As a consultant for the Advisory Board Company, my first assignment was to spend six months at UHA as its Interim Executive Director. I was tasked with leading the medical foundation, developing the team, conducting benchmarking and developing strategy. When we presented our vision and strategy to the UHA Board of Directors, they were so supportive of our recommendations, it made me want to work here. I was so impressed with the collaboration and commitment that exists between the Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford Health Care and UHA. It’s wonderful to be part of an organization that is so committed to innovation and doing things to improve patient outcomes and the patient experience.

We are working on five strategic areas of focus for UHA: access, partnership, lower cost structure, population health and research and education.

Through our community-based providers and the IPA, we have the capacity to care for thousands of patients and last year we provided over one million patient visits. Our footprint in the east bay, south bay and the peninsula provides a convenient alternative for many patients, and decompresses the burden on our faculty clinics where access remains a challenge.

We are always looking to collaborate and create alliances with managed care plans, accountable care organizations, payers and employers to be able to deliver care in the community. Most recently, Stanford became the medical provider for 5,300 Google employees.

While Stanford Health Care is aggressively working to lower its cost, UHA has a head start operating at a lower cost in a clinical environment. Our cost structure allows us to be competitive in the marketplace and helps us provide a large network of care. When patients do need tertiary or quaternary care, we can get them into the system of phenomenal world-class medical care that Stanford provides.

UHA has a number of initiatives to improve population health and quality. As we gain experience working in population health management, we become critical to the vitality of Stanford’s Senior Advantage and Alliance plans, and to its goal of delivering precision health.

UHA providers also conduct research and have clinical trials in oncology and cardiology. And our south bay clinics actively educate residents.

We want to continue to optimize our current delivery model and services and improve clinic operations and provider productivity. Our goal is to ensure a consistent patient experience across all our locations.

We are also working to better integrate our care delivery model with services provided by Stanford faculty. And we are looking to add imaging and ambulatory surgery to our network of care.

I’m fascinated by the numerous plants and flowers that grow here, and I love the microclimates. I also love the diversity here—the diversity of thought, the diversity of opinion, the diversity of background. It provides such a richness of culture.