By Ating Enwongo – Nigerian-born Dr. Stella Onuoha-Obilor has been recognized in the United States of America as belonging to the “Top 10 Emerging Women Leaders of 2021.”
The award was conferred on her in recognition of her contributions to the health industry and welfare of communities in the United States in 2021.
The award is powered by the Industry Era Women Leaders and IEra Women Leaders Magazine based in New York.
The organization highlights leading visionary women leaders who change industries by leading and implementing state-of-the-art business solutions to accelerate growth, making their companies the world’s most valuable brands.
Dr Obilor is the Vice President of Highmark Health firms which provide a wide range of vital health-related services, such as health insurance, health care delivery, population health management, dentistry solutions, reinsurance solutions, and cutting-edge technology.
As Vice President of Clinical Quality and Medical Policy, she is responsible for the Health Plan’s Clinical Quality and Medical Policy. She is in charge of creating and implementing a hybrid clinical quality strategy that includes both structural and virtual integration models. Her goal, in collaboration with the clinical leadership team, is to reduce abuse and overuse while boosting underuse, all while improving the value-based member/patient/provider experience.
Leading a team of dedicated personnel, Dr. Obilor has preoccupied herself with the quadruple objectives of finding, standardizing, tracking, and improving quality outcome measurements such as provider satisfaction and demonstrating value improvement.
She is in charge of leading Health Plan quality operations as well as developing the Health Plan’s quality improvement function and capability in collaboration with the Operational Effectiveness team and the government Stars leaders to ensure that all quality programs are effectively connected and aligned.
She is also in charge of developing, maintaining, revising, and enforcing business medical policies for all goods in conformity with regulatory standards.
The award also acknowledged Highmark Health’s vision of a world where everyone enjoys quality health services and a corporate behavior which puts the client first and “places the customer at the center of everything the company does.”
As all real leaders do, Dr. Obilor dedicated the award to her team. “ I dedicate this recognition to my Clinical Quality & Medical Policy champions, all the leaders, and team members at Highmark Health doing their best work in creating remarkable health experience for the communities and members we serve!!! “
Highmark Health also launched a wholly owned subsidiary under Larry Kleinman’s leadership to assist businesses in achieving large-scale transformation using digital tools, process improvement, and agile approaches to streamline and automate work that is highly manual, repetitive, time-consuming, and introduces unnecessary errors.
On-site and virtual ideation solutions to engage employees and gather ideas; readiness and adoption techniques to support change management; and employee outreach to establish a community mindset around transformation are some of the services offered.
Dr. Obilor was also quoted as saying that “My passion for improving numbers stems from the fact that every data point in the healthcare industry has a human narrative behind it. Numbers are not just numbers for me. People’s spouses, siblings, friends, and relatives make up this group.
“Throughout the pandemic, Highmark Health has worked with many partners on several vaccination events serving minority and vulnerable populations across Pennsylvania. To date, Highmark and AHN have worked together to administer nearly 400,000 vaccine doses.