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My name is Omar Latif, I'm a Physician Executive Fellow at WellPoint. Before joining WellPoint I trained in internal medicine at a top academic medical center, I also worked in consulting for a number of years.
The reason I chose WellPoint is that it gave me the opportunity to work for the nation's largest and most innovative health benefits company.
Everything that I've done as a fellow relates to improving the health, care and value that we deliver to our members, and that's been very rewarding.
As a physician, it has been extremely rewarding because I've been able to make change on a large scale basis not just change at an individual patient level.
The Physician Executive Fellowship program has been a unique launching pad to my career because it has given me the ability to gain a skill set that I did not have previously and I couldn't gain in any other place. So for example, last week I was giving a presentation to senior leadership where I was talking about how we can improve one of our key care management programs and this affected several hundred thousand members unlike previously when I was seeing a single patient as a clinical physician.
One of the challenges as a fellow has been navigating WellPoint. WellPoint is a very large organization, because it is a large organization it has a tremendous amount of resources which is a strength but a weakness has actually been being able to navigate those resources and luckily I've had mentors to help me through that, but at the same time sometimes it's a bit overwhelming.
Early on in my fellowship my mentors helped me navigate the large organization that we are, because of that I was able to take on a leadership role and know where to go for the resources that I needed.