Putting the teacher hat back on

Public school teachers branch through my family tree as far back as I can see: my dad, both his parents, their parents, my siblings. Many people have told me over the years they're surprised I didn't end up in a classroom.

Maybe I did, just in a different one.

For almost 20 years at Kelly Benefits, the days I felt best about my work were the ones where I helped someone learn or grow. In the early years, they were the days I helped an employee actually understand their benefits options. As a consultant, they were the days when I helped an employer make sense of moving from fully insured to self-funded or unpack the value of captive reinsurance or better negotiate an Rx contract. As a leader, the best days were helping a colleague grow in their career or learn a skill that would help them better assist our clients and their employees.

That spirit of teaching, translating and making the complex simple, is what drew me to my next chapter:

I've joined Handl Health as Senior Vice President of Employer Solutions to help employers and their brokers better understand the potential and power of the billions of rows of new data we have access to.

Many are calling this the “next generation” of healthcare analytics, which others are saying is the foundation for the “next generation” of plan design. All that sounds aspirational, but I too believe it is true. However, for brokers and employers to realize these benefits, they need better tools to unlock the machine readable file data and they need an education on how to meaningfully apply the data to their benefits strategy.

Working with the brilliant engineers and visionaries at Handl Health, utilizing their incredible technology, I am thrilled to be putting the teacher hat back on, to help brokers, employers and their employees embrace this next generation of employee benefits!

PS. With all this talk of teaching, I can’t forget to give thanks to the teachers within our industry that I've had along the way, John Kelly, Sandy Walters, Jamie Danner, Jason Danner, Larry Devitt, Dan Carpenter, Nathan White, Joey Dizenhouse, FSA, MAAA, Dan Ringer to name a few. I am also grateful beyond words to the Kelly family and the broader Kelly Benefits family (a family that I have come to consider my own family). Some of my colleagues there I've known since my early 20s. I'm thankful to say I'm still working alongside them in our industry, just from a different seat at the table.