Julie Panek – Blue Shield of CA Julie Panek is the Senior Manager of the ACO Program Development and Innovation team at Blue Shield of California, a 3.3 million member not-for-profit health plan that serves the commercial, individual and government markets in California.
Prior to joining Blue Shield, Julie managed process improvement work for Stanford Hospital, where she gained proficiency in Lean/Six Sigma project methodologies while leading Lean process improvement projects across the health system. She began her healthcare career nearly 10 years ago in hospital financial consulting, leading project teams through engagements with academic and multi-facility medical centers in California and Oregon.
Julie received a Masters degree in Public Health from Johns Hopkins (concentrating in Health Systems and Policy with a certificate in Finance and Management) where she conducted independent graduate research to analyze healthcare resource utilization for critical care patients. Through this research, she discovered a “new” concept called an “Accountable Care Organization” and proposed that it should be leveraged as a potential solution to the disjointed and costly healthcare system she had encountered during her analysis. Julie’s findings were transitioned to her fellow researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and eventually selected for presentation at the 2012 American Thoracic Society International Conference and published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society in 2015.