Shannon Marques: Making Healthcare Smarter with Influential Leadership That Delivers Excellence

Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Lumiata is an Artificial Intelligence company that helps healthcare organizations manage costs and risks. Lumiata's predictive power is generated from more than 100 million patient records, in-depth clinical knowledge, and IP. The company has over 100 pre-trained AI models that address a breadth of use cases. Lumiata AI Studio is a productivity tool for data scientists to create and deploy AI models quickly. 

Shannon Marques is the Vice President of Sales at Lumiata. She has over 20 years of experience at the convergence of technology and healthcare. Shannon has held leadership roles in enterprise software, medical device, and pharmaceuticals and  is responsible for strategy, alignment, and growth goals at Lumiata. She develops and fosters relationships with all the customers to understand their priorities and needs.  Shannon networks extensively with prospective clients and oversees the activity of junior sales associates in conjunction with Lumiata's product, data science, and engineering teams to develop implementation plans for the customers. 

Prior to joining Lumiata, Shannon was the Vice President of Sales in Salesforce's Healthcare & Life Sciences vertical. Before that, she was responsible for the Payment Integrity book of business at HMS. She also managed the Edits & Analytics teams that developed the payer recovery algorithms. ​Earlier in her career, Shannon has worked in the healthcare consulting space for Corrigo Healthcare Solutions and EY, there she he was responsible for payer and provider revenue growth and cost containment initiatives.  

Shannon started her career with HCA Healthcare and holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Florida. 

Learning From  Peers and Work Experiences 

Shannon considers herself fortunate to have had the privilege of working for exceptional female leaders in tech and healthcare. She believes they have helped to shape her career and taught her life lessons that she shall pass along to other women. Some of the exemplar women who influenced her are: 

Shannon McGovern (Senior AVP at Salesforce) who taught Shannon the art of executive presence and commanding a room without saying a word. 

Semone Neuman (CAO at AccentCare) who showed her the importance of building a power team based on one's strengths and weaknesses. 

Andrea Benko (CEO of HDI, when it was acquired by HMS) explained to her how integral it is to be consistent with accountability for oneself and the team one leads. 

Overcoming Gender Challenges 

Shannon thinks that in tech, and more specifically in the healthcare tech, it is not uncommon to be the only woman in the room.  Initially, she found this to be daunting.  This was because it would make her uncomfortable, and feel intimidated to speak up but  she was extremely disappointed when someone else in the room said what she was thinking, and everyone agreed with them. She shares, "It took a few iterations of me walking out of a meeting without the credit for solving the problem or having the best idea – only because I didn't speak up – before I made a promise to myself,"  

Fortunately, things changed when she resolved to speak up. She further adds, "Now I go to every meeting prepared for good dialogue and ready to use my voice,"  According to Shannon, there is power in being the only woman in the room, i.e., people will listen.   

Building Transformational Leadership  

Though change can be hard, leading it is even more challenging. A transformational leader has to be ready for the rollercoaster of emotions that come with the wins and losses along the way.  

This is why Shannon strongly feels that transformational leaders have to roll up their sleeves and be in the trenches with the team at the heart of it. They ought to check their ego and keep it at bay. They should be willing to learn, adapt, and build themselves alongside others. In addition to these, a transformational leader is considered worth their salt if they have the ability to motivate the team during challenging times. To achieve this, consistently communicating the vision and quickly taking action to evoke additional change is quite vital.  

Fuelling Innovation for Customer-centric Solutions 

If a company wants to appeal to its audience, it must learn to listen to them. "It doesn't matter what you or your team want to build and innovate – if it doesn't speak to your target audience or market, the time spent on the build is wasted," says Shannon.  She asserts that companies must align themselves with the age-old adage of "work smarter, not harder." So, brands must invest significant time and resources into learning what their ideal customer wants and needs.  They must find answers to burning questions like, "What are the pain points? Are there any pain points they are not aware of?" and build their strategies based on the data and information collected. Further, they must make this an integral part of the company framework with a continuous process. 

AI and Machine Learning Powered Offerings 

Shannon finds that the impact of AI and Machine Learning on legacy processes is incredible. She says, "Lumiata is consistently providing our customers with uplifts in predictive precision in the 65% – 100%+ range. Infusing these advanced technologies into legacy cost and risk prediction models that have been driving businesses (successful businesses!) is creating greater financial transparency, increased cross-functional collaboration, and significantly higher margins."

The company's most recent work has been successfully reducing risk for 1% of its customer's business by US$100 million. "When you start to extrapolate these numbers across the other 99% of their book, the opportunities are endless," she adds. 

Insights into Promising Future  

Speaking about future plans, Shannon remarks that the incorporation of artificial intelligence and machine learning into healthcare is still at a nascent stage. Most of the existing prospects are working in excel or using pre-internet consultants. These tools and companies are preventing them from advancing their business. Without advanced analytics, payers and providers are missing out on revenue but, more importantly, they suffer from lower employee satisfaction and poorer patient outcomes.  

Therefore, as per Shannon, if healthcare wants to attract the best talent and improve patient outcomes, it has to be using the best, and the most advanced tools. Lumiata is on the precipice of advanced analytics tools for healthcare, and the company is always eager to help its customers make the most of the tools provided. 

Words of Wisdom  

Shannon advises budding leaders to, first and foremost, never be afraid to speak up and encourages people to participate more often and never be intimidated to present a new idea.  She asks young minds to find their tribe as she firmly believes in the proverbial, "behind every successful woman is a tribe of other successful women that have her back." Hence, she owes immense gratitude to the women who have helped her become the innovative, influential leader that she is today. Moreover, she wishes to remind people to be strong-minded, kind, and hone such qualities. Lastly, she also suggests to pay attention to one's well-being too and never stop reading, learning, improving – never.