles that typically tend to be a bit more entry level on there, a lot of our public health students and health care minded students really find that they're most interested in the Wellvolution and the health care quality and affordability. It's a good place to start on our website. Just type in health care quality and affordability, and see what's out there from a public health standpoint.

I know we have so many open positions that it's a little daunting. I'm going to say either connect with me after, or probably can go ahead and send my direct email. If you have questions about any of our open [inaudible 01: 03: 31] or any of our programs, just shoot me an email and tell me what you're looking at. Then we could have a conversation over if it's the right fit for you. I can connect you to some other recruiters who directly recruit for those positions. The first step would be just get into that careers website and start looking around and seeing what peaks your interest.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Any followups with that? No? Okay. All right. I'm just going to go to Wellvolution. If a student wants to work with Wellvolution, they want to apply directly there, what should they highlight in their resume? What are those skills, those accomplishments that you must have in your resume ... or maybe they're in the first semester and they're like, "Okay. What are the things I need to do so that when I graduate I can be well qualified for Wellvolution?

Nazli Ghamarifa: This is loud. I'll keep it here. Our department, we're made up of 15 people. We all have different backgrounds. Some of us are focused on sales and marketing of our Wellvolution programs. Some of us are focused on analyzing our wellness programs. Some of us do the research. Hubert is a lot of the research and make sure there's evidence behind any service that we provide. Then there's some of us that do program planning and implementation. There's lot of things that I do. There's a little bit of everything in the department.

Our department is pretty awesome. It's really hard to get rid of the people in our department because they really love what they do, and we love what we do. My background is community health education. As part of that it was just doing needs assessment, analyze what are the health issues, focus on those health issues, what does your population look like, how do they learn, create the program based on that. We work a lot with vendors. Some contracting background. That's something that we can train on site as well if someone doesn't have that background. But it's really just knowing how to do the research and how to plan program, and how to evaluate a program. I think that gets you through a lot of that. In my master's program, one of my classes was all about communication and promotion. I do the promotion for our own employees. I'm glad that I had that education and the background as well.

As soon as I see a MPH, I get excited because I know that MPH students have the education to be part of our program. Now Wellvolution is not the only department that accepts MPHs, has MPH students. We have MPH students all throughout the Healthcare Quality and Affordability Department. Our Quality Department has MPH background. We have the disease management case, what we call medical care solutions. They do disease management, health care management, health coaching. I think there are a lot of opportunities. It's just going to our careers page again to see what is available now to be able to apply for those. But I think that MPH alone for me when I see that on the resume, I'm like thumbs up. I know what kind of training you have.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much. All right. This question. I think I want to ask Surabhi because you said you analyze data but you don't run statistical test. What are some of the analyses you conduct so that our students pay attention in class.

Surabhi Narain: I mostly work with Excel. This is really loud. I mostly work with Excel. I don't use SPSS or all these different programs in stats and what not. I use Excel, and given a big dataset on these different errors and where they occurred, the departments that they occurred ... This excel sheet is huge. It's got 500 lines and it goes to double letters all the way down.

Looking at this big data sheet, really being able to pick up and think about what are some things that your audience might want to know about these errors, and where they occur, and who's responsible for them. Not just being able to present data that ... It's just showing something but it has to have a purpose. Think about when you're presenting data that it's not for the sake of just showing data. It's going to drive a decision or it's going to drive some action in some department or in some form or other. I think in that sense I think Biostats showed me how to just look at data and just pick out what's important and be able to put that in the visual form and show an audience.

I know a lot of Biostats focuses on conducting two table T-test and what not. I think that's important if you're really choosing to go into that field. But I think in general most public health jobs are ... when you're looking for a job outside of, after your MPH will require some form of basic data analysis. I think that a lot of times it's just being able to look at the data and present it in a presentable form, not someone just conducting those tests and what not.

Speaker 1: I think for those who just started the semester and went to our orientation, you all heard about the sleepy data. How many of you remember that? We had a professor talk about how we have sleepy data. A lot of organizations have sleepy data, and how we need to learn how to wake up that data and how to tell the story. This lines up exactly what you just said. I think it's important to ensure that when you're looking at data, it's for a purpose. What is that story that's going to tell?

Moving forward, I really appreciate you talking about the different aspects of MPH. Are any MS students here? One MS student. You have a question? Just want to make sure that we don't leave you out of the questions. If not, that's okay. No questions. Okay.

I'll ask a questions, then, for MS students. As our MS students focus on writing a thesis and taking variety of the Biostats and Epi classes, and they don't have Practicum but they do have a lot of experience with research data. They analyze it. They write a paper. What would be something that they do beyond what's in the classroom so that they can be a good fit for Blue Shield?

Surabhi Narain: [inaudible 01: 11: 36] Paige, or Nazli, do you want to take it?

Nazli Ghamarifa: I think we all have to start somewhere, right? We all have to have that first job. When I was at a MPH school, it took a little bit of time for me to find that first job because I was just always focused on the academics. But you've got to start somewhere. I think there's always organizations. Even we did. I hired someone with a bachelor's in public health. Because there's opportunities to train and learn in the company as long as you have just the background. The fact that you said that they've done the research, they've written papers, I think shows that you have some experience.

But we hire at different levels. We hired the bachelor's in public health as a coordinator. Then she's got opportunities to grow within the company and get promotions within the company. I think there are opportunities at any level. If you don't have that experience, I think there are people who are open to hiring you on and training you on-site as well. Does that answer your question? Do you want to add anything else?

Surabhi Narain: I just want to add one thing. I think that a lot of times having transferable skills is also very useful, or I guess they call it translatable skills. I don't know. One of the two. But in that case that person is probably good at writing and they can probably communicate really well. They probably have good written communication. I think that being able to take what you've already done and look for common skills that might come out of it and use that in your resume or when you're looking for a job and applying to jobs.

I just wanted to touch on one thing. I saw one of the questions that you had sent us, and it was talking about is being in public health too broad of a thing for a position at Blue Shield? I think actually it's probably a good thing to have all those different skills, to have knowledge across various different functionalities. I think that's actually probably serves to your advantage. There are so many extractable skills from everything that you do in whatever jobs that you're currently doing, your Practicum. So just highlighting those areas, I think, would be helpful.

Paige Lowery: To build on since I look at a ton of resumes for not only our programs, but for across the board for the university talent that we see, I think if someone's coming in with the really heavy data research background, I think one important skill to build on, if possible, is the business acumen side. Knowing that in the corporate world that you know that the data and the writing and the research that you're putting in is driving decisions. Being able to translate that into the business acumen piece. How do you communicate what the data's telling you to a VP or a CEO and when that's going to drive the decision, and then kinds of risk associated with that. That would be one thing.

For a lot of MPHs that are not looking to necessarily go that public health route in Wellvolution, is I say get involved in some business courses, if you can, because being able to navigate the business world is not something a lot of public health students spend a lot of time building. That's really important to know the connecting between the data and our programs, and what we're building and how that's relating to our corporate strategy, how we're communicating that and how we're telling the story of the data that we're collecting and the programs that we're doing up to the VPs who are making our business decisions.

Speaker 1: That was a great answer, all three of you adding to that contribution. That's exactly where this question, I think, was leading to. Am I at advantage or am I at disadvantage? I think for all our students here, you've made a decision. Your degree is going to take as far as you allow your degree to go, so that being learning how to put your current skills in the MS program or the MPH program on the resume, how to ensure that they're transferable, how to ensure that you can speak a different language such as business. All of these are really important. I hope that you're all paying attention how you can work in an organization such as Blue Shield.

I think that Blue Shield is not unique in talking about how their organization ... even non profits do have a business focus and a goal. Because if we don't have money, we can't do public health programs. We can't help people take the diabetes program. We can't help people learn that, "Hey. If you get your calm app to do meditation, that could help you with your health, and perhaps help you with your pain management." Yes, I do have the calm app. Sorry.

Paige Lowery: Good.

Speaker 1: USC, all of you, have access to the calm app for free if you enroll with your USC email. You can start meditating and feel better.

Surabhi Narain: I was just going to say I have the app as well. USC students have access to the app. Just a total random things.

Speaker 1: Okay. Where are we at? We have few more minutes on the panel. I know that there was some brief conversation about communication. USC has one of the top health communication schools in the nation and our students to get to take some classes at the Annenberg School of Communication. Communication's important. How can our students who are health com utilize communication at Blue Shield?

Paige Lowery: Sure. I'll start off just with from the recruiting hiring standpoint. One of the things that we look for is communication ability across all levels of an organization. At Blue Shield, you are typically ... none of our roles are in silos. You're commuting up down and sideways. We really look for someone who has a communication skills or being able to talk to their peers, maybe being able to talk to their direct reports, but also have skills to go to VP or CEO and communicate effectively at those levels.

Also, a lot of the roles if you're dealing with work that's like our customer experience or health care quality and affordability and you're communicating things directly to our members, that's a whole different kind of skillset of how you communicate the language of health care, and what we're doing and why these programs are helpful to an audience that probably doesn't really know all the ins and outs of health care and the acronyms and all of that.

One of things I look for when I recruit for Shield Emerging Leaders and summer internships is if someone has been in a role where they can demonstrate that they have communicated verbally and in writing to all different audiences across levels within the organization as well as having the ability to explain complex problems and complex situations to someone who is more of a novice.

Nazli Ghamarifa: I would just add, if you have examples of other than writing skills ... but I do more for marketing and trying to recruit members or engage members in the Wellvolution programs. If you have examples of any marketing or communication pieces whether it was through social media or through email, if you can bring that to an interview, that would be good for you as well.

Surabhi Narain: I just wanted to add. Paige brought something up that's super important, is being able to communicate complex things to an audience that might not have an understanding of all these random health care terms and all that complexity.

If you guys have an opportunity to work with members of your community, I think that's really great too because that really shows that you're able to take a complex health issue, maybe such as diabetes or heart disease, and being able to talk to an audience. I think that's something that helped me do this is through the American Heart Association where I've worked with members in the community and took blood pressure measurements, and just explain to them what goes on in the simplest form of terms. I think that also is super important especially for any customer experience or health care quality and affordability, and you were often working with members who might not have all that knowledge and information that you do.

Speaker 1: Any questions, Janet? No? Aaron?

Aaron: I have a question. Nothing against the health promotion or communication track. But I myself am on Bio-Epi. I get it, we're all MPH and I can play at that aspect. But is Blue Shield a company that would have opprtunities for those of us who are involved in research. You spoke about Doctor Dean Ornish. That's very stimulating to me. Or something with more data analysis side. Do you guys have opportunities such as those, and if you can spell that out a little bit more clearly for me, that would be great.

Paige Lowery: Yes. I'll start and I'll pass it off Nazli. Just from a company-wide perspective, there's a ton of research and data work that goes on whether it not be driving community based programs that we have. We have as a health care company and health care industry there's a lot of data out there. But it doesn't tell us anything yet. So we need folks that are very data minded that can look at a dataset whether it be from programs that we're rolling out or whether it be-… (recording ended due to power shortage).