Kim Parson is a health care industry consultant. Using human-centered design and experiential learning techniques, she leads ideation workshops and futuring sessions to stimulate innovative thinking. This results in insights that fuel strategy development and create experiences that balance the demands and complexities of health systems with the skills and abilities of healthcare consumers.
She most recently has focused on improving the health care experience for people with kidney disease, including increasing awareness and access to home dialysis as part of Humana’s Member Engagement Marketing organization. Kim also served as enterprise-wide health literacy champion. Humana helped establish Health Literacy Kentucky, a statewide coalition working for a healthier commonwealth through improved health literacy, and adopted health literacy best practices as a result of insights from efforts Kim led to understand the consumer and health provider experience with referrals and prior authorizations. She served as co-chair of HLK in 2018.
From 2013-2018, Kim severed on the National Academy of Medicine Roundtable on Health Literacy. The Roundtable’s mission is to inform, inspire and activate a wide variety of stakeholders to support the development, implementation and sharing of evidence-based health literacy practices and policies. The goal is to improve the health and well-being of all people. She co-authored a perspective paper calling for a new definition of health literacy, one that recognized the demands and complexity of health system design instead of focusing on the skills and abilities of patients and caregivers trying to navigate the system.
Other roles at Humana include defining the desired Medicare consumer experience as part of the corporate Consumer Experience Center of Excellence; identification of the holistic provider experience with Humana; and leading the Provider Interface team, which was responsible for helping providers and Humana reduce administrative costs by increasing provider self-service.
Kim joined Humana’s Innovation Center in 2006 as part of the Integrated Consumer Experience team that developed SmartSummary and SmartSummaryRx, the heath care industry’s first comprehensive and personal consumer-focused health benefits budgeting, planning and reporting statements. SmartSummary received a Stevie Award for business innovation.
For the previous 20 years, Kim was a journalist with Knight Ridder at The Lexington Herald-Leader, Gannett at The Courier-Journal and Tribune Co. at The Orlando Sentinel, where she led designers, copy editors, graphic artists, news editors and reporters in collaborative storytelling of the news of the day and investigative projects. A Society for News Design award winner, she served as a judge for SND’s 19th edition international design competition. Her first job after graduation from WKU was at the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer. She has a B.A. in Journalism, a B.A. in English, and completed coursework in WKU’s Master’s program in Communications Management.
Kim lives in Louisville, Ky., with her husband, Creig Ewing, where their sons Zachary and Noah attend the University of Louisville. A year ago, they forged a multi-generational household with Kim’s mother, who has stolen the hearts of their three dogs: Rosalita, a Bichon Frise; Gidget, a male Pomerania; and Jackson, a Yorkie mix.