Leading with Lived Experience: Lessons from Medicaid Leaders

Martin, I appreciate you sort of leading us into the next place that we were curious.

I mean, you all have these personal experiences that may or may not be particularly visible to folks that you serve and or for others that you work with.

You were just mentioning sort of how you bring that to work.

And I'm wondering...

if you could give a specific example of like, where do you see yourself tapping into that personal experience in your professional role?

Yeah, I bring that experience, I would say, every day to work when we talk with the leadership about policy and program decisions.

But yeah, to give a specific example, in my role, my team oversees the Medicaid Advisory Committee and the Beneficiary Advisory Council, the MCIMBAC.

So It really gives Medicaid beneficiaries an opportunity to weigh in on policy decision, programmatic decisions, and things like that, either as a beneficiary or through public comments.

it gives me i think a little bit better connection with with some of these these people that do bring concerns to the table and especially recently or in 2025 and still now like there's been a lot of people talking about family and personal care services and we made some some some changes in 2025 and it really impacts people with developmental disabilities like like my son so To be able to help these people, making sure that they have a voice that's heard by our leadership team is something I can bring to the table.

And if they want to come to the table, I want to make it as easy as possible for them.

So if they want to become a back member, like what does an easy application look like? When we have Mac meetings, like are we using plain language, language that they can understand? Or when we disseminate or hand out like materials, like make sure it connects with these people.

So yeah, that's something I bring.

But like I said, I bring that.

I think every time we think about programs, it's like, what does this mean to the beneficiary?

Yeah, Martin, I appreciate the commitment that you have to having people be heard.

But I can only imagine the impact that it has on people actually feeling heard to know that you are there, right? That you have that common experience.

Nicole, I'm curious, what does this spark for you in terms of where do you see your personal experience showing up in the way that you do your work or the way that you are a leader in Pennsylvania?

I had to give this question some thought because this is a really good question.

So thank you for asking it.

But I really think it shows up for me in that lens.

I always try to incorporate the parental lens because I think about my own family and parents.

So I always go, well, Especially when we have policy conversations, like, well, it may work for us, but is it really going to work in reality for families? Something that I have always encouraged my managed care organizations and our different partners to think about is timing as a big part of access to care.

Like, I remember my mom having to schedule four doctor's appointments and have to take off for work and get us all out of school.

And if the doctor had to reschedule, that was a whole major conflict in rescheduling.

So telling folks, maybe we should think about weekend hours for children, for parents and things like that, something that's not nine to five so they can actually have that access to get to their doctors and things like that.