2:00–3:00 p.m. | PANEL: Key Military Leaders MHS Overview (1 Qualified Credit)
Lauren Byrd is a healthcare executive with over two decades of diverse federal health experience leading large-scale finance, human resource, managed care, operations, and care delivery teams to deliver health value to large populations. She has successfully led transformational, complex, multi-million-dollar projects with adept management of resources to yield high return on investment. She is an experienced leader in designing value-based care solutions to promote health equity in underserved areas, principally in federally qualified healthcare centers and minority populations. Most recently, she served as the Chief Operating Officer at Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center, with responsibility for outlying primary care and occupational health clinics across San Antonio, Texas serving 68,000 beneficiaries.
Prior to that, she served as the Executive Director of Ross Clinic in San Angelo, Texas where she directed all aspects of healthcare delivery enabling the Department of Defense’s sole firefighter academy and initial joint-service intelligence and crypto- linguist training mission through a community-based healthcare system for 25,000 beneficiaries. Her experience has ranged from overseeing healthcare services for humanitarian civilian assistance in Africa and South America to combat tours in southwest Asia to her current role as a senior executive.
Lauren earned an MS in healthcare transformation from The University of Texas at Austin, an MS in national security studies from U.S. Air Force Air War College, an MBA from The University of Phoenix and a BBA in Economics from Baylor University. She is board certified in healthcare management and is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE). She is passionate about promoting integrated and sustainable solutions to produce better health outcomes and wellbeing by addressing the social determinants of health that disproportionately impact communities of color.