Humana

I am five weeks into my internship and I think I have yet to explain to my fans in Readerland what I am actually doing. So lets fix that problem.

I am interning at a company called Humana. When I tell people I work for Humana, I usually get one of two reactions. The first reaction is a blank stare, and the second reaction is one in which the person pretends to know what Humana is, but really has a vague idea. Well let me tell you exactly what it is. Humana is a health insurance company. They sell a variety of products in the health insurance space with the primary driver being Medicare. Humana is the 6th largest health insurance provider with a market cap (the value the market puts on the company) at just over $10 billion. In other words....big. 23, ooo employees big.

I work for a group called the Strategic Consultancy. More specifically I work for the Performance & Productivity Team. The charge of the Strategic Consultancy is to support the front line associates (the workers handling claims in the call center) in a variety of ways (policy development, process engineering, etc). More specifically, the Performance & Productivity Team is expected to work as consultants within the organization to measure associate performance, productivity, impact of various initiatives, budgeting, and staffing. The team has 8 members including myself.


The project I have been assigned is to find a way to measure the productivity of associates in claims quality audits and then assign an appropriate level of production for each employee. The project is pretty interesting and gets me in front of a variety of directors, but I haven't had a lot of success since finding and securing the available data takes more time than I think is appropriate. It is hard to get employees to understand that my timeline is 10 weeks, not the normal infinity timeline they have. I have also been working on various smaller projects to pass the time and acquire new skills. Lets just say I am pretty close to being an Excel master. Once I learn how to write code behind the scenes in VBA, I will own that program. Yea, probably not, but I can at least dream.

I have actually been feeling a small amount of stress from the whole process. I evaluated where I was on my project, and basically, I haven't really started. I won't call the first five weeks a waste of time (I will call the first), but I haven't focused enough on measurable goals for my project. I still need a little more direction on some parts of the project. I guess it just means I am going to be putting in some long hours near the end.

So far, I like the company and most of the people I work with. If they gave me a job offer tomorrow, I would take it.

Song Recommendation - Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show