NAMD Welcomes Allison Taylor as Board President.

On April 1, 2022 NAMD welcomes Allison Taylor as Board President. A combination of passion, experience, and a drive to contribute to the community of Medicaid leaders brings her to the position – and makes her a leader to watch.

As Taylor describes it, NAMD was a lifeline when she became Medicaid Director of Indiana in 2017. A consummate collaborator, she particularly values working with state and federal partners on shared issues. After a multi-year public health crisis that has triggered as much innovation as strain on Medicaid services, Taylor notes it is a critical time to come together and find that common ground.

Taylor has charted a leadership path within the public sector.  An early experience as a government affairs intern in a large law firm’s health practice piqued her interest in health care and ultimately set her on a path to law school.  Taylor spent a decade in the private sector as a health law attorney where a staple of her legal practice was legislative and government affairs. She recalls, “my favorite legal memories involve the times when our coalition building helped to pass important public health legislative measures like a tobacco tax increase to support improved health outcomes and the establishment of a primary care loan forgiveness program to support the growth and accessibility of preventative care.”

Taylor credits her experience in consensus building and fostering relationships as particularly valuable to running a Medicaid division. Early career experience assisting health care providers to navigate the state and federal regulatory hurdles is one of the reasons Taylor keeps focused on administrative ease and business process transformation.

Under her leadership, Indiana Medicaid is committed to delivery system innovation with a focus on maximizing alignment and coordination. A priority in Indiana is transforming how aging Hoosiers are served. With an emphasis on teamwork, Taylor is leading a redesign of the state’s long-term services and supports system with specific focus on a unique co-design process with stakeholders.

A tradition at NAMD and one way the association builds collaborative learning is through sharing “gives” and “gets” – areas where a state Medicaid agency can either contribute to or seek help from their peers.  Taylor comes to the NAMD Board committed to giving and collaborating to lead Medicaid forward.  In that spirit, Indiana Medicaid has a couple of “gives” for their peers:

• Indiana is working on “foundational improvements”. They are pursuing reimbursement methodology innovations – aligning reimbursement and rate methodologies across the human services organization to help drive towards collective goals of quality, transparency, continuity and predictability.
• Indiana Medicaid is also making strides on managed care alignment. Indiana is in the process of increasing its organizational structure, decentralizing managed care oversight, and expanding capacity and oversight to aggressively manage their health plan partners. Indiana is skilling up its current team members and bringing on new positions. The goal is a culture of excellence in managing managed care, and they are well on the way.