An Interview with Anita Vila-Parrish on Healthcare Analytics

I had the opportunity this week to conduct a recorded interview with Dr. Anita Vila-Parrish, who is currently working at McKesson.   In the interview, we covered a variety of topics, including her extensive work in the field of healthcare analytics.  Dr. Vila-Parrish has had a remarkable career, beginning with an Industrial Engineering degree from Texas A&M, an MBA from Duke, and a PhD in Industrial Engineering from NC State.  She has worked as a product development manager at Dell, as a consultant in the Bay area on process improvements, an analyst at Gartner, and is now working as a Portfolio Strategy Director at McKesson.  Anita also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Industrial Engineering department at NC State.

With this incredible background, Dr. Vila-Parrish has certainly covered a wide breadth of activities in the supply chain.  In the interview, we discuss some of the interesting approaches that hospitals must learn to adopt as they use analytics to drive improvements in their processes.  This is an area that is also covered in my healthcare analytics class this semester, and many of the ideas she shared in this video are being driven in practice as our MBA students work on projects with the American Red Cross as well as workin with SCWorx on several categories of hospital spending in a variety of hospitals across the US.

Dr. Vila-Parrish also had some great insights to share on work-life balance, and provided some fantastic views for women in the supply chain, mirroring many of the insights derived from our forum on this subject held at NC State a few weeks ago.