Beverly Roberts Beverly began her career in the medical industry as a researcher specializing in retroviruses. Her work led her to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she continued her research while developing her skills in information technology. After 14 years at the Center, Beverly moved into the private sector, where she has held leadership roles for several large federal contractors.
In February, Roberts took on his current role as senior managing director of health. MaximusShe is driven by a vision to shape the future of health into one that is equitable, connected and delivers positive outcomes for all.
Roberts recently sat down with ExecutiveBiz for an Executive Spotlight interview to discuss how Maximus’ culture contributes to successful service delivery. He highlighted the importance of data in improving health outcomes and highlighted the emerging technologies that are transforming the public sector.
Tell us about the culture at Maximus: what aspect do you think contributes most to the company’s success and helps it attract and retain top talent?
Our guiding principles are to encourage collaboration, innovation and respect. These are fundamental elements in attracting and retaining top talent. But what makes Maximus unique is that our work is truly mission-focused: helping to deliver services that improve the lives of citizens, soldiers and veterans. Like most companies, we offer comprehensive benefits, training and career development resources, but what really sets us apart is the magnitude of our impact, which is incredible motivator for prospective and current employees.
Our team engages with the public every day in deeply personal and meaningful ways. We serve more than 180 million citizens annually, nearly half of the U.S. population, including 15 million benefits administration cases per day. Our employees love that their work is so impactful and that they work for a company that supports better outcomes in people’s lives.
It’s our mission that attracts Maximus employees, but what helps us retain top talent is that opportunities to continually improve the customer experience are built into our service offerings. We have built-in capabilities that help our employees generate innovative ideas, streamline our activities, and learn from what we hear from the citizens who call our contact center — truly understanding our customers’ needs and experiences.
Combining this learning with our values of caring and collaboration opens new and innovative avenues for improving our services. We have a strong focus on human-centered design and customer satisfaction, whether it’s for our clients or the citizens they serve. This in itself encourages ongoing satisfaction with the job, creating a natural cycle where employees are valued not only by clients and ongoing job opportunities, but also by the citizens they serve.
Recognition is another big part of our culture. For example, we are very fortunate to be involved in two important health programs that have received Service to Citizens Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively. One of them is Helping the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services improve accessibility Second, the CDC quickly Expanding support for the people Amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of the COVID-19 response, we operated the CDC Information Desk (CDC-INFO) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a critical part of the agency’s response infrastructure for dealing with large-scale outbreaks. Through this project, we were able to help CDC rapidly and incrementally expand their capacity to provide critical information to the public from the beginning of the pandemic through March 2020, which saw a peak of approximately 222,000 calls that month.
We transitioned CDC-INFO to 24/7 call contact center support and continually trained and learned from data insights to improve our engagement with the public — and along the way, we learned how to always improve. This is just one example of our core role in helping agencies play a vital role in public life, building trust and improving health outcomes.
Staying focused on what you have chosen as your job plays a big role in keeping employees engaged and feeling rewarded and satisfied. It’s not just about what you offer as benefits as a company, but what opportunities you offer to work for and support your country.
What do you think helps federal health agencies have the greatest impact in their work to support the nation, and what is shaping the industry that supports them?
There’s a ton of data out there, and at Maximus we believe that putting that data to work is essential to improving health outcomes. To put data to work, you need to understand not only what the data is, but also the context of how it’s presented. If you want to use data as decision support, you need to understand how data is transformed into information and knowledge. Going forward, we need more and more good, validated, and readily accessible knowledge – data that we know how to use and implement in real time. The challenge is, what do we do with the data we have?
At Maximus, we do a lot of evaluation work. Our job is to participate in the health care journey of our citizens, soldiers, and veterans. We believe that a connected view across programs and services provides insight into health outcomes — the entire health field. As a result, in the different types of work we do, we have expanded to the full spectrum of health care delivery in many different ways. We can use data to examine how policy and program design impacts health outcomes. We can also use enhanced data collection to determine future impacts not only on individuals, but on communities, states, and even entire nations. Leveraging data can be incredibly impactful, and by applying the right tools, we can derive real-time insights from data to drive positive outcomes in the future.
Data is at the heart of supporting the healthcare process, and our process expertise and understanding of related policies provide us with a unique opportunity to streamline processes within the healthcare ecosystem we serve. Specifically, the data we collect and use daily for government programs can lead to a deeper understanding of issues impacting the healthcare process for our citizens, potentially leading to better outcomes and reduced burden on healthcare providers. All these elements combined create the potential to reduce corporate costs of services, implement innovative technologies, and increase capacity within the healthcare system.
What emerging technologies do you expect to have the greatest impact on the federal landscape over the next few years?
Artificial intelligence is currently a major emerging technology topic, but it is not the only one: the use of robotics, avatars and simulation techniques will be important, especially in citizen services.
I believe emerging technologies will help manage, communicate, and exchange information. While AI-powered technologies will be deployed around these business functions, there is an opportunity to continue to focus on better uses of technology, such as innovative customer experience improvements and developing intelligent ways to interpret natural language and process documents such as claims and eligibility forms. With our population becoming increasingly mobile, there is a tremendous opportunity to focus on mobile technologies, from applications that help localize care in medical deserts.
Given that health data is a top target for cyber threats, there is a lot that can be achieved in terms of data integrity, cyber threat resistance, and mitigating the damage caused by hacking. We need to evolve how we protect information and data, and the technologies we use to secure information, to ensure that information is safe at rest and in motion. There are many AI-enabled tools to support this. There are also many underlying emerging technologies that need to be refined and applied appropriately, not only to improve the speed of access and treatment, but also to give the public confidence in how they receive information and treatment. There are still bridges to cross and we need to think ethically and carefully about AI-enabled tools and refinements to existing technologies.
What emerging technologies do you expect to have the greatest impact on the acceleration and significance of tech growth in the U.S. over the next few years?
I think the biggest impact will be how we leverage AI and social media platforms and what the governance around them will be. These technologies have many incredible opportunities to give people access to information that they can use to improve their lives, but there is a huge risk of disinformation with AI platforms and AI content and image generators. Social media platforms are highly influential spaces that people use to determine how they should behave in all aspects of their lives, and we need to help people distinguish between useful and true information and information that may be harmful.
This is a huge opportunity for accelerated growth in the federal sector because there is a strong need to move ahead of AI technology, which is currently ahead of policy. The challenge is to align policy and technology more closely. It will require focused effort, but this is an opportunity for companies like Maximus and others in the market to use new technology to improve outcomes by providing a holistic health experience for citizens and improve their lives.
