Centene’s Chief Customer Experience Officer Anika Gardenhire on health equity

Anika Gardenhire recently took on the role of chief customer experience officer at Centene Corporation, a St. Louis-based managed care company. Her background as a cardiology recovery nurse and Centene’s chief digital officer will help her act as a “caregiver” for the voices of Centene’s more than 26 million members and ensure that their perspectives are incorporated into Centene’s work, she told Healthcare Brew.

Gardenhire sat down with us to discuss health equity and the goals she’d like to accomplish as chief customer experience officer.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does a chief customer experience officer do?

The chief customer experience officer role is really about ensuring that our members and ultimately those who support our members—so our government regulatory partners, our brokers, our providers, and also our employees—are all having their voices show up in the way that we work. That work includes getting an understanding of what our customers really want.

What are some ways that you try to understand what Centene customers want?

What I think is some of the most interesting research that we do is what I would consider more of the ethnographic research where we’re spending time with our members. We’re doing things like ride-alongs or bringing members who are in a specific geography in for focus groups and really understanding their needs and their voices from that perspective.

How does health equity play into your role?

I think health equity bleeds through the fabric of the organization. When we think about health equity, we’re thinking about everything from how do we use data to actually really identify our members so that we can understand what things might be specific and most appropriate for our population to how are we thinking about the way that we design our services? How do we actually measure health equity—are we building the right assessments, those types of things? [Sarah London], our CEO, has talked about how do we really ensure that we’re actually assessing for those drivers of health, which are what people call social determinant needs.

How do your previous jobs, including being a cardiology recovery nurse and Centene’s chief digital officer, influence how you approach your new role?

I consider myself a caregiver. When Sarah and I were talking about this position, one of the things that she said is that that desire to be a caregiver and having had an opportunity to view the healthcare system sort of writ large from several different vantage points gives me perspective that I definitely bring into the role. It’s also having the benefit of understanding a clinic workflow. Having the experience of being in a cardiac recovery room and understanding what it’s like to try and find a place to discharge a patient—all the things I think are experiences that I bring with me and that work and make me really excited about that culmination of trying to support being that voice of our members.

What are some of your goals as chief customer experience officer?

If there were two things that I would say I’m highly focused on as we go into this work, I'd say one would be the data. How are we using discrete data and fake data to ensure that we’re really capturing the voice because we are representing voices that are oftentimes underheard. So making sure that we’re actually doing the research to make sure that we are not bringing notional information forward, but that we’re bringing research-driven, clear mechanisms for how we capture and represent that voice.

And then the other is how we truly orient ourselves as an enterprise around our customer base and what that really means to what we need to transform as an enterprise to drive us forward.

What are the unheard voices that Centene represents?

Our populations are made up of Medicaid, Medicare, and marketplace. But oftentimes, we are serving vulnerable populations. Whether those are populations who are closer to the poverty line and have socioeconomic challenges, or whether those are deeply acute and chronic populations, we’re often serving voices who—whether it’s how technology is developed, or even historically, how buildings were built—are often underserved. We’re really trying to make sure that we are being responsible in how we capture and understand those voices, and how we amplify them.