Bob Winthrop

Why did you choose Wagner for graduate school?

At the time I was considering graduate school, I was working for MDRC in NYC - focused on low income and youth development issues - and the senior staff there advised me that Wagner was the best public administration program in NYC.

How did being in New York impact your professional journey?

NYC is an incredible place with incredible people. Because it's so big there's a tremendous amount of diversity.  I grew to appreciate diversity more (I grew up in Duluth, MN). Not just diversity in different races and religions, but also in where people came from and how they reacted to the world. It was NYU Wagner that helped me realize that two people can see the same set of facts and come to two different, but reasonable conclusions.

Describe your current job.

In my current role, I help drive Medicare initiatives in the Northern California Region of Kaiser Permanente. Specifically, I work on programs such as perioperative supply optimization - whereby we improve our systems to capture data related to supplies used in surgery.  From that we identify variations in surgical cases to drive costs down and improve quality. There are 13 specific initiatives that I follow (including programs to help deal with geriatric service provision, complex needs, and end of life options). One of the tools I use is a Salesforce Application we call Symphony to track progress on these initiatives and report that to leadership.