Monica Perkins

About Monica Perkins

The biggest risk in AI isn\'t failing to adopt it; it\'s adopting it poorly. Organizations invest in powerful tools and then deploy them without proper calibration, validation, or workflow integration. The result is often worse than doing nothing: decisions made with false confidence, models trusted without understanding their limitations, and technology that creates new problems while claiming to solve old ones.This is the problem I\'ve spent 16 years solving- working at the intersection of AI, healthcare data, and operations and building enterprise capabilities that didn\'t exist before I arrived. My PhD applied machine learning to healthcare outcomes. My career has been spent ensuring that when organizations deploy advanced analytics, the tools are properly calibrated, the integration is sound, and the people using them understand what the outputs actually mean.At Centene, I created the organization\'s first provider quality designation program now evaluating 210K+ providers across 2M+ members with a 15:1 ROI. I led AI model evaluations for value-based care platforms and worked with my team to integrate clinical quality measures into Medicaid VBC models across 6M members in under six months to meet a government mandate.Before Centene, I directed real-world evidence research at Avalere Health and led integration of EHR and claims assets into the largest longitudinal real-world data resource in healthcare (379M patients, 80B+ medical events). At UnitedHealthcare, I spent nine years building oncology analytics from the ground up: creating the industry\'s first payer cancer registry, leading research for the first bundled oncology payment model ($33M in pilot savings) and advising CMS in the development of their Oncology Care Model.The common thread: I don\'t build models that sit in a slide deck, and I don\'t let them get deployed without rigor. The gap between what AI can do and what organizations actually do well with it is where I operate and that gap has never been wider or more consequential than it is right now.PhD, Medical Informatics — Machine Learning & AI in Healthcare (University of Utah)| Executive MBA \'26 (Kellogg, Northwestern)| BS Health Information Management (Saint Louis University)

Experience

1. Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives

   Centene Corporation

   Sep 2018 — Present

   Enterprise strategy leader building first-of-kind analytics capabilities for the nation’s largest Medicaid MCO. Report to corporate CMOs and network executives; present to state health plan presidents, CFOs, COOs, and CMOs across 20+ states for Medicare and Medicaid.• Created Centene’s first provider designation program with multi-million-dollar annual budget and 15:1 ROI. Evaluates quality and efficiency of care across 210K+ providers serving 2M+ members; industry-first program calibrated for Medicaid and behavioral health providers.• Lead enterprise cross-functional team spanning clinical, network, IT, risk adjustment, quality, finance, legal, marketing, regulatory, and compliance. Navigate relationships with external stakeholders including state provider associations, national quality organizations, and government regulators.• Led integration of clinical quality measures into Medicaid VBC models in <6 months to meet government mandate impacting 6M members. Created relationship between Centene and the Core Quality Measures Collaborative to align strategy with other payers and government entities.• Lead AI model evaluations for integration into Centene’s value-based care platform, delivering insights for provider contracts covering 7.2M members.• Created and lead five enterprise advisory boards spanning clinical, analytics, risk adjustment, payment innovation, and quality to advance strategic initiatives cross-functionally.• Evaluated analytic vendor landscape across acquired companies post-M&A to identify overlap, drive decommissioning savings, and streamline enterprise operations. • Assess potential VBC vendor partnerships using research design and causal inference frameworks to enable reliable pilots at scale.• Function as agile product owner (certified SAFe® Agilist) in software development of tools, dashboards, and reports serving 12K+ internal and external provider end users.

Education

• University of Utah School of Medicine

  PhD, Medical Informatics

  1996 — 2004

• Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management

  Executive MBA (Expected June 2026), Healthcare Leadership Certificate

• Saint Louis University

  Bachelor of Science, Health Information Management

  1992 — 1996