Alanna Kaplan-Munoz, MBA 1996

I’m a Principal at Metaplan, a consulting company that specializes in alignment processes focusing on life science companies. We help client groups come together and get aligned on anything from launch and competitive readiness to evidence generation planning and scenario planning. My business partner and I call Metaplan, and we call ourselves the “X’s” and “O’s” because we have this unique focus on alignment. We’re not creating reports or restructuring, but we’re really helping groups come together. We call it “consulting from within,” because our clients usually have the answers, and we’re leading them to alignment on the path forward. I became interested in healthcare consulting because it’s something that everything can relate to. It’s almost like education or consumer products, in that way.

My husband is an educator, we have a lot of educators in our family, and when I worked launching consumer products, it was not necessarily as rewarding as helping others directly, and so I turned to healthcare consulting. As a woman in the industry, it’s always been important to have a strong presence and work hard. I’m constantly encouraging my female colleagues to speak up and be heard.

During this pandemic, the biggest professional impact has been working remotely to align client groups. At Metaplan, while we’ve been able to get great engagement, it is not the same dynamic as in-person interaction. I hope that we can get back to the office, on the plane, and in a room together as soon as possible to hash through issues in person.

On Zoom, I can lead an in-depth discussion on issues, opportunities and trade-offs, or an advisory board, but there’s always more I want to know because you can only stay in a Zoom meeting for 2-3 hours optimally. Who ever thought we would miss all day meetings?!

The biggest change we need in healthcare is to move towards being patient-centric. It’s an element that all the companies are talking about, but if you look at their budgets, it’s still more provider-focused. Maybe rightly so, given the need to recoup investments from developing life-saving medicines or innovations like the COVID-19 vaccine, but there is still great potential in balancing provider focus with the patient.

The second change I would like to see is cross-specialty coordination. Caring for my mom and my aunt, I’ve noticed the silos in patient care. It would be a dream to have a team meeting where they’re all in one conversation together to help their patient. Centers of excellence like Mayo Clinic might be able to achieve this, but for most people, this level of care is not available. So we’re working with companies to help better coordinate these efforts in patient care.

I also hope companies move more towards prevention. It might be pretty far out in their timeline, but the direction they are working towards is wellness and disease prevention rather than cures and therapies. That’s the holy grail for everyone, of course, but there is a concern that they will disrupt or obsolete themselves. Yes, there’s tension, but there is also great opportunity.

Alanna Kaplan-Munoz

MBA 1996

Principal of Metaplan

Interviewed and Compiled by Felicia Ho