Aliza Arjoyan is senior vice president of Provider Partnership and Network Management at Blue Shield of California. She joined the nonprofit health plan in 2017 and now leads provider engagement strategies and oversees provider partnerships and relations including network contracting, compliance and analytics. With more than 25 years of healthcare management experience, Arjoyan also is responsible for Blue Shield’s Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) initiative, and Medicare and Medi-Cal network expansion efforts.
Why health care?
Health care is such a critical and integral part of being human. Without health, very little else matters in life and personally I want my life’s work to make a difference for others. It’s about making a meaningful contribution and the one industry that directly impacts the health and wellbeing of so many individuals is the work that we do here at Blue Shield. Our mission of creating a healthcare system that is worthy of our family and friends and sustainably affordable continually inspires me and reaffirms my belief that there is nothing more important for me than the work I’m doing daily to impact the most precious aspects of life: the health and well-being of others.
Who are women that inspire you?
I’m inspired by many women but none more so than my grandmother. She escaped a genocide, lost her husband when she had two young children, taught herself how to read and write without ever having a single day of schooling, worked three shifts to ensure her kids had what they needed, left a communist country for a brighter future and started from scratch in the United States, and through it all she always tried to find ways to help others along the way. All of this with always a smile on her face and never once complaining about the hardships of life. She is my guiding light of strength, humility, determination, generosity and doing right the right thing no matter what the circumstance.
How can we support the next generation of women leaders?
We should encourage young women to dream big, or as the saying goes, “hitch their wagon to a star” and most importantly we can lead by example and demonstrate that tremendous success can be achieved in the workplace while being amazing mothers, wives, daughters, sisters and friends. There is already so much hardship, adversity and inequality for women in climbing the corporate ladder that we, as women leaders, should find every opportunity to leave the door wide open for those behind us while finding the time now to encourage, uplift and lend a hand when other women reach out for guidance, opportunity and support.
What challenges do we still need to overcome to achieve equality?
It is of the utmost importance to understand that inequality comes in many forms impacting a multitude of individuals. The one critical challenge is the ability to address our unconscious biases by beginning to consciously see one another as being of equal value and status irrespective of gender, race, social status, ethnicity, sexual orientation and on and on. The first step toward achieving equality is to recognize that we are all human beings, and irrespective of our circumstance, we all deserve the same opportunities without the notion of inferiority and superiority.