SEI Atlanta consultant Erica Wright is helping local healthcare professionals counter the effects of the COVID-19 while gaining new industry experiences.
Erica Wright has always been passionate about giving back to the Atlanta metropolitan area. Between serving as the PTA President for her children’s school and serving on the board of various Atlanta-based organizations that support underserved populations, Erica knows the joys and benefits of helping her local community. Consulting with SEI Atlanta enables Erica to work with businesses that are close to home while leveraging nationwide resources and experiences.
SEI’s emphasis on locality and employee ownership initially drew Erica to the firm. As she sees it, SEI’s “flat organization aspect” encourages consultants to work together to find innovative answers to complex issues. At SEI Atlanta, consultants are incentivized to collaborate with each other, within the office and across SEI locations. SEI’s co-ownership model attracts passionate, engaged and humbled hires — as Erica puts it, “the type of people you want to spend your career working alongside.”
Erica is about to celebrate her seventh year at SEI, and her work has been a testament to the longevity of SEI careers. She benefits from the extensive knowledge of SEI consultants throughout national offices while helping local organizations solve business problems that impact the immediate community.
Taking Action with SEI
Early in her career, Erica held program leadership positions across multiple industries. Her responsibilities grew as she moved up the ladder, but her scope narrowed down to sales enablement technology and marketing automation. She soon began to crave opportunities where she could learn more about emerging technologies and innovations. Prior to accepting an offer from SEI, Erica was a buyer for local consulting services. “The more I learned about a consultant’s day-to-day, the more I realized consulting was the right path for me,” She recalls.
At SEI, Erica can wear many hats and take on a variety of challenges, including program agile transformation, program management, process improvement, workflow design, change management, or even facilitating end user training. She took up consulting to widen her breadth of experience, and she expanded her horizons by embracing a leadership mindset.
To date, Erica’s most rewarding healthcare project at SEI Atlanta is an ongoing program managing the planning, launch, and operations of several COVID-19 vaccine clinics across the state of Georgia. This is a critically important project for the state, but it also has particular relevance to Erica’s personal life. Erica’s parents and her in-laws are all in their seventies, and one of her children is also high risk. Erica knows how it feels to be worried about your family’s health, and she’s committed to doing what she can to keep them safe. “The sooner we can effectively protect our community from the coronavirus,” she explains, “the sooner our families can get back to everything they’ve been missing out on.”
SEI and the Future of Healthcare
The demand for virtual care, touchless registration, and payment capabilities increased rapidly in the past year. Even with lockdown restrictions lifting, many patients are hesitant to loiter in waiting rooms and use traditional contact-heavy systems. “The desire for continued digital transformation across healthcare platforms will not diminish as the pandemic dissipates,” Erica asserts. Consumers will want to engage with their healthcare providers in the same way going forward, and implementing patient-first, experience-focused strategies will help health systems create loyal communities.
Even before COVID-19 rattled the healthcare industry, SEI Atlanta was helping healthcare clients lay the right foundations for providing safe, patient-oriented provider experiences. Rollout was already underway on many of Erica’s projects when COVID-19 hit, and SEI’s support enabled these organizations to effectively pivot and respond to patient expectations. As needs grew during the pandemic, Erica and the SEI team helped their client’s implementations stay ahead of the curve. Currently, their team is leading efforts to eliminate paper registration forms and instead, offer eCheck-in, online payments, and more paperless services.
Erica describes technology as “the backbone” and consumer experience design as “the heart” of SEI Atlanta’s healthcare projects. Transparency throughout the project and close collaborations allow consultants to change direction as needed and take on urgent inbound requests as they arise. “When you hire an SEI consultant, you’re just looking at the tip of the spear,” Erica explains. “In reality, you’re getting the full depth and breadth of all the healthcare experts within the firm.” For her, this makes SEI a unique consulting firm as well as an incredible place to learn and grow while implementing solutions to urgent healthcare challenges.
