Sharon Smith is an innovator and general manager with extensive experience in business strategy, marketing and healthcare management. In a 25-year career with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, she held key leadership roles in healthcare policy and management, strategic marketing, product management and development, service delivery, operations, and technology.
Ms. Smith is known for her ability to lead transformational change, to translate vision and strategy into operational terms, to rapidly achieve world-class performance, and to develop and motivate staff. As an innovator, her record includes product start-up and re-positioning, business turnaround and design of wholly new models of service delivery. Most recently, she created systems and approaches that enable healthcare providers to deliver better care to more patients at lower cost.
In operations and service delivery roles, Ms. Smith was responsible for breakthrough improvements in member satisfaction, quality of service and cost management. She led the design and record-setting roll-out of HMO Blue, and ran the Medicare B program under a contract with the Federal government for all of New England.
Ms. Smith currently serves as the first non-physician board chair of Partners Community
Healthcare, Inc. (PCHI), a 5900-physician network providing care throughout eastern
Massachusetts, including the ten Partners-owned and affiliated hospitals. She recently stepped down as board chair of Management Consulting Services, an organization building management capacity for inner-city nonprofits, and as a board member of The Medical Foundation. She is a guest lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health.
A graduate of Connecticut College, Ms. Smith completed the Executive Development Program at Northeastern University. She is a past member of the Board of Visitors of NU College of Business Administration and has served as Executive-in-Residence since the program was initiated in 2005.
She can be reached at slsmith17@yahoo.com.