Four Questions with our New Executive Director
We are just weeks into her tenure as the Executive Director, however Denise Giambalvo comes to the role with more than three years experience in leadership at the Washington Health Alliance.
Denise answers four questions looking back at her time with WHA and giving an idea of where our multistakeholder collaborative is headed.
What has changed since you came aboard the Alliance?
Over the past 3 years, the WHA has shifted to be more action oriented in driving system change. Through our collaborative convenings, whether they are workgroups or an education forum, best practices to address gaps or opportunities for improvement and savings are identified with clear pathways for execution.
What’s been the most satisfying part of the job? What do you want to see continue?
The people I work with! I have always enjoyed making connections. Those connections can be between systems, internal silos, or individual people, where bringing them together creates an opportunity for creative problem solving and synergy. I suspect that will always be most satisfying to me, and I believe to be the best way for me to lead WHA in driving system change.
How has listening to members informed change at the Alliance?
Listening is such an important part of what we do. Providing a place for our members to discuss their priorities and barriers to achieving them has opened the door for greater collaboration, more education programs, and stronger connections across stakeholders to collectively drive change through problem solving.
Where do you see the Alliance in five years?
I see our current preliminary discussions to add clinical data to our database to come to fruition, opening the door, as an example, for standard quality metrics to be used for value-based contracting which would permit us to measure the aggregate impact a value-based approach has on the health of the population in Washington.
To learn a bit more about Denise, we give a brief overview of her career in our announcement in May.