Alumni Spotlight: Kenny Winn
Kenny Winn, MHA ’12, Director of Respiratory Care at Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Connecticut, has always worked in the field of health care. His goal entering college was to become a vet assistant, but he quickly learned this role was not for him. Instead, Kenny transitioned into respiratory care. He ultimately earned his MHA from UNC Charlotte.
When asked about the challenges he currently faces in healthcare, Kenny expressed that the state of Connecticut currently has a great deal of debt, so it is increasing taxes and cutting back on Medicaid. His challenge is finding money to pay for services previously financed through tax revenue by reevaluating operating budgets; specifically, evaluating money spent on supplies, salaries, and wages. Yale-New Haven Hospital’s goal is zero layoffs, making reducing parts of its budget difficult. Furthermore, Kenny says communicating budget cuts can be difficult to express to front line employees.
Kenny believes the future of healthcare revolves around coordination of care. Providers and administrators can no longer see patient encounters as individual, isolated episodes, but, instead, as one singular, ongoing episode. To achieve this aim, Kenny believes agencies should work together, whether or not they have formal affiliations. He emphasizes that such collaboration should result in less utilization of hospitals. Kenny is currently working to establish partnerships between all the players in a patient’s healthcare experience: hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, primary care physicians, etc. In one specific program, he partners with Durable Medical Equipment providers and Skilled Nursing Facilities to better manage pulmonary patients. Since the start of this collaboration, they have seen a 50% reduction in readmissions. Kenny stresses the importance of establishing quality standards and acquiring community buy-in to make these projects beneficial.
Kenny chose UNC Charlotte because he enjoyed talking to the faculty and felt the programs vision encompassed what he wanted for his career. Throughout the program, he found the presentations to be the most helpful because they taught him the skill of public speaking, especially public speaking “off the cuff”. In addition, Kenny values the skill of teamwork, which he learned through group projects.
Kenny suggests that students need to be willing to move for their career; noting that being unemployed for six months or longer will make finding employment more difficult. His advice for current students is to read the job descriptions on the ACHE website and use the knowledge of each role as an icebreaker when networking; furthermore, Kenny says to value and expand one’s public speaking skill.