Speaker 0: This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare podcast, and we are live at the CEO and CFO roundtable. I'm joined right now by Rhonda Bagby, who is the head of finance and business strategy at Yale Health at Yale University. Rhonda, thank you for being here. We'd love to have you start off by introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about your background.

Speaker 1: Okay. Good morning, Grace, and thank you for inviting me to participate in the podcast this morning. As Grace stated, I'm Rhonda Bagby, head of finance and business strategy for Yale Health at Yale University. I have been a healthcare executive for over 25 years, spending most of my career working with publicly traded companies, but also spending some time with private equity backed companies as well. I have been with Yale for only a few months now.

So I'm still relatively new in my role and learning, much about the organization. One of the main, factors that, Yale found attractive about me for the role in which I'm currently serving is my extensive background in the payer environment. So I'm bringing a lot of that thinking to, the university.

Speaker 0: Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And let's start our conversation talking about your growth strategy over the next year or 2.

Speaker 1: So my growth strategy over the next year or 2 involves learning a lot about the university and, continuing to build strong relationships with key business partners across the university. In addition to that, for the business units that I manage at the university, helping to modernize, some of the business office functions and connect some of the fragmented activities across the organization. That is a priority area for me for growth. The more we can improve the member experience, the more we can understand about our members and our patients that we see at our organization, the more effective we can be in attracting new members and also retaining our existing members.

Speaker 0: And I'd love you to tell us about the most exciting and impact of initiative or project that you're working on right now.

Speaker 1: The most impactful initiative I've been working on is really understanding our cost of care. So, my team and I have, conducted a lot of work around understanding both our internal cost of care related to the health care the piece of health care that we employ as a staff model HMO, but also our external cost of care. So with that, we have, learned a lot about our unit cost, our utilization patterns, and we're working across the organization with internal partners, as well as with external partners to optimize that cost of care. In the long run, we know that care has to be kept affordable and we need to find areas of inefficiency and opportunity. So we are working, very much in that area to improve our cost.

Speaker 0: And rounding out our conversation, I'd love to know what you think the most important thing health care executives should do now to make sure their organizations are successful in the future.

Speaker 1: Understanding the customer is the most important thing health care organizations can do. And this means giving the customer an opportunity to have a voice, really hearing what the customer wants, where the customer sees value, and then tweaking business strategies to meet those needs. Because at the end of the day, all of us are in the healthcare space as leaders because of our customers, whether they're members in the payer environment or they're patients in the direct care environment. And through better understanding, their wants and needs, we can be more effective as organizations and have a longer, pathway ahead of us.

Speaker 0: Wonderful. Well, Rhonda, thank you for taking the time to join me today on the Becker's healthcare podcast. Again, we are live at the CEO and CFO roundtable.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for inviting me.