Her Story
About Shyloe
My journey in healthcare has always been driven by a passion for making the healthcare system work better for patients. I earned my master's in public health from George Washington University, focusing on health policy and specifically on the patient experience - how to make navigating the healthcare system as efficient, meaningful, and effective as possible. I started my policy career doing research with Medicaid, thinking about low-income populations and how to achieve more effective enrollment and expand eligibility. After graduating, I spent three years at the Business Group on Health, a membership organization for large employers, where I learned about the commercial side of healthcare - the half of the system we don't talk about in grad school, where people get insurance and benefits through their jobs. I did a lot of convening there, bringing together large employers, health plans, and industry partners in multi-stakeholder committees to tackle these issues. I then moved to Families USA as Senior Manager of Health Equity, getting closer to grassroots health policy work. There I managed grants and funds for health equity work and convened state-level advocates, making sure they were properly equipped to help people in their own states on healthcare issues. After a little over a year, I came full circle to my current role at Willis Towers Watson, where I've been for nearly four years. I'm on our client service team in the large market practice, doing overall plan management - helping clients set insurance rates, vetting solutions and vendors, and using the tools I learned at Families and GW to keep the lens on promoting health equity and making sure the overall benefit strategy is efficient, equitable, accessible, and makes sense for the person who needs to access the care.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Shyloe
01What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think a lot about the fact that people who are interested in healthcare and health policy tend to go into public health, but then you have these other rooms on the commercial side of things, and it sometimes feels like we're all having the same conversations in different rooms. I think a huge problem within healthcare in the U.S. is everything is so incredibly disjointed, and there's too many cooks in the kitchen. The process and pathway of getting to the care you need when you need it is so very convoluted. And on top of that, it's compounded by race, by socioeconomic status, by gender, by location. Just like we talk about food deserts, there is a huge problem with rural hospitals closing, and you can live in an area where there's no primary care providers for miles and miles. There's no easy way to solve these problems. We try and get at these issues from so many different vantage points, and the problem is we just compound the problems, because you can solve it in one way, in one scenario, but it's not applicable across the entire system. How do we even create solutions that work for everyone? Is that even possible within the system that we currently have set up? And I haven't even mentioned pharmacy, which is a whole other can of worms, which is so opaque because of the vast amount of money that's in that segment of the industry alone. It's so hard to wrap your arms around the very numerous issues as it pertains to healthcare, elder care, childcare, maternal care, chronic disease, acute disease, cancer.
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