Michelle Allen of Premier: 5 Things We Must Do To Improve the US Healthcare System

As a part of my interview series with leaders in healthcare, I had the pleasure to interview Michelle Allen.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’ve been fascinated with healthcare my entire life. As a young child I wanted to be a doctor, but that interest evolved into biomedical engineering in high school and college because comparing the human body to mechanical and chemical systems just clicked for me. I started my career in diagnostic system design but was quickly drawn to the software aspects of these systems and ended up working on early interoperability projects with lab information systems. The presentation of data to support clinical workflow and influence provider decisions for better patient outcomes has kept me constantly challenged across the past 20 years.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

I’ve always been driven in my work in healthcare technology by the potential to have an impact on patient care and the transformation of the way healthcare is delivered. I could not be more impressed or proud of the team I lead now and their recent response to the COVID pandemic.

My clinical surveillance and analytics teams went into overdrive as reports of COVID began in U.S. health systems. These teams worked around the clock to rapidly develop and deploy to our infection prevention users a number of custom COVID response tools. The analytics team developed interactive COVID dashboards that pulled information in real-time on the lab testing and census burden for organizations.

This was the first time for many people on my team where their professional and personal worlds collided, and they realized the importance of real time actionable data for our health systems and how that directly correlated to their quality of life. And they did this while working remotely and navigating the unique circumstances the pandemic created for everyone.

Full Q&A